A lengthy critique of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) systems like Obsidian has sparked sharp pushback from developers and power users who argue the original article fundamentally mischaracterizes what tools are supposed to do. The response, published on Hacker News, takes Brennan Kenneth Brown's piece titled "What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?" to task for conflating tool capability with human output.

The Core Misunderstanding

The original critique asked whether Obsidian—released six years ago—has produced an increase in 'public-facing understanding and knowledge.' But the response argues this framing misses the point entirely. Emacs and vim have been around for decades without producing any works themselves, yet they've enabled countless developers to write code, applications, papers, and books. The tool doesn't make contributions; it enables people to do so. Obsidian's own documentation explicitly states: 'Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.' Instead of providing an opinionated product, the team gives users functional building blocks to discover their own solutions.

Misrepresented Claims

The response goes further, accusing Brown of misquoting or misrepresenting key points from Obsidian's documentation. The original article claimed Obsidian promoted concepts like 'data privacy,' 'portability,' and 'future-proofing' as evidence of its 'higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.' However, the linked documentation page makes no mention of these concepts in those terms—it simply advocates for plain-text files that work with standard file system tools. The response notes: 'So where Brennan came up with all of this "future-proofing" and "highbrow" and "epistemological value" is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading.'

Shifting Goalposts on Questions

The critique also takes issue with how Brown's central questions kept changing throughout the article. The original question asked whether PKMs produce 'important, meaningful contributions to our understanding of the world,' then shifted to asking about academics making contributions versus people selling PKM courses. These aren't the same inquiry. The response points out that Forte's Building a Second Brain explicitly addresses incubation as one of four core capabilities—directly contradicting Brown's claim that PKM systems don't support the creative process described in empirical literature on insight and creativity.

The Throughput Problem

Brown's attempt to measure output from dedicated PKM users relies heavily on Theo Stowell, who has written about Obsidian for years but shows minimal following (1.8K on Medium, below 500 elsewhere). This cherry-picking ignores that Obsidian claims between 1-1.5 million active installations, with numerous plugins exceeding a million downloads each. The PKM market itself is relatively small—Forte's book generated $2.4M in revenue against a broader self-help industry worth roughly $46 billion in 2025.

Research Quality Questions

Perhaps most damning, the response points to Brown's own published blogging workflow where he describes writing 750 words in approximately 20 minutes using placeholder markers (TK) for research to be filled in later. 'When I'm writing a research-heavy essay or commentary, I'll put something in brackets with TK and return back to it in the editing process so I don't slow down with the writing.' The response argues this methodology leads to poorly supported claims: many cited articles prove inconclusive or don't support the arguments they're supposedly evidence for.

Key Takeaways

  • Tools like Obsidian are infrastructure enablers, not contributors themselves—judging them requires examining what builders create, not raw output numbers
  • Brown's core questions shifted throughout his article, making meaningful comparison difficult
  • The PKM market is tiny relative to broader productivity and self-help industries ($5-25M for Obsidian versus $46B total)
  • Brown acknowledged writing quickly with placeholder citations—raising questions about research depth

The Bottom Line

This whole debate feels like criticizing a hammer because it hasn't written any sonnets. Tools are means, not ends—and Obsidian's 1-1.5 million users suggest plenty of builders disagree with the premise that PKM frameworks aren't producing value. If you're evaluating infrastructure, look at what gets built on top of it, not whether the foundation itself generates content.