Del.icio.us
del.icio.us
del.icio.us
I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service, and a better-executed alliance with Mozilla and rode them into prominence and relevance.
All the pieces were there, just the management vision appears not to have been.
Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut.
The rise of advertising everywhere, and the loss of privacy, and the glut of trivia, hatred, and anti-science in the form of Facebook content, have resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago, and is governed by incompetent personalities.
The return of del.icio.us might just be one small step back in the right direction.
There's a ton I don't like about Google, and whether true or not it feels like they were 'better' in the past. A huge step up from the multiple AltaVista searches or the clicking around on Yahoo that I had to do pre-google.
Maybe there are better alternatives these days, but DDG still isn't fully there for most of my searches, and I use Bing for very specific types of searches that I wouldn't bring up in polite society...
> resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago
This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.
Verizon was and still is very scary. Whether or not they are incompetent, companies that came from the mother bell, att, Verizon, CenturyLink, ... And all major ISPs are scary.
Verizon's supercookie thing was revealed shortly before it's acquisition of Yahoo! And Aol. If Oath/Verizon Media succeeds as a major online destination, they could have more data than Google, no? I mean it is a data hoarders dream. Own the pipe end to end?
» This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.
I read something either published by Google or about Google that basically said that publishers in average can expect to see twice the revenue with targeting than without which made me think if that's all then we should get rid of tracking and figure out how to live on half the money.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/veriz...
> I read something either published by Google or about Google that basically said that publishers in average can expect to see twice the revenue with targeting than without which made me think if that's all then we should get rid of tracking and figure out how to live on half the money.
I have an apparently minority ("conspiracy") view on telecommunication systems and security services (regardless of the country). Advertising is a convenient pretext: for both state surveillance and advertising, we need to track users, read their email, and end privacy as we know it.
quote:
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
― Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162691-the-technotronic-era...
In case you don't know who this person is, I suggest reviewing his career. He is, as Donald Rumsfeld would have it, a known known.
In fact, in some ways, the incompetence makes them less scary. Imagine the reach that Verizon would have with content delivery that was better than Netflix and webmail that was better than Gmail; and the resulting potential privacy concerns.
Verizon FiOS is excellent as far as connectivity, but as a corporation, they suck.
But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.
What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.
Privacy has always been a concern, but it used to be something more physical that involved sealed packages, curtains and cash payment. Privacy-minded people simply didn't share sensitive information on the internet, they treated everything on the internet as public.
Privacy on the internet wasn't that much of a thing not because privacy has changed, but because the internet has changed. It is now everywhere and used for things that used to be unthinkable back then: banking, official documents,... An internet connected coffee pot (not a teapot) used to be a joke, they are now in every (online!) shop.
What we didn't know then is that Google would achieve exponential growth to reach trillion dollar status by surreptitiously harvesting each user's search queery history, tracking their browsing histories by IP address, scanning their gmail, surveilling their movements via android, and putting it all together to achieve an advertising monopoly the likes of which Hearst, Pulitzer, Beaverbrook, Ogilvie and Murdoch could only ever dream about.
All without the cost of employing a single journalist.
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
I mean, it was. But encryption was a joke (and still is, to great degree) and we all just lived with plaintext over TCP everywhere. IRC, email, web, etc. In fact, during '93-97 the thing I remember most about the internet was just how paranoid everyone really was at the time. It was still a mostly technical user base and there was this general intuition that the potential for this to all go sideways is right there. But we were all on local BBSes and local ISPs and looking at personal web pages and logging on our friend's IRC server. It was sharing bootlegs with Grateful Dead fans, with a cautious eye towards the Feds and the AT&T and IBMs of the world. After 2003 or so, this world ceased to exist. Tracking, spam, privacy invasion became normalized.
> Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff
I remember people on Slashdot begging Google to not clutter their front page. There were a few times that I believe Google introduced new features and there was a serious backlash. I want to say Google was paying attention (Slashdot was huge at the time), but who knows.
> while you may want 1999 Google back
What strikes me nowadays is just how much Google has always sucked. I don't mean the company (they suck too). I mean PageRank. The thing we always held in unquestioned high regard. This thing we used to think is really clever turns out to just be a thing people could game to improve their visibility. Then Google realized this and now it's a tool Google uses to control the internet. I've spent a good portion of my career on this cargo cult nonsense we call "Search Engine Optimization." The rules change all the time, and only Google knows what those changes are. The biases are ever-shifting, in order to keep people on their toes and to reinforce Google's control.
But the part of PageRank that sucks is that if you do any sort of search that isn't a Wikipedia page, a Stackoverflow or Quora question, or a Pinterest image, you will quickly land into the mire of shady Russian Twitter/Instagram rehosting sites and scam pages. And this is all within the first page or at best the 2nd page of results. That is godawful results if you really stop to think about it. Google can't tell you anything that Wikipedia doesn't already know.
Slot-machine of the internet. rage, outrage, xenophobia, name-calling, name-dropping, celebrity, manufactured 140 chars at a time. It's a culture killer.
For me I avoid Twitter and ignore all news media(minus some local news).
Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad campaigns.
This may come as a shock to some, but it's quite logical when you think about it.
With print advertising, it makes sense. You pay for the space you take up. How do you calculate that? Well, at minimum, the cost of a classified ad for similar space, plus additional fees for processing, graphics, and color.
Online, advertising pricing really doesn't make much sense. The space you have is freely available, there are no printing costs, no special processing requirements, and the readers aren't even likely to be local, unlike the limited distribution networks of most newspapers. It should come as no surprise that online advertising revenue for newspapers is nowhere near its peak of print advertising revenue [1]. Even when a newspaper stops printing and can cut out all the expenses that come with it, there simply isn't enough money to support their existing levels of operation.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is...
Digg was originally modelled on the "popular" section of Delicious, an example of building a product out of a feature. Then Reddit saw a huge boost from the eventual Digg community exodus, after a time when Digg itself was the cultural nerve centre.
I wonder what happened to that guy. I would gladly trade a drunk Kevin for a Zuckerberg.
Revision3 had some other great shows also on their list. Too bad there is nothing like that anymore on the internet, at least to my knowledge.
Delicious was about 10x-15x the size of Digg.
it's cleaner, nicer, and no comments. Refreshing.
1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings.
2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.
Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.
It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.
Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes.
But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.
I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work.
There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest.
If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t).
Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.
For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever.
In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.
So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
However, in support of your point, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both say billionaires and other "better off" people should pay more taxes, to my knowledge, they haven't been unilaterally sending checks to the government for the difference between current taxes and their ideal amount. They seem to believe that their private foundation can make better use of their excess money than the government can. They're willing to advocate additional taxes for groups, rather than just for themselves.
I don't know why some people seem to expect that of billionaires. It's not rational behavior for them or anyone else, so why do you think they should be behaving that way.
I've seen this more than a couple times in HN comments and it always befuddled me.
Are you asserting that the government (and the public) will get more utility (benefit) from the extra 1 dollar on its $2.7 billion budget (increase of .000 000 04 percent), than I would from the extra dollar in my net annual income (on the order of a thousandth of a percent)?
That's a pretty incredible contention.
But on a percentage basis (in a progressive taxation scheme, and especially in the higher tax brackets) the government gets more marginal utility from a 1% tax increase than you would from a 1% tax break.
In any bracket and at any percentage, the government will be adding $x to it's huge budget by taking $x from an individual or organization's much smaller budget.
(* Note that it really isn't valid to compare marginal utility between entities. It's an individual, relative measure, rather than an absolute quantity.)
But Gates and Buffett both say that they SHOULD be paying more in taxes - but they don't. So what they're really saying is, all those other guys (the "well off") should pay more, and then they'd pay more, too.
This supports the original poster's contention that the billionaires would seek that tax break (for "fairness") even if they didn't need it.
The well off don't pay much tax, and they will probably pay none at the top end (they'll donate to charity, for example, which they work at, and the charity will fly them around to their meetings, pay for accommodation, etc). Generally it's the middle class who end up paying tax until it's not worth working any harder.
It is a good financial decision to spend up to "$1M * <odds of success>" to get that tax break, or another better one. (especially if the ~$500K spent on retainered-lawyers sets you up to pay less due to future tax hikes.) Economics gets weird when any of the numbers get really big, or really small.
I don't like this example though, as it doesn't detail why the tax break was so specific. Did 4/5 of them have no taxable income that year? Do all of these billionaires live in a despotic-shithole where the rule of law doesn't apply equally to everyone? (to be fair, most billionaires do. /s)
But this example is not about that. First to answer your last question, it's the despotic shithole kind. The point being, the reason is completely arbitrary.
This is about a billionaire who can already buy whatever they want, regardless of said tax break. It won't make them directly happier because it doesn't allow them to buy anything they couldn't otherwise buy.
The point of the example is that given this is the case, we still have a built in biological desire for "fairness" and if this billionaire would realise and observe this desire having no logical basis, they would not fight it. (assume fighting it is not as enjoyable to spend their limited life time as they could be doing something else with the money they already have)
In an analogous situation, five people go to a fancy restaurant and for some reason four of them get 10 plates of food, and one gets 9 plates of food. Assume the restaurant is so generous one person can't possibly eat more than 2 plates anyway.
Why is it easier to imagine simply not making a big deal out of it and enjoying your meal(s), in this situation?
(Especially considering that the meal example is 100x more unfair)
out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of your business?
I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).
Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server.
[1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.
https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...
Delicious was pretty much perfect as it was. Morphing into something like a Twitter or Reddit would not have been a move in a positive direction.
Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss.
"But it doesn't scale!" is practically a mantra for HN, but scalability is fairly low on the list of values for me. I'd rather have interesting websites than big websites, and I'd rather see websites go bankrupt than compromise their values. The reason I care that Delicious might come back is that it was still interesting when it went down last. Digg and Slashdot still exist, but frankly I care so little that I actually had to look up that fact, and after verifying that they existed, I clicked away.
The barrier to entry for making money is a different thing.
It's mostly due to this principle actually that Facebook usurped Myspace despite having far fewer features.
One exception to the rule lately is Roam Research, which looks like dog shit but is apparently popular.
> There are still PHPBB forums which "look like dog shit" but host vibrant communities
There are small communities that predate modern web/Facebook, which is irrelevant. There is also craigslist, and its shitty design is remarked upon constantly. It's frequented by the elderly so falls outside the scope of discussion.
You're married to the idea that design standards haven't changed, or that the web as a platform hasn't become much more sophisticated over the last ~decade.
I also remember this as a time when Google didn't yet have a reputation for abandoning everything they touched, so you could get inspired by, say, Google Knol or Google Wave. I had hope that Google Reader might grow into something, and the was a fraction of a second where we all wanted to believe in Google Plus.
I never really tried out Wave but Knol suffered from the problem you'd expect if everyone gets to write their own self-promotional competing article on a topic.
I'm perfectly aware of this and have used RSS feeds on a daily basis for more than a decade, so I'm not sure what's being suggested here.
Now we have Quora, of course.
So ahead of its time! I have never understood why that got the axe, it took everything they where doing great at that time (chat, video, email, and the newish At the time G suite apps (called something else then) and just meshed them together in a surprisingly useful and pleasant way. Also the whiteboard features were really good particularly for it’s time.
This Mashable article does a good job explaining it in more detail[0]
I can’t believe it to this day they couldn’t figure it out. It was very ahead of its time
I don't mean to suggest it would have been similar to them culturally, or that it would have evolved into a copy of reddit or twitter. It would have still been delicious, in the sense that it would always be a booking service (as long as they never went all in with Delicious Stacks, which I think nobody remembers except me). I also don't doubt that, at some point, it probably would sell it's soul and lose whatever signature personality it had according to the main users. But it would have remained useful, grown, and been one of the main places everybody goes.
Even with the loses you identify, it was an invaluable asset that could have kept Yahoo relevant.
And in this alternative future, if del.icio.us had kept its core as a social bookmark sharing service, it could even have kept the Web relevant.
Users mostly didn't want directories of web sites and portals (which couldn't really scale anyway), they wanted search.
Microblogging (and individual blogging sites generally) fell out of favor. I consider it a minor miracle that Blogger is still around and Google even did a minor and only somewhat regressive update recently.
Most people didn't really want "serious" photo sites like Flickr. They wanted free social sites dominated by "influencers" like Instagram. (We'll see how long Flickr holds on under a small owner like Smugmug.)
I'm curious what those moves/announcements are; I haven't been keeping up with Flickr, but I was actually rather happy SmugMug bought them as opposed to most other possible outcomes. SmugMug has always been a subscription-supported service with no free plans, so they were always "doomed" to be much smaller than competitors -- but they've also been around since 2002, are apparently profitable, and remain pretty laser-focused on their niche.
Digg is still around, too, but not in a recognizable form. (At least, if there's a way for mere mortals to submit links, I haven't found it.)
> July 15, 2020
> Hi, my name is Maciej Ceglowski, the latest (and hopefully last) owner of del.icio.us.
> The site will be back online soon. If you had data stored on del.icio.us after 2010, you'll be able to export it here.
> [...]
> You can reach me at maciej@ceglowski.com
I also hope the site will be back online.
Before social media amplified celebrity worship and extreme positions, everyone's voice on the web was only given weight by the merit or personality of what was said. No matter how popular you were on the old internet your voice was never loud enough to silence another. People were mostly anonymous (in practice because governments were caught off guard) and anyone could start a quirky website that was suddenly the talk of the town.
I miss the old internet that inspired a lot of brilliant and all too idealistic people to code into the night and bring us these amazing innovations. In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.
Thank you Maciej for the trip down memory lane. Some of us may cling to the past but I hope there's another version of you and the old guard of the internet waiting for us or our future generations when we are gone.
At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.
When I first got to use Facebook (after it had opened up to more than just users from particular US universities), I loved the fact that it had a cohesive look and feel. The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
But over time I kind of started missing actively visiting the 'page' of a friend, and especially the craziness in how they were able to modify their myspace/cu2/hyves.nl/etc. pages. Sure, it was often ugly as hell, filled with emoji, psychedelic backgrounds, and autoplaying music. but it was /them/ expressing themselves.
I think a lot of what's turned out to be problematic about Facebook (and perhaps the broader internet) is that most platforms have completely locked down people's ability to express themselves to comments and a tiny little profile picture next to it.
This is partly because Facebook introduced "the internet" to people who would otherwise never create anything on the web.
1. Users of site request and upvote requests for individual memoirs, and comment with their questions and prompts, which are also upvoted. Similar to an AMA. Upvotes are purchased with preorder deposits, and if the subject accepts, the funds will be transferred from users to site. Similar to Kickstarter.
2. Subject sees that their name is high up and accepts the memoir invitation. A tool allows them to select the questions and prompts they want to use.
3. An app plays the prompts using text to speech and records the conversation with the subject, performing a live transcription.
4. The transcript is sent to an editor, who fixes any transcription mistakes and adds some organization so the book has some sense of flow. Using a transcript and audio combination editor, the interview audio is recut to match the text.
5. The edited transcript is sent through a template and sent to Amazon's publishing service. Audio goes through similar process for corresponding audio book. Preordered copies are delivered to the users that upvoted the subject. Revenue is split between site and subject. If successful, subject releases a sequel written in a more traditional way and offers it to the same users.
But yeah, I'd set aside a monthly budget for backing such memoirs, even if I never listen to the results, simply getting them made about subjects I find interesting feels like a worthwhile use of a few bucks.
The newsfeed was copied/acquired from FriendFeed. Messages was Beluga. Instagram and WhatsApp got on FB bandwagon too. FB just had the cold hard cash laying there and just had to put it in front of these people. Cold hard cash and no morality when it comes to selling people personal data, but, in their defence, we put that data there in the first place, it's the fuzzy binding contract that's made when one joins Facebook—look at all these social tools for you to share and connect, for the mere price of letting us exploit you and your data and enrich us and our investors while doing that. It's a power structure, really.
> to comments
Hope springs eternal for the freespeecher.
Most of the time, I'm here for the text. I really appreciate straight answers in legible fonts. They're a rarity in the age of SEO-optimised, engagement-obsessed websites.
In that sense, I'm happy with platforms that standardise the experience. It's just unfortunate when those platforms add their own layer of annoyances in the name of growth.
> The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.
At first I liked the newsfeed but looking back I think that's the beginning of what killed Facebook for me. At one time the site was about you. When you logged in you went to your page. Now it's about other people almost exclusively.
I was thinking a while ago of the old "web ring" idea where likeminded sites were all listed together in a ring and you could explore them.
It would be nice if there was a "simple, privacy oriented, sustainable" web ring out there of good projects doing good things for their customers.
I think you're right. The best we have now are the "awesome-*" lists. Here is an "aggregation" of the options on offer: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
I love any sites with lists on it made by regular people. Rateyourmusic is the same. Find a band you love, find out who else has an album on their list, get digging.
Same with Delicious. I was gutted when it shut.
Maciej bought Delicious in 2017 and always planned to let people recover their bookmarks.
The problem was that even years after making the site read-only, I couldn't cope with the level of spam traffic directed at delicious, and had constant problems keeping it online. Rewriting that read-only version so it's not a bloated layer cake of 20 services is my attempt at bringing it back online more sustainably.
"I" created Facebook in 1999. The commpany I worked for wanted a "networked solution for all and everyone." Not big enough market, bad timing etc. So there you have it; timing is _everything_.
To get to that point the trick was to build it as something else first, and then switch. Myspace was primarily a platform for bands, which are fun and cool, which contributed to its early success.
Jwz:
> Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
And Facebook was ENTIRELY this initially.
Down to the lack of TLS even (or maybe I should say SSL -- XD)!
I agree with this 100%. I'm old enough to remember when the internet worked fine without having advertising everywhere. Now we're supposed to be convinced that the whole thing would cease to exist if there weren't popover ads and auto playing videos. :/
It's funny, I'm trying to remember when I simply stopped using bookmarks. 5 years ago, maybe? 10? I'm not entirely sure. I used to have elaborate folder hierachies of bookmarks in my browser.
But at some point, I realized anytime I needed something, it was faster to just type a keyword or two in the address bar. Either it was there in my history, autosuggested, or my search engine would find it. So maybe it was when Chrome debuted the Omnibox?
I suppose it was around the same time I started primarily accessing files on my computer/drive with search (Drive, Spotlight) rather than navigating folders.
A few years later, I stopped organizing my 1000's of tracks into playlists by mood/theme, because now I can just think of a single track I'm in the mood for, and start a Spotify Radio based on that track.
In other words: I no longer extensively curate, because you just don't have to anymore, beyond a kind of bare minimum (a few project folders, a mega "favorite tracks" playlist).
So I guess I'm just curious: Delicious was wonderful when it existed. But even if it were brought back, is it a service people need anymore? Or have we moved on to a new paradigm?
Search engines require active discovery. You can find most of the links posted here on HN. Why have HN?
It's curated, have social elements and passive. You just sit back and click rather than coming up with something interesting to search for.
I am still surprised google hasn't come up with a passive consumption of their search engine. It seems like something they can do. Google feed doesn't have social elements to it so I wouldn't count it in. Google Plus was a failure.
I've been doing a lot of cooking. Trying to find anything you've found searching for recipes is just wading through a swamp of blogs, spam, and impractical nonsense. If you find anything you want to try, you'll never find it again.
On the other hand, if I tag all the stuff I might consider in pinboard with my own descriptions, I'm starting with a subset that's just the 4-5 pages I was looking at before.
Google is a poor substitute because it gives me pages of results for what I need and they may or may not be any good. I may have to search again. I may have to click through 4 or five pages before i find one that's useful even though i've been to a useful one before.
Searching in my bookmarks gives me ones that are KNOWN useful, AND because of Pinboard's archival feature they are still available even after the site has disappeared.
I bookmark things _I_ find useful and things I think will be likely be useful to the people in my circles. Then when a friend says "hey is there a good tool for x?" I can say "yes, and here's a link to it" even if i don't use that tool. Or, i can link them to full pages of useful bookmarks on a topic.
So yeah, I have thousands of curated links of _useful_ things and pieces of information that are on the internet or _were_ on the internet. I use it daily. I share links with others regularly. I'm constantly thankful when i can read the content of that blog post I bookmarked that described X better than anything currently out there... but no longer exists on the internet. It's also great for research. I can make a new tag for some topic I'm gathering info on (maybe competitors for a future project) and when i am ready to start processing that info i have a whole list of easily accessible links to go through.
re "is it a service people need anymore?" Note that the reason the thing that started off this discussion exists is because enough people are paying him money to use Pinboard.in that he was able to spend unknown thousands of dollars on Delicious for the SOLE purpose of shuttering it and putting it in read-only mode. He probably got some users who transferred their accounts to Pinboard.in out of the deal, but that wasn't his primary goal by all accounts.
Also my memory is perfect, I can't remember anything I have forgotten.
not having them across browsers makes them a non-starter (ditto for Firefox plugins)
Not having them across accounts makes them a non-starter (work account vs personal account).
Not being able to tag them and thus find the thing that i remember the associated categories / taxonomy of but not the specific name of is a non starter. With tags i can say "it was a thing that ... was in ...Go, and ... did something with the cli and...." and have a list of viable things. Doing that with just google is searching for a needle in a haystack. In those case I'm searching for a needle in a handful of hay, on a nice clean desk.
Now I use Raindrop.io, and eventhough the iOS app is not that great, but it allow full text search for Medium account.
My question is, can you check Pinboard's archival account feature on whether it still use iframe, and whether you can do full text search on Medium posts? Thank you!
Today there's no similarly popular equivalent. Sure general-purpose social URL bookmarking sites still exist but they're niche, not mainstream.
So thanks for trying to invalidate my question, but it's not that simple.
First, I said popular general-purpose URL. Notion isn't popular, pinterest isn't general-purpose, and so on.
And absolutely nowhere did I assume what is true for me is for everyone. Which I why I asked rather than assumed. And got valuable answers about other perpsectives.
So no, my question wasn't "bad". I suggest you take your judgmental attitude elsewhere. HN is not the place for it.
It's also been a valuable way to work with resources that I found years ago and then forgot about. Since I tag things by subject area sometimes just going through a subject tag I see some random person's personal website with extensive notes on the history of something... I found it several years ago and probably wouldn't have remembered it without having it saved.
That said, the "just search for it" paradigm is the correct way to think about bookmarking, as Joshua Schachter taught me. Bookmarking sites just take care of the haystack for you so the various needles you want to find later don't disappear.
Delicious was around as user curated sites and forums started to wane. So it did provide discovery for them. It was like even older days at the dawn of the web when one went to Yahoo to find the best site on working out in a human curated directory rather than horrible keyword searches. We do need that still especially now that Google has pivoted to being "doing evil" and is doing things that are against their open web practices of the past. So now even with a great search engine, discovering curated content is less and less possible as they are scraping it and burying it.
But as much as I'd like to see that I fear it isn't going to happen. People are less likely to create things out of these silos like social media platforms because they aren't going to be discovered. So then there's less discoverable great independent content, and then less of a case for bookmarking...
I would go one step further and say that the problem isn't losing URLs but losing content.
I have most of my bookmarks from delicious exported and saved locally now, but most of the links from the 2005-2010 era are now broken and even with something like Pocket or archive.org, it's impossible to find those old blog posts and articles anywhere. These days, I just print things to PDF and save them rather than risking articles get lost over time.
Well Pocket can be handy. Gave yourself a 5 minute break at work and find a few interesting articles that threaten to suck you in? Save them to Pocket and read them at home.
I use chrome for day-to-day bookmarks and some google sheets for other bookmarks.
Whether a dedicated bookmark site is useful, I don't find it useful, but some might. Especially if they don't use the same computer all the time like I do.
After some digging, the above thread seemed like the most informative one as to what happened to Delicious (with a top comment from joshu, no less).
And so heavily truncated, spoiling the point in many (but not all) cases of having an RSS feed entirely.
I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, as a reader it's convenient to have the full text and images of the articles/posts so that I can look at them all in one place without much effort.
On the other hand, as a webmaster, I might have months or years worth of content on my site that I want visitors to look at, and if they never visit my site again after finding and subscribing to the RSS feed, odds are that they'll never see any of it. So truncating the entries is a good way to nudge readers into visiting my site if there's something that looks interesting rather than downloading full text and images for a bunch of articles that they might not even read, which would be a waste of bandwidth.
I personally think RSS was killed when social networks shifted to social media...
The fact someone took the time to understand why they should care about Google Reader, set it up, and regularly used it does require some technical interest/ability. That's why most internet users didn't know what RSS was even at the peak of the blogging and RSS revolution circa 2005, whereas today (or even back then), everyone intuitively understands newsletters.
I'm not saying they're better for everyone, frankly they are far worse for regular readers in my view, but they're the clearest successor.
It is possible for software to be finished and only require minimal maintenance.
Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-finder/ijdgeed...
https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
NNW is fast and simple. Using it, I've come to feel that RSS doesn't need to be updated -- it just needs modernised tooling and a frictionless UX. Now I have a good reader, I spend as much time reading feeds as I do on social media. And I feel good about spending time reading and skimming, knowing that there isn't an engagement algorithm which is trying to steer me towards extreme responses.
RSS readers were useful because you had all the news/posts in one place (instead of many browser tabs/newsletters/social accounts). You read, curated and shared from the same place, and you were able to easily choose what categories you wanted to read and when.
Interesting to think that an attack vector against an open standard is creating the objectively best implementation and then shutting down after killing competition and consolidation.
Other commenters in here have mentioned their readers of choice; I can add mine: NewsBlur.
Turns out RSS is still in pretty common use, as far as I can tell, unless you can point to a handful of sites that aren't using either RSS or Atom.
Invariably, when the topic of RSS comes up, someone laments its "passing", which leads me to ask (again): where is this impression coming from? Is it the mere absence of Google Reader?
Is there a social aspect I never knew about?
I see you mentioned other tools being lacking, but I know NewsBlur, at least, provides all those capabilities. (Not sure about "curating", though; maybe you could define that a bit more? There is the "blurblog", which has its very own RSS feed, which lets you surface articles you like, and there's the "save" function.)
I still subscribe to feeds in a different tool but it's not the same.
Also, "not the same"... can you be more specific? (And which tool?)
Inoreader is the only RSS reader I'm comfortable with, Thunderbird's also ok. They aren't "widget" pages though.
RSS.
What I can't figure out is why there's a persistent myth that RSS has somehow vanished from the internet...
> we concluded that it would be quicker to re-write the app as opposed to dissecting the exiting application codebase. This is the primary reason why stacks were canned, regardless of what others might have said. Many times rewrites require reducing features in order to build a new foundation. This is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not.
And then the pinpoard guy just summarizes the frustration of countless users:
> But the biggest mistake was when AVOS turned off some features beloved by a core Delicious constituency, fanfic authors. In particular, they made it impossible to search on the "/" character in tags, which instantly rendered a lot of the elaborate fanfic tagging and classification scheme useless. In my mind, that's when Delicious hit the point of no return.
So what do you think, does del.ico.us can have a second run under Pinboard creator?
I'd just started learning web development and going through a career change in to that world. In your presentation you came across laid back and totally unpretentious, explaining how you dropped a corporate career to focus on the site, of which I was a user at the time and loved.
You explained how you dealt with the tagging of content, that was one of the subtleties you had to figure out. And I remember you mentioning nagios. The way you explained it all made it seem pretty straightforward and fun (at the time, hope I'm not getting this wrong).
For a long time that talk, your project (and a few others) were very inspirational to me, to see how one guy could build something so awesome and be pretty successful. Stories like yours gave me a lot of drive when I was still a total noob.
Fifteen years later I'm up to my neck in code, just as driven as then and still chasing that dream. That's it, just wanted to say thanks!
i still have nagios nightmares.
Only ocassionally.
"My dream is to keep this a one-person project," says Ceglowski. "I am competing against billionaires like the YouTube guys running Delicious and I can hold my own. The tools I use have gotten so good and they are the same ones that Yahoo and Google use."
I hope to do the same one day with Soundcloud!
[0] http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...
1. entirely made-up number
> Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!
I always think of / mention Gumroad when I think of that:
https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
I worry in the rush to the tip top we lose some good products / services / economic activity that are billion dollar wins... but are still way good ideas.
I ask because I know one of the big tradeoffs of bootstrapping is no growth "war chest" — but I would love to find and use more of these!
Anywho, I’m a solo developer that created a desktop electron app that lets you design and print labels (either roll or sheets) and can import spreadsheet data for use in text, barcodes and even colors. It’s been a hell of a ride so far because my customers run the gamut of “organizing my yarn” to “storing nuclear isotopes.” I get emails and calls like, “I need to print 15,000 labels by Tuesday or I’m fired!” Those are always fun. My customers are in my small town of Minnesota USA, California, UAE, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, NZ. I have global reach in this funky little niche.
All this made possible by some insane tooling (and toiling). It’s a really fun time to be a developer... even if my app takes up 500MB memory. Ha!
You can download my app from https://label.live
I'll sell my 1000th license sometime before the end of the year. There's a lot of interesting roads to take... for example, I could become more serious about selling a bundled solution where I'm the only label printer distributor to own their own inexpensive software. Or maybe move to cloud? Or a portion of the functionality to the cloud. Or start targeting mobile/tablet more seriously. I don't know, yet... the future seems bright.
hilarious :)
But I'm bringing it back online with a pre-Yahoo design in a few days, once I finish stomping the bigger bugs.
I run a for-profit bookmarking service based off of early del.icio.us so you can take a guess as to whether O.G. delicious will be read/write or read-only.
For those who did not experience it, del.icio.us was a bookmarking service, and one of the first to have "tags", but also had a sense of fresh discovery. You can bookmark and tag your sites. But you can also browse the bookmarks and tags of people you know, and people they know, getting deeper, freed from algorithmic manipulation. Like Wikipedia, but you start at you.
Delicious, Digg, Technorati, StumbledUpon - those were the days!
StumbleUpon
I have very fond memories of spending hours clicking 'stumble' during the early years of high school.
No algorithms. What a refreshing idea!
Every now and then I would take something I had bookmarked that was not widely bookmarked and go through the people who had bookmarked it like me to find relevant stuff under the tag they had bookmarked it. Was a great way to find new content.
Also I bookmarked some random mp3 files and used the same tag for all of them. Then o took the RSS feed for that tag and subscribed to it in iTunes and then I had a custom podcast I could add to anytime just by adding a new bookmark.
We soon had this conversation:
Wait! Are you so-and-so?
Dude, how did you know?
We've been saving all the same links to del.icio.us!
I had just finished a rotation in one of the handful of labs in the world that worked on this subject, and he had arrived to do a junior year summer internship in the same lab. Incidentally we both were led astray, in some sense, by all the Web 2.0 idealism of tools like del.icio.us; neither of us fit in in academic biology. He even took it to the extreme of opening a nonprofit to support DIY, "open source" biology ... (So very late-aughts!)
i had a text file of the format "url #notes\n" and the notes were pretty short. so i'd write "url #wifi #linux" or whatever.
so a friend asked, "have you heard of this wifi thing?" and i said "yes, here's everything i collected" and just did 'grep \#wifi links' and pasted it to him.
this later became tagging in muxway and then delicious.
July 15, 2020
Hi, my name is Maciej Ceglowski, the latest (and hopefully last) owner of del.icio.us.
The site will be back online soon. If you had data stored on del.icio.us after 2010, you'll be able to export it here.
If you had data on the site before 2010, whether I still have it depends on whether you completed the "opt-in" process in 2011, when Yahoo transferred the site to AVOS.
I'll do my best to get everything I can back online this summer!
You can reach me at maciej@ceglowski.com
In particular, I think it was del.icio.us that introduced or at least popularized "tag clouds".
I now am using google keep, but if Ceglowski can bring back and freshen up the old del.icio.us, I will switch over.
Now... somebody resurrect google reader :-)
Then raindrop.io appeared. It's another one-dev project, but it's like a polished delicious, has working browser extensions, and even it's own mobile app. Worth a look, no affiliation. (Now if only I could figure out whether it's created by the GRU cyber division to gather intelligence )
I seem to recall del.icio.us being a great discovery tool, as well as a great way to catalog your bookmarks (another discovery tool that was great for a while was Stumbleupon). Will be interesting to see if anyone can bring back some of that "old school" curated/personal discovery vibe, which feels like it's becoming more relevant again with the recent discussion around Google results.
from: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/07/eight_years_of_victory/
>As every year, I'd like to thank all Pinboard users, old and new, for their support and their custom. I know there are lots of rival bookmarking services out there.
>I will consume them, one by one, like I consumed the pie.
there is a picture of a beautiful pie. brilliant!
I always found the folksonomy model for aggregating and finding content very interesting, unfortunately it seems to have fallen out of fashion as sites like del.icio.us disappeared.
I tried pinboard but it wasn't very stable and full-text search didn't work for me on multiple sites (he was great about refunding me, though!). After that I researched all options I could find and raindop truly works just how I wanted on all my devices. The only time I had a minor issue with them was near the start and they fixed it in a few days.
https://wiby.me/ (not exactly a webring)
For the old-school feel it must be without javascript
It's still there! https://www.rememberthemilk.com/
I cant wait to see all my bookmarks from 2000's probably just gifs but memories.
good luck Maciej Ceglowski
Seems to be doing ok for me at least -
> 59795 of your bookmarks have been archived, representing 93% of your collection. 4380 bookmarks have not been stored due to errors: not found 2298, server error 970, (bunch of other small stuff)
Having never seen the point of a social bookmarking service can someone tell me reasons why I should consider using something like this? What were the benefits over my private bookmarks. I obviously remember it back in the day but viewed it the same I do most social networks, with suspicion.
I could use better (as in faster and incremental) search, but otherwise I love the functionality.
"Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916
Notes re: how this could be standardized with JSON-LD: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916#c116
The existing Web Experiment for persisting bookmark tags: https://github.com/azappella/webextension-experiment-tags/bl...
And of course suggested tags.
>If you had data on the site before 2010, whether I still have it depends on whether you completed the "opt-in" process in 2011, when Yahoo transferred the site to AVOS.
I'm not sure I ever remember doing that (although it was 9 years ago). But I think I still do have an old export left over...
Hopefully there will be an import feature that can read the same data file, because I'd be interested in returning to it under Pinboard's stewardship.
(edit: typo)
Edit: Referring to ways of discovering non-mainstream content
Who knows, maybe the world is thirsty for that.
There's http://are.na
A bookmarking service combined with user friendly archival website or a user friendly IPFS is the way to go.
I know there is the Wayback Machine but it takes so long to load an URL that the user experience suffers.
I'm thankful for pinboard. I wish there would be an equivalent for Google Reader and RSS too :)
Glad if someone can clarify.
1p, 0 comments Not that it matters, but what is the rule for something gaining traction here? It seems totally arbitrary.
(I honestly can't wait!)
Old forums had the opposite issue (with threads years old being "necro'd" back to the top, confusing everyone) but at least you could have a discussion over a couple of days.
I wrote my own tagging system for HN and it's hard to describe how much it changed the experience for me. only usernames feels a bit like being in a community where everyone wears the same clothes, uses a vocoder, and covers up their faces. if you squint you might be able to make out the nametag.
I would love to find ways to more easily identify users on here. The username, despite my best efforts, I mostly overlook or can't remember.
On Forums, with Avatar images, this used to be so much simpler.
I still find chronologically ordered, flat discussion threads to be far superior to nested and vote ordered discussions.
Yes, and not in the least because one can answer/reference multiple messages in one post, thus bringing different conversation 'branches' back together. It also provides a nice chronological order to follow the whole discussions, which is hard in nested discussions.
However, flat discussions have limits: once you have hundreds of participants, it becomes nearly impossible to follow. I estimate that the limit to more or less comfortably follow flat discussion is ~50 posts/day, or 15-30 more or less active posters.
And to fix this, you'd need buy-in from major tech companies. All of which don't want to solve this problem.
Doesn't federation solve this? You're identified by the server you signed up on.
I don't understand why people consider this to be such a barrier. In an era where we have browsers that suggest secure passwords, store and fill credentials, and sync credentials between devices... why do we still think of registration as an impossible ask for the average user?
HNers discussing about Facebook/Google logins in their apps regularly mention that more than half their users use those options, instead of creating an account using their email.
Just go ask a bunch of your non-techie acquaintances if they use those web browser features you mention.
If a signup page auto-fills with your email, name, and suggested secure password, and then your browser stores and syncs that information, that's basically as frictionless as clicking a "Sign In With Google" button.
Being single threaded is annoying. People keep asking the same questions or repeating the same stuff again and again. No fault of their own. Discovery in a single thread is crazy hard.
Finding what you’re looking for in a thread can take a long time. Some one may ask a question your interested in knowing the answer to, but finding people who respond to it is not easy. If you post something in the middle of a [popular] thread, there’s a good chance it barely gets read or noticed.
Many of these problems afflict reddit too and Reddit and HN issue of threads being almost dead after a day is really annoying.
I have a feeling grass is greener on the other side and people in either case.
That's a bit reductive, perhaps. The way I see it, different styles of 'forums' or 'communities' can foster different types of interactions. it's a bit like how in the 'real world' we might have a gathering where everyone sits in a circle, or small separate tables, or a bar area, or a conference-style 'lecture + hallway-track', etc. each have their advantages and drawbacks.
It’s possible many communities never have get the correct way of interacting ever. With positives and negatives to their choices and alternatives. Which is also what my statement was referring to.
Trying to police this destroys the usefulness of a forum too. There is one major forum for a piece of software I use so I had this issue Google lead me to the forum, the thread is old and because it's old it's locked but it doesn't answer the question. I post a new thread after waiting 12 hours for my account to be approved by a mod, the overly zealous mod locks it with a link to the old thread saying there is already a thread about it.
Yeah I know there is, but it doesn't answer the problem and I can't post it in to keep it on topic. I now dread when that url shows up in my searches.
Building a good useful community and being a good host has some crossover with being a moderator but honestly they're completely different skillsets.
—
On what you wrote about, a good point too, just not what I was thinking of, I am cool with topics repeating. It makes sense for then reasons you gave.
I don’t remember any forum I used to go to that was really tight and strict with not allowing duplicates. Stackoveflow is what I think of for a place that really hurts the community with its strictness.
That's what FAQ lists are for. Many forums have wiki-like features where FAQ-like information can be stored and kept up-to-date.
There are communities still out there, but there seems to be no modern forum software? They have either been around forever or, if a bit newer, do nothing without mbs of JS.
Now that activitypub is here, there seem to be half a dozen reddit clones in development. Microblogging and social media are also everywhere, but what about forums? What about topic-centric, lasting conversations instead of hot-topic and people-centric chats with no history?
Discourse is pretty modern.
(I run Remarkbox and I'm trying to find product market fit)
Forums require a lot moderation and maintenance. If you don't keep the software up to date they're easy pickings for hackers. Without active moderation they're quickly overrun with spam.
For most people forums end up expensive pains in the ass. In terms of ActivityPub, the lasting conversation topic-centric nature of old school forums doesn't really fit in the model of pushing new activity. A hot-topic Reddit clone fits that model much better.
Discourse, Flarum, Talkyard (which I'm developing).
GitHub's new Discussions feature?
Lemmy? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy, "Building a federated alternative to reddit in rust" (how does it matter that it's a reddit alternative? it can still be topic-centric etc?)
I've poked around in the tables a little bit but haven't done any deep dives. I'm pretty sure I didn't opt in during the transfer and also I don't have access to the e-mail address I used on delicious, so my data, on that old service I'm sure is long gone.
Find someone else with an obscure site or tag and check what else they have saved. It was a deep, deep rabbit hole.