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Comment by fisher-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Why did social bookmarking die? I say this in the sense that obviously Pinboard shows it is still around, but the hype and velocity that was in the space a few years back is gone.

Hacker News, Reddit, and bookmarks in your browser don't do the same thing. The former two because links you submit to them are not considered "yours" in the same way del.icio.us and Pinboard, and browser bookmarks because they are not social in the same way.

I guess Twitter does the same thing for a lot of people but it isn't as focused and it doesn't feel the same to me.

Does anyone else have any thoughts? Is social bookmarking forever relegated to a niche market or...?

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Pinterest is social bookmarking and is (obviously) incredibly popular. Delicious pushed "tags" as its killer feature. But if it had dumped putting tags front and center, and instead focused on beautiful photos of the items bookmarked, maybe it would have taken off more.

I've already up voted you, but have to praise this insight. Folksonomy is a wonderful navigation and subscription method for the early adopters, but I still hear my wife telling my son to "search for a recipe you like on Pinterest". It's perhaps the Yahoo! vs. Google aesthetic in the sense that Delicious appealed to curators who were comfortable navigating by concepts, while the rest of the world just wants to find a like-minded, curated world that they can navigate by search.

I don't think tags were front and center.

We wanted to do images; the delicious predecessor did have inage capture.

I don't think it died as much as it captured the early adopters, which by definition represent a limited market. In my case, it's a great tool for archiving research. I'd describe social bookmarking as aspirational in the sense that a lot of what I bookmark is for future projects around current and latent interests, which I know some day that I'll return to. That's maybe a use case for the creative class, and not something as passive as reddit browsing.

Take Shirky's power law distribution ideas around content on the internet. A small percentage produce, another percentage participate and by far the largest percentage consume. Social bookmarking is a kind of curation that is in between the producing/participating levels. Much of the social aspect has been gutted by Twitter (which wins in terms of sharing, but drops the folksonomy and organization and production of a research repository), but what Twitter drops affects almost no one outside the 1-5% who are in that produce/participate space.

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