Who gets it? 😭 After swapping my 3-year-old memo app, Tidenote cured my bookmark anxiety

I’m really fed up.

My phone is crammed with over 200 memos, from “must-watch study materials” to “book list recommended by some blogger” and “next travel guide.” Every time I saved one, it felt incredibly valuable, as if just tapping “save” meant it was etched into my brain. But then? Three months later, I open it and it’s all links and screenshots, I can’t even be bothered to fix the titles. Jeez, what did I even save?

That guilt of “saved but never touched” is called bookmark anxiety. Until a friend sent me a link and said, “Try this, it’s made for your problem.” It was Tidenote.

The memo app’s fault, AI can’t take the blame

To be honest, I’ve tried quite a few AI note-taking tools. Some are too verbose—you throw in a recording, and it spits out a thesis. Others are too dumb—you take a photo of a whiteboard, and it recognizes a bunch of garbled text. And some are just rebranded ChatGPT, too lazy even to write a decent summary.

But Tidenote hits a very specific pain point—it solves not “forgetting,” but “not wanting to revisit.”

Think about it: why do our bookmarks turn into a landfill? Because we only complete the “collection” step, not the “digestion.” In traditional memos, you have a bunch of scattered screenshots, recordings, and links. You need someone to actively organize and review them—but that someone is usually not online.

What Tidenote does is actually simple: you throw in long content (recordings, web pages, video transcripts, class recordings, meeting recordings), and within tens of seconds, it spits out a clean core summary. You only need to skim it in a minute to decide, “Is this still worth digging into?”

Three scenarios that made me finally decide to switch

Scenario one: Monday morning stand-up recordings. One guy on our team just loves to ramble—he can go from project progress to his weekend fishing trip. A 40-minute recording replay would drive anyone crazy. Before, I’d record it in my memo app and forget it. Now I just toss it into Tidenote, and it gives me: “This week’s progress: Module A done, Issue B pending, Next week’s plan: pre-launch integration.” All the key points, none of the fluff.

Scenario two: Great articles stumbled upon late at night. I used to bookmark tons of articles about “design system building,” each with a flashy title. Now, before saving a long article, I copy the link or text into Tidenote and check its summary. Out of ten articles, I can filter out eight. Only the two remaining are actually worth reading in detail. My bookmarks are no longer clogged with junk.

Scenario three: Class recording organization. I’m self-studying some data analysis online courses. The teacher talks slowly and rambles. I convert the video to text, throw it into Tidenote, and it cleans up repetitive filler words and interjections, leaving formulas, cases, and conclusions. My review efficiency has definitely improved a lot.

It’s not perfect, but the direction is right

I have to mention the downsides. Tidenote’s Chinese semantic understanding occasionally trips up—for example, it doesn’t extract industry jargon accurately enough, missing some key context. Also, if you need deep analysis (like summarizing the argument logic of a book), it’s still more of a “summary” tool than an “analysis” tool. For truly complex content that requires critical thinking, you still have to do it yourself.

There’s another practical issue: it doesn’t solve the “action” problem. Even after reading the summary, if you still don’t want to act, no one can help you.

But that said, if your biggest headache is information overload, runaway bookmarks, and an inability to digest long content, then Tidenote is indeed a shot in the arm. It transforms the note-taking process from “save and forget” to “read first, then decide.” That change has cured my bookmark anxiety.

After three days of switching from my old memo app, I feel like I can keep going.