Folders are a leaky abstraction

I've been thinking about why folders feel increasingly wrong for modern digital life.

Imagine a photo from a company beach trip.

Where should it live?

• 2026

• Summer

• Beach

• Team Building

• Work

Traditional file systems require a single answer.

But that's not how people remember things.

When I want to find that photo again, I don't remember its path.

I remember its context.

The more digital content we accumulate, the more obvious this mismatch becomes. Screenshots, PDFs, bookmarks, notes, recordings, documents—they rarely belong to just one category.

Folders force information into one location.

Our brains don't.

Building PouchVerse has made me wonder whether folders are becoming a legacy interface inherited from a world where storage constraints mattered more than information retrieval.

Do you still actively organize folders, or do you mostly rely on search now?