[settsu]

This reminds me of the time a few years ago when mind mapping sites and apps exploded into popularity among the... "technorati" and sort of slightly seep into the wider online awareness but then seemingly, just as quickly, disappear into the background noise of the internet (I'm terminally online to a degree, especially when it comes to tech news—and have a pretty decent general awareness of pop culture trends—and can't recall having seen the topic referenced since the trend faded. But perhaps I'm just not in the right circles?)

[fellowniusmonk]

People mistake a helpful "view" for a useful UI.

None of these mind map, zoom first interfaces actually help with creating a global understanding.

People take an occasionally helpful "view" for navigating items and then mistakenly believe it should be turned into an active interface for creation and editing.

Graph/Mindmap views should only ever be a view and maybe a linking layer for nested text lists, actively operating in these interfaces is worse for global understanding and systems thinking.

I suspect this is because mind maps don't actually map to how our brain stores information.

Visual programming and even tools like KNIME work for stepwise workflow creation but they are not a good UI for new thinking, it's too much UI for novel idea generation and brainstorming, these interfaces are also useful for quickly understanding a DB structure.

That's why they never take off and remain a niche tool for the small number of people who have brain structures that find them useful or are willing to bend themselves to an arbitrary interface.