You might wonder why so many people use Obsidian when it's seemingly just a plain editor.

Many "save everything" products try their best to reduce friction for you — browser extensions, WeChat article saving, Raycast plugins, and the like.

The core of Obsidian's approach is that it increases the friction of saving things. Putting something in requires you to manually organize and categorize it; otherwise, you can't save it effectively.

For example, when I find a post on X that I like, I first need to download the video, then find a suitable Note or Canvas in Obsidian to store it. To make it easy to search later, I also need to carefully think of an appropriate title or tag. Similarly, if it's a text post, I need to manually copy it into Obsidian, fix the formatting, and then summarize it with a title.

Another example: when I find an excellent motion design video, I organize it into Detail — a process with extremely high friction. I have to download the video first, then create a new file, write a title, a summary, add tags, and finally put the video in.

This seemingly crude "digital garden" approach has greatly improved how I filter content, effectively weeding out noise and letting only truly valuable content enter my garden.

You might ask: what if I miss out? What if I want to find it later and can't? The answer is: "If something is truly important, it will find its way into your mind." What you're putting into your bookmarks might not be that link — it might be your anxiety.

You might feel that once something is in your bookmarks, you won't lose it — it's already "yours." I often fall into this habit too: I must quickly capture everything that interests me, and I'll organize it later when I have time.

But just like the content-flooded internet, if your garden is overrun, it eventually becomes an overgrown wasteland. Quality matters far more than quantity.

So, back to the title: a good digital garden should be a "high-friction" digital garden, not a place where you can toss in anything. It might be an Obsidian Vault, or better yet, a website you maintain by hand. The key is: you need to constantly prune, organize, and cultivate it — not just leave it there and rest easy, hoping it might be useful someday.

Inspiration happens during that high-friction process, not in the relief of a one-click save. It's like how the best doodles from childhood were casually drawn in the margins of textbooks — no fancy canvas needed.