Every note-taking app eventually asks the same question: where does this go? A folder, a project, a category. The trouble is that most ideas don't know where they belong until much later — sometimes not until they've bumped into three or four other ideas and formed something worth naming.
Folders force that decision early. Backlinks let you skip it.
Write first, organize later
When you link a new note to an old one with [[double brackets]], you're not filing anything — you're just noticing a connection while it's fresh. The old note doesn't need to be reorganized or reclassified. It just quietly gains a reference: a small, dated trail showing that this idea came back around.
Over weeks, those trails start to do the organizing for you. A note you wrote in January turns out to be linked from six different places by March, and that's usually a good sign — it means the idea was actually useful, not just filed.
A folder tells you where you put something. A backlink tells you why it mattered.
None of this requires discipline or a tagging taxonomy. It requires a link, typed in the moment, between two things that are clearly related. Markpad tracks the rest automatically — every backlink shows up on the note being pointed to, without any extra step.
Folders aren't wrong. Some notes really do belong in a project, sorted by client or by date. But for the notes that matter most — the ones you return to, argue with, and build on — a web of backlinks will almost always outlast a filing system.