I never bothered to figure out what happened. It was del.icio.us where everything was lean and clean and worked well and at some point it moved to delicious.com and went to shit. At least that's how I remember things. ;)
Don't know the history of it but I didn't see a revenue model and they ended up pivoting around for something that would make money. Seems like there are certain ideas which are destined to be great services but not great businesses. We should figure out a way to put them into the public demesne where they can be collectively supported in a non-profit way, rather than see them die off after unsuccessful pivots
I believe the founder, Joshua Schachter, should be the best person to answer that. He is also another active HackerNews user[1]. Unlike Flickr, I think, Delicious was never rescued from Yahoo!
Wallabag[0] is useful too if you want a self-hosted bookmarking solution. I'm with Pinboard too, but regularly export my bookmarks so I have a backed up local copy of recent bookmarks I've added to Pinboard.
As someone who is a heavy user of Pinboard and has had Elixir on my 'to learn properly after dabbling' list for a while, looks like a great project to explore.
Why would they want to do that? It's extra work, extra downtime potential, and I believe literally no competing service of theirs uses it either. I mean, congrats on getting .HT fixed (when did that happen?), but I wouldn't enable it without a good reason.
Because DNS is an insecure protocol and DNSSEC adds a layer of security that protects against bad actors? It's beneficial to the business and it's consumers? Why do I put locks on my door, I've never been robbed...
Just to throw my hat in the ring I also worked on a social bookmarking site called HunterGather, with an emphasis on visual bookmarking and collections.
The biggest problem with bookmarks isn't the bookmarking; it's the rediscoverability.
Tags and folders aren't even close to solve the problem of surfacing bookmarked links when they're needed.
And the only way to fix this, is to have them integrated into search. "You're looking for how to do X? Here's what I found on the internet. Also, you bookmarked these links about this topic, so check them out."
> Tags and folders aren't even close to solve the problem of surfacing bookmarked links when they're needed.
I think that's an overstatement. I use tags regularly to find bookmarks in Pinboard. They work well since the content was curated by myself. I can find categories of links which can be further filtered into subcategories, etc., until I usually find what I want. It's a great way to have a collection of things I found interesting at some point, and tags and full-text search are useful enough to find them again when I need to.
Would I like a RAG type of interface over my bookmarks? Sure. But it's absolutely not required to have a good experience.
I had the same problem back in the day, so I created https://historio.us, which is a search engine over the content of the pages. That way, you don't need to tag things, you have your own personal search engine.
This is the exact problem we're solving at https://www.zenfetch.com. Right now, as you're working in Google Docs we surface anything you've saved that's relevant. Will be working on a search integration and other PKM/text editor integrations soon.
I used to store links in a Google Sheet for this reason. It's not ideal though as it ads friction to the process of adding a link.
I think a better system wouod be one where the bookmark stores either the "link source", i.e. backlink to the site you found the bookmarked link on, or the "search term", I.e. what you were specifically looking for when you bookmarked the page.
What I'd like to see is some kind of "ongoing" or dossier for news. So when an errata or new development happen, even years later, you get a notification and can update your knowledge.
Specifically for things like "future miracle cure for X" or trials. Like "what happened with the Panama Papers"? Then you'd get a full dossier of articles, links, comments etc. It may require some standardized way to link news article together.
I think I would enjoy something like this (or pinboard), but with comments.
Sort of a smaller version of Hackernews, where I could see what my friends are bookmarking and then write comments on those links, so we could chat about the content not necessarily with random people of the internet but with your smaller community (or maybe with everyone too, but in a different section).
Maybe someone here knows if anything like this exists already? I've taken a look at some of the options out there, but didn't end up trying them because it seemed like they didn't do anything like this, and were more focused on simply storing bookmarks (and maybe sharing them with upvotes, but nothing for conversation).
Hey, that's exactly what I've been building with lynkmi.com! The main idea is social link sharing, curation, and discussion in smaller circles. Have plenty more features coming down the line, including one I'm really excited about for bridging the in-person/online divide, but the general direction is described in lynkmi.com/about
Would love to give you an invite! I think my email is in my profile, if not my DMs on Twitter are open (@TheOisinMoran).
Interesting example. Reddit definitely started that way, but over time people went to it for discussion first. So the links actually end up getting ignored if the title of the Reddit post is enough for people to start posting comments right away.
Delicious[1] was delicous, and Pinboard[2] is just there. Not into bookmarks that much except for less than 10 significant websites. I might look at ArchiveBox[3] or something like it to bookmark and take a snapshot. Again, none of them as important as it used to be.
I setup Raindrop.io [1] to feed into Archivebox, mostly as an overcomplicated way to automatically submit the page to archive.org [2].
Raindrop is nice since it works in browser and as a phone app - so it truly is a single bookmarking tool. I mostly use it for search purposes, bookmarking things I may want to find again in a few years.
I rarely look at my Archivebox, but it's nice to know it's there with offline copies if I ever want them.
Search totally didn’t kill bookmarks. Even good search didn’t kill bookmarks - and now we’ve got shit search with endless SEO rubbish clogging up results.
I use raindrop.io - it’s amazing, does archiving of original page to cater for link rot, tagging, notes, categorisation, full text search (of original page) and more
> are there better paradigms for organizing links, documents, files, etc.?
Notebook apps and personal knowledge management systems largely serve this purpose. They don't really replace online bookmarking services; the latter serve as a discovery tool, not as a personal repository of useful links. The personal knowledge systems hold the potential to be the main interface to everything, but have not yet reached their full potential IMO.
>are there better paradigms for organizing links, documents, files, etc.?
I keep a Resources section in my knowledgebase across several categories (e.g. Career, Health, Dating) and mostly dump links there.
I don't know about others but I barely open any bookmarks or any links saved anywhere, but the value of this is more to re-discover niche resource links that would've been hard to find from scratch.
I have +500 bookmarks in Firefox and dozens of tabs in groups. I also have a selfhosted "interesting links storage" for long term. I used to automatically post them to Twitter, but they banned my bot.
Has it? Search (especially on Google) is 20% ads and 70% SEO spam with ads. Search might have killed bookmarks back then, but today it is of little use to find interesting links. Maybe Linkhut solves this.
To answer your question, bookmarks. Reading lists. Markdown files. That can't be taken away or enshittified just yet.
