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someone has felt the need to ask this exact question every time delicious came up since the first time i showed it to anyone in 2003

But the popularity of Delicious then was proof that it was useful. It was a major internet destination.

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.

there's a huge proliferation of memory tools: notion, pinterest, and so on. so, yes, your question is bad: you're assuming what works for you is right for everybody.

You don't need to be a jerk here.

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.

HN is 100% the place for this attitude.

I currently have 13,229 bookmarks in Pinboard.in. They are all cross referenced with multiple useful tags and I add maybe 3+ every day.

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.

Yeah, active Pinboard user as well, coming from del.icio.us a number of years ago. Have 35,549 bookmarks in Pinboard as of right now, will almost certainly be a bit higher by the end of the day. Definitely a personal knowledge repository. I can't tell you how many times I'll be talking to someone and say, "You know, I read an article about that a few months back... let me send you the link" - really useful. I also like when I save a really good link and see that others have linked it too, and then I can explore what else those folks have bookmarked with that same tag; it's a great way to find other high-quality pages. Kind of "social bookmarking" :)

I think you're right. However, personally, I can - 95% of the time - remember a few words from the page that allows me to search it on Google. 95% is conservative figure. I honestly don't remember the last time I couldn't find something. Might have been a year ago. Furthermore, it's usually much more accurate to simply search your own browse history. Granted, one might need to delete the history or that can get large, but I usually only need to search for something within a year of the last retrieval.

Google search quality has been in freefall for a while and I'm never sure if the "Verbatim" button will still exist on my next search. I have zero faith in the repeatability of a Google search, especially with a delta of months.

Also my memory is perfect, I can't remember anything I have forgotten.

One thing I've learned from running a bookmarking site is that people have vastly different experiences and practices with re-finding stuff online, which sometimes makes it hard not to talk past one another. It turns out the way we remember, find, and re-find stuff is very idiosyncratic, and the success of it depends a lot on the subject domain.

Thanks for sharing. Random thoughts/questions: How do you compare this with using Google Chrome's ecosystem with bookmarks? Or any other browser with bookmarks stored in the cloud? Is there any plugin that can allow search results in a browser's address bar to show the bookmarks from pinboard.in?

chrome's bookmarks aren't available to me across browsers, and I can't use tags to search them. They don't load any faster than Pinboard's either (which is kinda mind-boggling).

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.

Nice. Makes sense! Thank you!

I tried pinboard archival account but decided to request refund because it uses iframe, which prevent my annotating tool to work (Memex 2), also prevents full text search for Medium posts. Other aspect that I consider is the lack of nice iOS app.

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!

Try to search for anything more than a couple of years old on Google and you will have a very difficult time.

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.

I can see it being helpful for random domains one might forget. For large websites, like reddit, searching within that site is usually pretty accurate (for me).

A common problem is when you half-remember something on reddit. You can either then search within your own bookmarked reddit links, or try to dig through their entire site.

I agree. for a long time the difficulty has not been in finding stuff on the internet, but rather finding said stuff again later

I've been finding lately that as overall web usability declines, ive been relying on bookmarks more. For example, at work I can never navigate jira correctly to the page I want, so I have a bookmark. Twitter shows tweets out of order and from random people I don't follow, so I have a bookmark to the search page with a query to have people I follow sorted by date. I too haven't used bookmarks for years until recently discovering that it's the easiest way to "hack" a bad service.

I tend to view Pinboard principally as a way to search more effectively. It's especially valuable because a lot of the things I find on the internet and want to be able to refer to later are PDFs of scans of old documents, and other kinds of things that don't really index well for searching. Basically by putting it into Pinboard and adding some metadata manually (like a correct title and description) I'm preserving my ability to easily find it via search later.

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.

> Not to rain on the parade, but serious question: are bookmarks actually useful anymore?

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.

Pinboard.in offers a pro account that will archive pages when you bookmark them. Won't help for the old lost stuff but will help for everything else going forwards. Also, it's a lot easier than manually exporting everything as pdf.

That is amazing, thanks for the tip. Just signed up.

I think we have shifted to a new paradigm. People are now less likely to host their own sites and own their content. Facebook especially has made walled gardens of user generated content that cannot be discovered outside of Facebook. And now even Google is taking their path by scraping content and displaying that and ads for most of the search page. Then even content that is displayed as a result it is going through Google hosted services to "speed it up"

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 am working on something similar. Bookmarks are still usable because Google is pretty bad for some obscure queries and they work as a reminder more for me.

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.

Google is also useless for overly common queries.

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.

>> are bookmarks actually useful anymore?

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 bookmark pages in Chrome because they show up higher than non-bookmarked pages in auto suggestions. I sometimes search within my bookmarks, but never organize/browse them the way I did 20 years ago.

I use a bookmark service near daily. It's valuable when you have multiple machines and you prefer not to give Google all your bookmarks to sync through their servers.

I never used delicious, but bookmarks as a general concept - keeping a URL stored somewhere for later use - I can't live without.

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.

Like others here, I have 10,000+ bookmarks on pinboard and add several daily. I can be on any number of computers, iPad, phone at any given time so an online, centralized database of sites, personally tagged, is extremely useful.

Absolutely yes. These days if I see an interesting content on my phone, I share to Google Keep. Periodically I look in keep and take another pass at what I saved.

If you find yourself binging it more than once a week, bookmark it? Crtl-B brings up Firefox's bookmark sidebar and you can just search it there as immediately.

i use pinboard as a replacement for bookmarks because I am on multiple devices and because of the tagging. I use it with keywords to save links to projects I"m working on or even want to read later. I also use the address bar's history for things too but those are things I go to on a daily basis. pinboard is for things I will get to in a day or a week.

I agree, for any hierarchical needs, I just put them on my private git in the form of markdown folders.

I use Pinboard a lot, all the time.