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Comment by atroyn | Hacker News Reader

There are strong critics of free bookmarking sites (@Pinboard in particular). Their main criticism is that without a revenue model, users will eventually lose their bookmarks.

What's your plan?

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The other reason for charging (even a nominal amount) is to remove the spam problem.

That was the only reason I originally charged money for Pinboard.

Good luck!

Good argument, though pinboard has it's share of spam too.

A good example is this one: https://pinboard.in/t:mac

Codez4Mac is always "just submitted". It's been like this for years. All from- https://pinboard.in/u:simensol/

Or look here:

https://pinboard.in/t:app All the junk posts from heyyouapp, starting with "paid"

I find it a pity that these obvious annoyance things for us users, don't get fixed at all. It really polutes the site and I can't imagine these things to be incredibly complex to circumvent, in the whole system that Pinboard is.

Too busy taking baths filled with gold?

You can just report this stuff and I'll fix it. The top users seems to have misconfigured something, or else is posting from the far future.

I like spammers a lot because I can take their $11 and then shut down their account. Unfortunately, I don't get many.

Kozmos will be always free for private bookmarking, and there'll be a paid account for creating public collections in the second phase. Copying the details from my another comment here;

"The second phase of Kozmos will have "public collections", for example, we will be able to create a "Best Boutique Hotels in Istanbul" collection, and this will be only available for paid users. This is Kozmos' business model but I haven't explained it in the site, because collections aren't implemented yet."

Who is the target customer for this feature? Do I pay to make collections, to view them, or both? If I have to pay to view them, what would make me want to do that? If I have to pay to make them, why would I want to?

Only to create. They'll be public and available for anyone (user or not user). My target market for collections is Pinterest users.

But Pinterest users don't pay anything to make collections?

That's why it's full of low quality content and spam :)

i stopped using pinterest because they stopped displaying anything unless you were logged in. they are clearly using it as a mechanism to drive sign-ups, though - do you have any similar but less annoying plans to exploit network effects?

I wondered the same thing. I assume I'm the product (my data) if it is free, but the site also talks about privacy.

Pinboard isn't free though, you have to pay to even join and start using it.

Atroyn is referring to @Pinboard the person, who is critical of free bookmarking sites and has a history of buying them for cheap when they eventually fail.

Correct, he has a business model that prevents losing your bookmarks.

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