Why does hub nodes fail?

The most common reason hub nodes fails: Treating all notes as equally important. If you give the same maintenance attention to a peripheral note with two links and a hub node with forty, you are under-investing in the infrastructure that holds your graph together. The other failure is creating artificial hubs — index notes that link to everything but contain no substantive thinking. A real hub earns its connections because the concept itself is deeply interconnected, not because you manually wired it to everything.

The fix: Export or visualize your note graph. Identify the 5 nodes with the highest link count. For each one, ask: (1) Is this note well-written enough to deserve its centrality? (2) Does it accurately represent what I currently understand about this concept? (3) Are there connections it should have but doesn't? Upgrade at least one hub node today — rewrite it, add missing links, or split it if it has grown too broad. Your hubs are load-bearing walls. Inspect them.

The underlying principle is straightforward: Nodes with many connections are core concepts that deserve extra attention.