I agree that backlinks are just normal links and should be intentional in a Zettelkasten. The point is that for me my Zettelkasten serves as a ‘top layer’ to navigate my ever growing body of (mostly fiction) quotes, stories, songs, books, articles, etc. You don’t want to have to add every single highlight from a book manually to a Zettel.
This is where the automatic backlinks or ‘linked mentions’ or whatever you want to call it come in very useful, because they allow you to simply ‘tag’ something and see whatever you linked to the current Zettel without having to add each and every backlink manually.
The only problem here is the lack of organisation. Obsidian already offers folders, so why not show the mentions in their position in the folder hierarchy?
Say I’ve got a Zettel ‘Life is inherently meaningless’ and a list of backlinks that goes like this:
- Mentions
- [standalone quote]
- [book I'm reading]
- [movie I've seen in 2020]
- [song lyrics]
- [book I've read in 2002]
- [article I've read in 2020]
- [movie I've seen in 2019]
But I’ve already organised all of these in folders. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they were shown in that hierarchy? Like:
- Mentions
- books
- currently reading
- [book I'm reading]
- read
- 2002
- [book I've read in 2002]
- movies
- seen
- 2019
- [movie I've seen in 2019]
- 2020
- [movie I've seen in 2020]
- articles
- read
- 2020
- [article I've read in 2020]
- quotes
- [standalone quote]
- lyrics
- [song lyric]