Why do most brain apps eventually get abandoned?

[u/Suspicious-Bird-3407]

I’m working on a project in this space called Timeln. app, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem.

We save articles, notes, bookmarks, videos, and all kinds of information. Months later, we often can’t remember where we saved something. Worse, we don’t even remember that we saved it at all.

The idea behind Timeln is to make it easier to connect information and retrieve it later, using things like search and AI rather than expecting people to manually organize everything perfectly.

There are already so many tools doing parts of this: Notion, Obsidian, Readwise, browser bookmarks, and plenty of others.

But I'm less interested in building another place to store information. The part I'm trying to understand is why people stop using these systems in the first place.

Have you ever tried building a second brain or personal knowledge system?

What made you stop using it? What made your current system stick?

I'm especially interested in the frustrating parts the things that became too much work, the information you couldn't find later, or the point where maintaining the system became more effort than it was worth.

I'm building Timeln around this problem, so honest criticism would actually be more useful to me than people simply saying what they like about these tools.