I've found that if you don't have structure, then you're reliant on plain search terms. As you have more and more leafs, without a tree, your searches will match more and more leafs, to the point where you'll have difficultly finding conceptually related but not textually related concepts. If you're using tags or links, I would claim those are structure. I've often found I have to go back and add tags/links to pages so I can find them in the search results.

I think structureless is not possible, since some form of structure will grow, with lumps. I think there's some happy in between, with some light structure in place.

Perhaps "useless" is the wrong term -- perhaps just "wildly inconsistent" would be better (which winds up being pretty much useless, if you can't find anything).

nomel wrote:

> I think structureless is not possible, since some form of structure will grow, with lumps.

This really nails it. There will be some kinds of structures (note the plurals), particularly if more than one person is involved, since you just think... differently at different times. A minimal structure like Quiver/Obsidian just takes all those silly decisions away that wind up lumping your data into a difficult-to-access wad.