Posts tagged “friction”
The Hidden Problem with Note Titles as Links (And How to Fix It)
Dear Zettlers, In today’s newsletter, we will discuss a fairly technical aspect of the Zettelkasten Method: How to link. The Archive encourages you to link using only the unique identifier. The Archive utilises link-as-search. What you see in the double brackets is not a direct link to another note. Instead, it will perform a search for the string within the double brackets. Since the ID is at the beginning of the file and matches the search term, it will select the note and display its content.
The Friction Fallacy
TL;DR: Friction that increases with system size is an existential threat. Any note-taking or knowledge system whose marginal cost per note rises as the system grows will eventually become unusable, regardless of how beneficial it feels early on. A Zettelkasten must be scale-indifferent. It should remain usable even if flooded with massive amounts of low-quality notes. The “one-million bad notes” thought experiment is a stress test for this requirement.