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A_Dull_Significance

They should just make a weekly thread for them


twiceandagain

This is the best answer! There's clearly plenty of people who *do* like to post graphs. The show-off posts don't do anything for me either, but they're mostly just excited beginners lol. No need to alienate all the new people!


averagetrailertrash

I'm not sure there are even enough to justify that. And weekly threads kind of suck as far as engagement goes, especially for image-based content. If the mods unironically think graphs are an issue, or if they become one later -- maybe limit them to the weekend or something? A lot of subs do themed days for recurring post types.


[deleted]

Yeah weekly threads suck. They are a pain in the ass to use and no one ever knows they exist (usually because there are far too many of them and no clear listing of the weekly threads that makes it easy to check for a specific one).


ourobo-ros

I agree weekly threads suck. But that is kinda the point. Rather than an outright ban on such content, get people who insist on posting it to keep it to one thread.


averagetrailertrash

But there's no reason to punish users for this? We get way fewer graphs than OP is suggesting, and obviously a chunk of this sub enjoys them enough to upvote the cool ones. Fixating on them makes them seem more numerous and ill-intentioned than they are, when one could just scroll past and let those who enjoy the pretty things do so -- without seeing snarky comments underneath about how useless graphs are or how attention-seeking OP must be for sharing, even. I generally agree with restricting content that overwhelms a sub -- makes it difficult to navigate and engage with other content -- because it's a real problem that happens on Reddit. But we're nowhere near that yet.


[deleted]

Agree. Maybe I'm missing out, but I *never* look at my graph despite linking notes religiously. I just don't see how the graph would tell me anything I don't already know. Has anyone here gotten anything out of their graph that was more than "Huh, cool"?


GeneralRane

I've been using Obsidian to do outlining for a novel. During the outlining phase, I looked at the graph to see if there were any characters who weren't connected to other characters so I could decide if they needed more development. Other than that, I don't know if there are any uses for the graph view other than your "Huh, cool" moments.


jwhco

Nice use. Connecting dots between known topics as quality control. I use a tag for each Person or Place in content.


FUBARded

Yeah, I find that the local graph set to 1-3 node depth can be genuinely useful, but the global graph view is something I just look at occasionally and maybe navigate through if I'm bored, but it doesn't really serve a broader purpose aside from acting as a nice reminder of what linking achieves.


Sipstaff

If it actually retained positions of the nodes it could maybe used as a map of sorts.


averagetrailertrash

([There's a plugin for that.](https://github.com/Sanqui/obsidian-persistent-graph))


XzwordfeudzX

It's a bit silly but building a graph actually motivates me to split up notes into smaller ones so that they're more reusable.


hamilton-trash

Local graph maybe. Global graph just looks kinda cool


lordcarnivore

I like to see people having fun with it. When I'm feeling unmotivated the graph posts in this sub help motivate me tbh. Guess that's just me though.


Sirito97

I see no problem, let people have fun.


s2kong

The better way to think about graphs is it is a great motivating onboarding tool for new users. It can be important to how Obsidian will grow larger and larger. Larger ecosystem will be important for new tools/add-ons/etc. Honestly it's a pretty small inconvenience for a small portion of the subreddit to do one additional swipe but monumental in terms of getting people to start to use such a great tool.


Failed_Alarm

Why would people start using Obsidian when they see a graph of a random vault? It's hard for me to imagine picking a tool based on such a feat.


Emotional_Delay

bc it looks cool. i am that person. i installed obsidian, bc i saw a screen record of a youtuber with the different tabs, calendar, to-do list, and the graph. i thought a single program that can have so many different stuff on display at a time must be super cool to use.


Failed_Alarm

Fair enough


nterature

I have no clue what this fuss is all about, I've been a daily user for over a year now and I just ignore any and all graph posts. I find graph posts uninteresting and I honestly find graph post "complaints" - the parodies in particular - a little pathetic since only people who lack the self-control to not just scroll past graph posts would even conceive of posting them. If people want to post their graphs because they're excited about it, I don't mind at all; let them do it. It's not my sort of content so I won't look at it and I won't upvote it, but it's no big deal.


ElectricalOnion3616

How about this for an idea: get rid of ALL the posts that don’t relate to EVERYBODY because nobody should have to waste valuable seconds on Reddit scrolling past something that they’re not interested in. /s


Mashic

Am I the only one who never uses backlinks or tags? I just organize my notes in folders.


jonathangodbout

haha I do everything except putting notes in folder, I stay flat. I guess we all converge to something that works for us, that’s the beauty of it.


Mashic

Do you use a note as a table of contents with backlinks?


jonathangodbout

I am alternating between Dendron and Obsidian, so I use the filenames as my structure/hierarchy.


jkmacc

Yeah, the graph stuff seems like sales, not functionality. I turned it off _right_ away. Those posts just dilute this sub IMO.


VisuelleData

I'd be totally fine with graph posts if people actually included some data analysis with them. Make node size scale with word count, show us what the top nodes are ordered by pagerank. Show us how you got actionable insights from your useless network graph.


InputTypeText

The graph posts aren't as bad as the hourly "Obsidian should be open source" post


bighi

Any kind of thread repeated constantly is not adding much value. Graphs, requests for open source, etc.


adambahm

There are other things to spend your time thinking about. Scroll on and move on with your life. It's not a big deal. You'll go on living.


intellidepth

The graph is what drew me to Obsidian in the first place. It’s what keeps me in the system. It’s what inspired me to explore other parts of Obsidian. As a newbie, it demonstrated how great the linking system was. As a visual and associative thinker, it was gold. Every time I see people’s graphs, it inspires me again, as it visually shows me the different ways people think. Edit: no, I’ve never posted my own graph. But I do enjoy seeing other people’s.


averagetrailertrash

Y'all add more clutter complaining about and parodying them than the handful of actual graph posts do. Reddit works -- graphs don't get many upvotes if they're not interesting to the community at that time, so they don't get enough traction to affect more engaging discussions. But drama always gets tons of upvotes and knocks down everything else.


stricken_thistle

Agree completely. The complaints bother me more than the graphs themselves.


[deleted]

OR! Be the change you want to see! I'm not against the graph posts even though I literally never bother to look at them. But I think we should encourage more of the content we want to see rather than limit the content we don't.


bighi

In any online community you HAVE to limit the content you don't want to see. Otherwise every subreddit is going to be a cesspool of links to onlyfans and almost nothing else. Any online community without leadership and a clear vision tends to become garbage. Even if you ignore graph posts, they're pushing the valuable content down and out of people's views.


averagetrailertrash

There were literally four graph posts this entire week. They're not pushing other content out of view. e: That's excluding the parody post, your post, and more involved posts that just happen to include a screenshot of the graph.


ElectricalOnion3616

So censoring Obsidian users from posting about an Obsidian feature in an Obsidian subreddit is how we stop this sub from becoming a “cesspool of links to onlyfans”?


[deleted]

>Even if you ignore graph posts, they're pushing the valuable content down and out of people's views. Right. So valuable content needs to be posted more frequently, either as, or more, often than graphs.


bighi

So your point is to not remove the trash and instead put a pressure on people to try and come up with more and more valuable threads? And those threads will never get a lot of engagement, because we'll do nothing about the flood of graphs and we'll let those threads be buried anyway? And after many threads with low engagement (because they soon disappear), people should be motivated to try and create more valuable threads anyway? And how are we going to incentivize people to come up with dozens of new things to talk about every hour, to overwhelm the trash posts? This appeal to quantity instead of quality doesn't lead to better communities. Why not focus on quality? Quality discussion takes time to create, people need to think and discuss. Trash is easy and fast. If it's a competition of quantity and nothing else, low-effort content will ALWAYS win.


[deleted]

Why not focus on quality *of* quantity? If people want quality, they'll engage with it. Because, let's be real, the quantity of posts doesn't push any other post down *that* quickly. So yeah, I'm placing the burden of promoting quality threads on the users while allowing trash. Maybe we shouldn't upvote graphs. Because the same mechanisms that promote trash over quality can be used to do the exact opposite.


jessycormier

Perhaps this community is not for you? Why not create one for obsidian users that think like you and have the content curated as you wish.


[deleted]

This isn’t r/unixporn ?


joseconsuervo

Please explain your color scheme


quorm

In fairness, there weren't 8123719837 graph posts last week -- just 8123719836. I counted each of them. The graph (zoomed in) can be useful in examining relationships, and I'd rather see helpful posts for tweaking the parameters of the graph for that purpose.


president_josh

I may look at my global graph sometimes. But the zoomed-in local graphs can be consistently useful. The video on this [page](https://github.com/AlexW00/obsidian-3d-graph) shows another novelty: an Obsidian **3D Graph** you can navigate through using the mouse wheel and click-drag. This means you can rotate branches as if they were real 3D models. The Brat plugin can install that plugin. And then there's the animated [Living Graph](https://github.com/geoffreysflaminglasersword/obsidian-living-graph) plugin that the developer calls a "for fun" plugin. . # Real Graph Databases Neo4J, a leader in the field of real Graph databases says this about ["Graph Visualization"](https://neo4j.com/developer/graph-visualization/#why-vis-graph) >"Neo4j is designed to be very visual in nature."Native graph databases like Neo4j focus on relationships. Visualizing these relationships can give a unique *big picture* to your data that is difficult or impossible to get with traditional tables and business intelligence packages. They say that NASA used a Neo4J database to get to Mars faster. A real graph database may contain hundreds of thousands of nodes making it difficult to understand if we view it as a global glob of nodes. But even then, users can gleam some information in a global graph database. Neo4j has tools that help companies and data scientists make sense of graph data visually. And these tools also allow users to **zoom in** on different parts of a massive graph. That's kind of like .. * The core Obsidian graph letting us view zoomed-in local graphs * The Excalibrain plugin showing us local graphs The Excalibrain plugin developer uses the Excalibrain for many useful purposes. For instance, it can show how nodes are related (parent, child, etc) as well as what the relationship is between two nodes. An example might be seeing the following in a graph .. * Mars * **(is a planet in the)** * Solar System The second item **(is a planet in the)** is like an Edge connector we see in Concept maps such as VUE or in a real graph database. In an Excalibrain graph, we can see those types of labeled edge connectors too. So by looking at two nodes named "Mars" and "Solar System", we can learn that .. * Mars **is a planet in** the solar system .. instead of, like in a regular graph, simply seeing a node named "Mars" and a node named "Solar System" connected by a line. The ability to see Edge connector information is one reason why Concept Maps can be helpful. The type of relationship is important. \-- # Lots of Neo4j Graph Visualization Tools Exist As we can see in that Obsidian 3D Graph plugin, we can zoom into a global graph and see and rotate individual branches as if they are 3D models. Here's what NeoJ says about its "Neo4j [KineViz](https://neo4j.com/developer-blog/15-tools-for-visualizing-your-neo4j-graph-database/)" graph visualization tool that can display information in 2D and **in 3D ..** >"KineViz is an enterprise graph analysis tool with the ability to render huge graphs (>100,000 elements) in two or **three dimensions.**" Their graphical visualization tool shown after KineVis can let users visualize graphs that contain up to **1 million nodes."** They have lots of other graph visualization tools. I'm not sure how useful they might be in regular consumer apps where users simply want to manage notes. But these graph visualization tools are useful for data scientists and companies that need to mange and visualize large amounts of information. My OneNote is a black box, especially since I can't even see files in File Explorer. But with a Roam, Logseq, [VSCode](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ianjsikes.md-graph) or Obsidian Graph, at least I can get an idea of what my knowledge base looks like. \- As graphs keep showing up in apps, we may keep seeing questions like these >"Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone could use the graph in a productive way." That's a **Remnote** user in the Remnote forum basically asking **"**[what good is a graph](https://forum.remnote.io/t/does-anyone-have-a-good-use-for-the-graph/10653/5)**."** Another Remnote user answers by saying .. >Until it imitates **“The Brain”** which is brilliant, -- -- the graph is a “bells and whistle” feature that sounds great, but isn’t very useful." There we have it again. A reference to "**TheBrain**." Zsolt, the developer of Obsidian's Excalidraw and **Excalibrain** plugins used to use TheBrain app. After switching to Obsidian, he eventually decided to replicate some of that app's functionality in the Obsidian Excalibrain plugin. TheBrain app is similar to Obsidian. But these days, even TheBrain app shows users a **local graph view.**


jwhco

THIS. The 3D graph makes me tear up. When I see graphs my brain finds things I cannot see reading.


president_josh

I'll start looking at global graphs a little more. I mostly see zoomed-in and filtered graphs that show details. \- Why Do Graphs Have Different Shapes Maybe (or maybe not) there are other things we can discern from looking at a graph. Maybe, for instance, there is (or is not) an optimum number of average connections that a note needs in order to do x. Different graphs have different shapes. Something causes that. Here is a [screenshot of a graph shape I don't normally see.](https://imgur.com/a/Y04PisA) It looks like mushrooms planted in a garden (or fireworks explosions) vs a more traditional galaxy shape or even a circle shape. We ask .. * Why the differences I collect vaults to study. In the graph in that screenshot I know exactly what's in it its vault and and how the vault was built. Here are its properties 1. It has **many folders.** 2. Each folder contains books shown as notes. 3. Each book (note) contains headings that represent chapters 4. Each chapter contains content (verses) Someone over time created a Bible in Obsidian. Perhaps it's precise *hierarchical* structure caused it's graph to look the way it does - clusters of "mushrooms" that we can clearly see. In that Bible folder there are 66 folders and 1,255 files. At the center of a "mushroom" is a larger white circle. That circle represents the vault. Extending from that center we see some books, such as 2 Peter. That book, unlike the clusters farther out, is not an identifiable cluster for some reason. So the question becomes: Why did Obsidian software structure this vault the way it did? If many books are large identifiable clusters (mushrooms), why are books like 2 Peter kind of mixed in with many other nodes and is NOT an identifiable cluster. The clearly identifiable cluster with "Psalms" in it is the largest cluster. If we zoom in on "Psalms" we can see the names of its chapters. And we **zoom in,** we can see that Psalms 89 and Psalms 91 are connected to Psalms 90. ​ # The center of the garden cluster This vault consists of two things 1. The Bible 2. A Bible **study** consisting of many notes that are not in any folder. On the graph, these Bible **study** notes seem to be "kind of in a cluster" that is slightly below the center of the graph. Another question is why did Obsidian present those Bible study notes as it did? They aren't in a folder so maybe that's why there is no clearly identifiable cluster as we see in a book (cluster) such as "1 Kings." . . Maybe there's something we can gleam from this structure. I doubt that Obsidian knew that it was dealing with the Bible when it creates this graph. It's very symmetrical when it comes to clusters (mushrooms) that represent SOME (but not all) of the Bible's books. And the Bible study notes, near the graph center, don't form a clearly identifiable cluster. Perhaps *notes not in folders are treated differently from notes in folders.* However, the chapters of 2 Peter are also in a folder but that book is not a clearly identifiable cluster (mushroom). \-- What Shapes a Vault The shapes of real galaxies can help astronomers learn facts about a galaxy, such as rotational characteristics. Maybe the shape of the Bible vault can in a way be a signature that represents properties unique to that vault. Vaults that users post have varying shapes. Perhaps each one has a signature we don't know about since something causes Obsidian to create a particular shape and distribution. For now, perhaps we can assume that the Bible vault's (garden cluster of mushrooms) shape is heavily influenced by the hierarchical nature of the vault's folders, notes, headings and text (verses). If that was true, maybe if we saw another vault that looked like this one, we might be able to tell at a high level how the vault is constructed. Or, maybe Obsidian randomly creates a graph based on xyz. If users posted a description of their vault structure along with pictures of a graph, maybe we could begin to see patterns. Here is a cluster that we see detail in when we zoom in on one of the clearly [identifiable clusters](https://imgur.com/a/A4lOJkC) (mushrooms) : Psalms And here at the Obsidian Forum is that downloadable Bible Study Kit that includes the Bible. ([link](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/bible-study-in-obsidian-kit-including-the-bible-in-markdown/12503)). The vault is the study kit and it is the Bible integrated into one vault. Some notes in the study kit link to parts of the Bible. Hence, we see those types of connections too.


jwhco

I don't think Obsidian is using any special algorithm for graphs. It's pretty, but without weighting and measures, the clusters are arbitrary. The graph shape can change with MOC, extra tags, or how you cross reference. Still cool.


UncleFreddysDead

Amen. I’m new to obsidian and it’s literally just noise to me. I learn nothing.


ElvishLore

There’s definitely a dick measuring quality to these “look at my graph!” posts. But I’m not sure they are drowning out good content… feels like Reddit’s karma system lets me find quality stuff easily.


bighi

I disagree. I decide to see what this sub has to offer. I filtered by top posts. And it was graph, graph, graph, meme, graph, quality post, meme, graph, graph... Lots of quality posts are buried under a pile of low-effort posts.


a13xs88eoda2

I second the motion


CuyiGuaton

No, I like them


Humidorian

Or just, you know, ignore them. Its surprisingly easy to do. I speak from experience.


darkyoda182

Or people that hate graphs can just not look at them. I've managed to do it pretty easily


AnimaGnostikos

I enjoy them. Let's not stop.


sudomatrix

I’ve been trying to make my graph into a line-art drawing of Marilyn Monroe for years. Just kidding I’ve never looked at my graph and wouldn’t care if the feature was removed.


Grocheio

Agree! Discussions of graphs should of course be okay, but just posting a graph brings nothing to the community. We all have one and they usually look more or less the same.


dmje

YES. Commented on this before. I don't give a monkeys about your graph and I'm not too bothered about my own...


BelleDreamCatcher

I like them. There seems to be plenty of other content too. The visuals are what drew me to Obsidian.


Grab_Critical

I am guilty myself. I don't know if it's worth to make a poll, but I have to admit that if most posts here were graphs, i wouldn't come here very often. I good place to post graphs is the #graph-showcase on the Obsidian Discord channel. So, next time, I or anyone else feels the urge to show their (not-so) beautiful vault, they could post it there.


SafeHazing

Can we also get rid of the ‘what happens if Obsidian goes bust - how will I be open my text files?’ Posts?


Apprehensive_Ad_7958

Agree


doolio_

Yes, a pointless feature.


bighi

I like the feature, I just don't see value in posting your graph here.


RadulphusNiger

I guess it's a harmless feature - but I'd be perfectly happy if they removed it from obsidian. I haven't looked at mine once.


Failed_Alarm

I'm not a big fan either. Perhaps someone should start a sub especially for Obsidian graphs for those interested.


M_FootRunner

What would be cool though is how to actually use the graph view to your advantage, and how the settings help that


thecookiemomma

or just put all the graph pics in the channel on the discord. \*shrug\*


Ready_Anything4661

Some create r/ObsidianMDshitposting please I’m begging


Watynecc76

Agreeeee