Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Okay, quick feedback. The first thing I looked for is the answer to "Public or private?" Privacy policy has this:

> We will also never share the content of your historified pages with anyone, although we might use the URLs of pages to compile anonymized lists of popular or new links. We will, however, never share any information about which pages you, personally, have historified.

I think that might be a mistake. You'll lose the ability to get people in for social networking/SEO reasons, and nobody trusts a service like this to stay private any more anyways. At first I thought, "Well, that's more useful because it's private" - and then I thought, "Who am I kidding? They'll just make it public anyways if they get big."

You might consider setting the default to public, maybe with an option for private.

View on HN

First of all, thanks very much for your feedback!

To address your points, there are no plans for your bookmarks to be public, or have an option to show a page with them, either. The nature of the site doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as there is no list of bookmarks to publicise in the first place. To make it public we would have to add a search box for people to search in your bookmarks, which may or may not be useful...

I see what you mean about it, and I agree, but many people have said "I will never use this if I can't have privacy", so we listened to them. It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...

> The nature of the site doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as there is no list of bookmarks to publicise in the first place.

Question: Are you building a fun tool for the good of humanity, or do you plan to make money at some point? From everything that I've seen, making a way to publicise a list of bookmarks could help you if you're going the latter route.

> It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...

Yes, my first thought was, "I'd only use this if it's private" - my second thought was, "Wait, actually, I'd use it either way, pretty similarly, and there'd be additional value if it's public." I might see what people choose instead of what people say. People talk a lot and then do different things. Just something to think about, and congrats on launching a pretty cool service.

Your points are very valid. It is also my personal opinion that people say one thing and do another, as far as privacy is concerned. I will put the policy change on the table and we will think about ways to make the service amenable to shared bookmarks, as it would indeed be a good feature.

Currently, a way of sharing that I, personally, have found works pretty well is to enable AutoTweet, which tweets your historified links with a tag. Then you can search for #historified and you see links people all over the world have historified. That is just an aside, however, and we will absolutely look into link sharing.

We don't want to use your links for nefarious purposes or to divulge anything embarrassing, but having a more lax policy that enables sharing is something we do want.

Thank you again for your feedback, it is sincerely appreciated.

I am pretty sure this is a case of users not knowing the difference.

I wonder if you asked them if they wanted to be able to share with others?

One last thing.

You won't get anything out of asking users.

What you will get something out of is asking customers.

I never thought of it that way, but you are absolutely right. Thank you for that perspective.

Hi. First of all well done in getting something up and running. I think I'm missing the point here. Whats the difference wwhen compared to delicious? I'm not being rude I'm really interested

Thanks, the difference is that historious searches inside the pages rather than just the titles. So, if there was a page talking about fish called "Sea creatures", you could search for "fish" and historious would find that bookmark.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com