Well, because markdown is structured text, the search works really well and it’s easy to find notes. The longer i use bear, the less the tags work for me because i want to use the bear platform for multiple domains, so having it all in one “workspace” is too cumbersome.
Tags work great for apps like read it later apps where searching for content besides the title is time consuming, so tags add a valuable level of structure for finding what you are looking for across a broad set of saved links.
Both of you seem to assume that people who want folders have some cognitive deficiency preventing organizing using tags. Frankly, the main reason i adopted bear was that its search was excellent, in large part because structured data permits easier searching.
I have the same set of notes in bear and in craft, as i wanted to try out the other app like any reasonable person would (probably including bear devs). The existence of tags vs folders really doesn’t affect me at all for either app, but it is clear that there is a difference between these two metaphors. Imagine you are a biochemistry student and you have one folder for “organic chemistry review” notes and another folder for “membrane receptor” notes. Now, there may be notes in each folder that you want to tag with “#acid-base” because that concept affects organic chemistry AND membrane receptors. But you don’t necessarily want a separate acid-base high level folder; it becomes too cumbersome to access your categories if everything is grouped in high Level folders. Tags are great because they provide metadata that you can create groupings independently of the folder categories; you can choose how to group your ideas together, so when you are revising i. The context of membrabe receptors for the exam on that subject, you can access that context via the folder, but when you are revising across disciplines issues pertaining to acid-base, you can access the tag.
Again, i want to emphasize that this isn’t even a feature that I use; i just think the “anti-folder” outcry is silly. From a feature bloat perspective, it adds no feature bloat because it is treated essentially the same by the database.
I started a new workspace in craft because i wanted to start a new set of notes for a new job and didn’t want them mixed in with my bear notes (as i tried this already in bear last year and it was really annoying trying to arbitrarily create index notes and all these nested tags and crap to try and make an ad hoc system for accessing my note structure for subjects unrelated to many of my existing bear notes). It took a bit to get used to craft and initially i used it just like i use bear, but as i got more used to it now i kinda ‘get’ the Craft ecosystem and started to make use of the nested pages, direct block linking, etc, and might continue using it because now it doesn’t feel as clunky to me as it once did and it permits me to have different workspaces. I was surprised to like it, because before this i was an adamant fan of tags, but i’m actually not missing them much, as in reality my bear tags have become so bloated in number that it’s rarely useful for me to use them.
This isn’t designed as a battle of the PKM apps or whatever, just an anecdote that there are probably many other users like me who are fairly reasonable but don’t particularly want an app prescribing what metaphor we use to organise our lives, and may find themselves migrating to a different app that is less prescriptive, just as many of us migrated TO bear because it was refreshingly less bloated than evernote.
I don’t envy app developers who have to deal with meeting demands of their user-base. But I don’t really see why the topic of folders is so polarizing.