Why is the folder metaphor a bad idea for computers?

With many pieces of information— e-mail or bookmarks or business cards or whatever—the file folder approach to organizing information puts the burden of organization on me, and I never wanted to be a file clerk. I'm no good as a bureaucrat. The idea that it is my job to assign names to each piece of information, and it is my job to decide what folder to put them in, and it is my job to arrange the folders into a hierarchy, and remember where everything belongs seems increasingly ridiculous.

Don't we lose something by delegating all those decisions?

We're going from an artificial information storage scheme to a far more natural one. The idea of a timeline, a chronology, a diary, a daily journal, or a scrapbook is so much older and so much more organic and ingrained in human culture and history than the idea of a file hierarchy. I don't think you give up anything at all.

How do computer users react to this new way of working?

People who are sophisticated programmers find it less natural. People who are not sophisticated programmers find it easy.

Your linear stream interface seems to fly in the face of hyperlinking.

Hyperlinking has always been a disaster and is becoming more disastrous all the time. Instead of an organizing strategy, it's an antistrategy, it's a refusal to organize. The last thing I want is a tangle or a network or a web in which there are a million links from everything to everything else.