[HN Gopher] Del.icio.us
___________________________________________________________________
Del.icio.us
Author : kome
Score : 1385 points
Date : 2020-07-29 08:26 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (del.icio.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (del.icio.us)
| haywirez wrote:
| What a hero -- love how the story of Pinboard stacks up against
| the long-term unsustainability of VC-funded and overhyped
| startups. Quote from the 2011 article[0]:
|
| "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...
| neon_electro wrote:
| Do you mean that you intend to buy Soundcloud's assets if they
| go under?
| randall wrote:
| *when lol.
| duxup wrote:
| It does seem like there might be room out there for things that
| aren't unicorns, but are sustainable / good products that can
| operate, even at a profit, with small teams.
|
| 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.
| jonwalch wrote:
| AFAICT Clerky is another example.
| dhosek wrote:
| My current project is a service for writers that at best
| might be able to provide me with a full-time income and at
| least will not lose money for me. Since it's something I
| want/need/use, I'm willing to donate my time to it as
| necessary and let it be what it'll be.
| wasdfff wrote:
| Craigslist is a model company imo
| spieden wrote:
| My favorite is https://readwise.io
| daguar wrote:
| Is there any existing directory of similar products? Small
| team, sustainable.
|
| 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!
| simantel wrote:
| Indie Hackers has a pretty big database of products:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/products
| semireg wrote:
| The tooling has become insanely good, so long as you trust
| the shoulders of the giants you're standing on. For example,
| a month ago the Electron team introduced a bug that made my
| Microsoft Store app think it was outside the store. The users
| of my app were not happy - so I looked into how I could test
| the app "in the store" as a beta ... it's basically an
| exercise in frustration. Package flights are a joke, build
| numbers don't make a package unique. Just all sorts of hassle
| for a store that's 1% (I'm being generous) the size of
| Apple's.
|
| 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
| hckr_news wrote:
| That's pretty cool, very niche yet still an interesting
| concept. You should try to get on the indie hackers
| podcast. How's the income stream on this sort of business?
| And it sounds like its a 1 man/woman operation where you do
| handle everything from support to marketing?
| semireg wrote:
| I'm ramen profitable at this point. Sales are increasing
| each month. And yes, one person operation. There are only
| a few players in this market, and their solutions cost
| upwards of $500 per license, plus yearly
| support/maintenance. Right now I'm selling licenses for
| $47.99 one-time. In other words, there is some room to
| increase the price of my product, or move to a different
| monetization strategy. The low price today helps me get
| users/feedback.
|
| 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.
| vandahm wrote:
| I don't have anything to contribute to the greater
| discussion, but I just wanted to thank you for building
| your app and sharing a link to it. Making labels isn't
| something that I often do, but when I have to do it, I need
| to make a lot of them, and that's always a pain. I'm going
| to give your solution a try as soon as I get off of work.
| semireg wrote:
| Hey, thanks! I didn't grow up dreaming of becoming a
| label printer app expert, but here I am... at your
| service. I'm glad to be here for you. Please reach out
| (via Label LIVE support) if you have any
| questions/comments.
| chc4 wrote:
| itch.io fits that. It's still just a two person shop, afaik.
| a_band wrote:
| Absolutely! The notion that the only successful web business
| can be billion dollar unicorns is nuts. More small web
| businesses!
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Soundcloud is awesome! Keep it up!
| cced wrote:
| Anyone have any idea what he's referring to when he brings up
| his use of tools?
| pedrosanta wrote:
| He has some (funny) info on Pinboard About page
| (https://pinboard.in/about) regarding 'the technology',
| perhaps he was mentioning that...
|
| > 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!
| SllX wrote:
| This is the kind of thing that made it easy for me to
| justify $39/year (for full page archives). Boring
| technology isn't going to excite anyone, but it sure as
| hell will keep ticking along so long as someone's at the
| wheel.
| idlewords wrote:
| I mean vanilla stuff like MySQL and PHP. In the Old Times
| both were considered toy projects unworthy of running a
| production website, while now both have been patched and
| improved into complete stability.
| gonational wrote:
| Probably WRT opensource tools (machine learning, databases,
| frameworks, etc.) that are now 80%[1] as good as what the
| biggest firms have access to.
|
| 1. entirely made-up number
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| It has been a while since I worked at a big firm, but my
| experience has always been that open source tools are
| always far superior.
| lcnmrn wrote:
| I'm doing the same thing with Subreply against Facebook,
| Twitter, Gab, Mastodon. There are others like me: GoatCounter,
| Micro.blog, Midnight.pub, Lobste.rs, etc.
| andrewxhonson wrote:
| I'm looking at Subreply, and notice you said it's English-
| only on the about page. Is that something you enforce? What's
| your reasoning if you don't mind my asking?
| technoplato wrote:
| Forgive me if I'm out of the loop but are we really
| considering gab and mastadon to be the "big players now"?
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Your Songsling project seems really interesting but not fully
| understanding how it works. Are you generating a site+server
| and uploading it to the "linked" domains? Is "linking" asking
| for some kind of upload/write access to their host?
|
| https://songsling.studio/
| haywirez wrote:
| Thanks! It works through DNS -- you point your domain's
| nameservers to Songsling, then it manages all the other
| necessary records automatically behind the scenes. Basically
| it points the domain at the generated site. It's still early,
| rough around the edges, but slowly getting there. The new
| audio engine that's in the works is on a whole another level,
| focusing mostly on that at the moment.
| techntoke wrote:
| There are a lot of room for open source improvements when it
| comes to bookmark management. I envision a CLI and web server
| that uses TOML, YAML and JSON like Hugo.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Cool! I was looking for a service which would auto-tag my
| bookmarks kind of like Del.Icio.Us did long ago. Pocket requires
| a premium account for this (which I find slightly overpriced) so
| I was looking for alternatives (can anyone suggest any by the
| way?) and now I see Del.Icio.Us coming back! That's a lucky
| coincidence! I would prefer to avoid exposing the list of
| bookmarks I have made, however. All I want to share is tags,
| without information about who exactly bookmarked what.
| kelvin0 wrote:
| So I'm not clear on what this is about? I seem to be missing a
| piece of the puzzle. It seems related to some type of nostalgia
| regarding delicious?
|
| Glad if someone can clarify.
| [deleted]
| keith__talent wrote:
| Is this for real; it's like Jesus coming back and he might have
| my bookmarks, oh Crikes!
| mikro2nd wrote:
| It'll have your bookmarks, but will they resolve to any
| pages/sites that still exist in 2020?
| pvelagal wrote:
| I used delicious and i loved it.. i am wondering how it will look
| now..
| gregjw wrote:
| I thought he offered to move everyone over to Pinboard after
| acquiring it, I wonder why hes reviving the site.
| flocial wrote:
| This is probably one of my favorite developments coming from the
| quarantine. Maciej Ceglowski is a keeper of the torch reminding
| us of what the web used to be: a weird place filled with weird
| people who were guided by curious intellects and a belief that
| the internet can and would liberate us in some strange and
| amazing way.
|
| 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.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The
| original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving,
| and so open.
|
| "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_.
| latexr wrote:
| > This is probably one of my favorite developments coming from
| the quarantine.
|
| Maciej bought Delicious in 2017 and always planned to let
| people recover their bookmarks.
| idlewords wrote:
| I ran the full site for about two years after 2017, using the
| code I inherited from AVOS, but a lot of people assumed the
| site was dead because they tried to visit delicious.com. That
| was never part of the sale and has been kept for some unknown
| purpose.
|
| 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.
| abraxas wrote:
| At what stage in its existence was Facebook in any way open? It
| was a walled garded from its inception - initially restricting
| access to college students only. In fact I never did and still
| do not consider Facebook as "the web". There is the web and
| then there is Facebook. The two just use similar technologies
| but live apart.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Have you heard the story of Cambridge analytica?
| ryder9 wrote:
| ok boomer
| mercer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| That customizability on MySpace was a security nightmare. My
| wife was the head of the security team back in the day and a
| lot of what they did to secure the site was duct tape and
| baling wire. It was kind of entertaining to log onto the
| hacker forums and see commentary on my wife's work for the
| day.
| 1337shadow wrote:
| Would it be easier nowadays with CORS and CSP ?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I imagine so!
| myself248 wrote:
| I would read that memoir!
| Multicomp wrote:
| Seconded. I bet if we could get a pipe between someone
| using nuance dragon and an Amazon print as you go book
| service, we could sell a lot more of these extremely
| niche books / memoirs.
| jevogel wrote:
| My business idea inspired by your comment:
|
| 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.
| onyva wrote:
| Same cloth? Zukerburger was an asshole to begin with, based
| on the stories told so far. No he's just behaving with
| impunity after selling his soul to the Drumpf.
| notatoad wrote:
| the old-school nerds that get celebrated like this are
| mostly all assholes. building cool things doens't make you
| a nice person.
| sp332 wrote:
| I agree that was what I originally disliked about Facebook.
| But I think a bigger problem (that definitely got worse over
| time) was the way everything gets swept away on FB. If you
| see something, it's very difficult to get back to it later.
| This is demoralizing for the writers too.
| nicbou wrote:
| It depends on what you're after.
|
| 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.
| pedrosanta wrote:
| > The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey
| it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile
| pages.
|
| 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.
| Konohamaru wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > to comments
|
| Hope springs eternal for the freespeecher.
| diegoperini wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is partly because Facebook introduced "the internet" to
| people who would otherwise never create anything on the web.
| duxup wrote:
| My personal projects (all too elementary to talk about at this
| point) are intended to be just that. Not flashy, but
| functional, they respect your privacy and etc. They are what
| they are and there's no secret or desire to dump it if it
| doesn't make $ billion.
|
| 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.
| amiga_500 wrote:
| I absolutely loved this when I found it. Delicious was just
| such a great place to find cool, esoteric stuff.
|
| 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.
| chaz6 wrote:
| del.icio.us was by far my favorite place to store bookmarks. I
| hope it comes back similar to the original. Thanks for keeping it
| alive!
| sonicggg wrote:
| I posted the exact same crap 6 days ago :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23922252
|
| 1p, 0 comments Not that it matters, but what is the rule for
| something gaining traction here? It seems totally arbitrary.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Random chance and _quite a lot_ of moderator curation.
| ralphael wrote:
| luck of the draw, busy day on the site, time of day ..can be
| many things.
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| didn't delicious.com point to del.icio.us??? this currently
| doesn't work.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| So weird, I was only thinking about del.icio.us yesterday. I
| tried both that and delicious.com and both were still offline <
| 24 hours ago. The timing of this is uncanny!
| tunnuz wrote:
| Used to love this, thanks for the effort!
| anildigital wrote:
| Wow! (I was early adopter and heavy use of del.icio.us) What
| about you?
| glenstein wrote:
| Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web,
| and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a
| reddit if stewarded correctly.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Part of me agrees with you. Part of me thinks Yahoo largely bet
| on all the wrong horses.
|
| 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.)
| b4ke wrote:
| I doubt long.... i attempted to create a new account the
| other day. it was a failed affair.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's too bad. I find it a handy place to keep my "good"
| photos in a way they can be publicly accessed. And act as a
| backup of last resort. But my sense from various
| moves/announcements they've made is that the revenue/cost
| may not be working out. I hope that's not the case but...
| The other big loss for me personally is that they're a
| great source of CC photographs (in addition to the Flickr
| Commons). But it's probably unrealistic to expect a small
| company that doesn't have other big sources of revenue to
| provide that amount of free hosting. Google should have
| bought Flickr way back when but... Google.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > But my sense from various moves/announcements they've
| made is that the revenue/cost may not be working out. I
| hope that's not the case but...
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Things like this:
| https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/flickr-cash-
| shorta...
| frogpelt wrote:
| So like the Western version of Tencent?
| szermer wrote:
| Let's not forget the exploit vector that it offered. Since they
| allowed you to export your bookmarks from IE/ Firefox/ Safari,
| lots of folks would bookmark a paywall site and append the
| login info (i.e. WSJ L:ABC P:123)
| criddell wrote:
| > I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a
| reddit if stewarded correctly
|
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| I don't disagree. It really was awesome. But whatever you
| call delicious from Yahoo aquisition onward wasa failure to
| steward it correctly. If all it took was not messing with it,
| that was a standard that was not met.
| ohjeez wrote:
| At the time I thought it was superseded by Digg.com, at least
| in the sense of helping other people discover cool stuff. I had
| a few articles go viral on delicious... well viral for the
| time.
|
| 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.)
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the
| web, and I think had the potential to be something like a
| twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly.
|
| 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.
| bE9a3S5So8igd3 wrote:
| Now with the idear of delicious coming back, your comment
| makes me consider all the good low-to-mid scale shit we've
| lost over time. In ~ 2008 it seems like there were just more
| fun/interesting sites around. Maybe I was just in an
| exploratory phase - late teens - and was discovering new
| things often. Or maybe the barrier to entry today, in terms
| of design/polish/product is weirdly high, and has pushed out
| the seeker-net in favor of normie-net.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| The barrier to entry for most interesting things is <$100
| and a few hours time.
|
| The barrier to entry for making money is a different thing.
| bE9a3S5So8igd3 wrote:
| The point I made is more nuanced than that. I didn't say
| there is a large financial barrier to entry for the
| production of a modern website. The point is, Delicious,
| Digg, etc. would fizzle out today pretty quickly.
| Consumers have come to expect a certain refinement of
| design, usability, mobile-bullshit, etc. etc. that web
| companies of yore weren't exactly known for. What we're
| left with today is a bunch of crap that _looks_ good but
| lacks novelty.
|
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| I think the most obvious example I would add to this list
| you are thinking of would be livejournal. I also had a
| handful of SoundCloud-like medium scale music sites that I
| went to, like Purevolume.
|
| 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I am still upset about Google Wave.
|
| 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
|
| [0]https://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/
| ghaff wrote:
| There are no real barriers to blogging or using an RSS
| reader if you want to. (RSS feeds are less ubiquitous
| than they used to be but they're still common.) And, of
| course, for saving and sharing bookmarks, it's Pinboard
| that's buying del.icio.us.
|
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a
| real loss.
|
| 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.
| nikhizzle wrote:
| Ex-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under
| Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a
| twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy which killed us. Here
| are an example of each:
|
| 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.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Hard to tell without context, but that first example could
| easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to
| employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead
| to increased productivity in the long run.
|
| 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.
| purple-again wrote:
| Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was
| okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father
| to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they
| would give any other employees a heads up on.
|
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| Yahoo was good at handling these types of things, but
| they were also good at keeping line management updated.
|
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was
| okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving
| father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing
| they would give any other employees a heads up on.
|
| 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.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing
| up provide? People should be able to take sick days,
| personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should
| have raised concern from team members to see if that person
| is OK.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I'm guessing corporate or team policies about requesting
| time off may have been too restrictive. Depending on the
| team, having people take random days off on short notice
| might not be all that disruptive. But hopefully
| management enables that for everyone, rather than just
| forgiving it on a case by case basis.
| bitslayer wrote:
| Management could have been aware of more personal details
| that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is
| necessarily a black mark against the company without
| knowing the whole story.
| prepend wrote:
| Management could also communicate to concerns coworkers
| that the absences are excused. They could also work with
| the employee to notify teammates in an appropriate way.
|
| 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.
| greyhair wrote:
| You can never be to certain what other people are dealing
| with outside of work. Sometimes, management knows things
| that they are not at liberty to share.
| oneplane wrote:
| <joke>Sometimes management hires a hitman to get rid of
| an annoying employee but then forgot about that awkward
| moment when they don't show up for work</joke>
| jointpdf wrote:
| Exactly. There are a vast number of incapacitating health
| related reasons that could cause a person to be absent,
| e.g. panic attacks, stuck in a bathroom
| (IBS/IBD/Chron's), migraines, depression. The type of
| thing that reasonably wouldn't be broadcasted out to the
| entire team.
|
| 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).
| jtbayly wrote:
| Yeah, the rest of your team should totally not rely on you
| being there to pull your weight. They can handle things for
| you when you're on call and no-show. Plus, we totally don't
| have things like vacation and personal days for the times
| when somebody really needs a day off. /s
| nikhizzle wrote:
| The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to
| work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was
| just not showing up. This happened with many employees all
| the time.
| idlewords wrote:
| My coworker at a Yahoo office in SF moved to Uruguay
| (where his wife is from) and then expected the company to
| fly him in for important meetings. He got away with it
| for a bit before HR caught wind. Even for them it was too
| much.
| HappyDreamer wrote:
| He got fired? Or moved back to SF?
| prepend wrote:
| Judging by the other stories I expect HR cracking down
| would be something "no more first class flights, only
| business."
| ghaff wrote:
| HR's issue was probably more along the lines of you're
| violating internal policies and probably various tax,
| etc. laws if you're supposedly living in one place and
| are actually living somewhere else--especially in a
| different country.
| idlewords wrote:
| He reluctantly moved back after his boss got yelled at.
| vidarh wrote:
| Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when
| I worked there.
| tarunkotia wrote:
| The point of being nice it seems that people were not
| repremended for bad behavior. That's not a good thing for
| the culture because it's demotivating for people who do
| things the right way as there is very little incentive in
| doing so.
| ansible wrote:
| People in general are hugely sensitive to perceived
| unfairness. This is a critical thing to maintain in any
| organization.
|
| 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.
| kbutler wrote:
| While I agree this is common human nature, 1) you seem to
| be speculating about billionaires without actual
| evidence, even anecdotal, and 2) individuals differ -
| some may have the maturity and perspective not to worry
| about it.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| seankimdesign wrote:
| Let's replace the term "billionaires" with "rational
| actors" then
| eloff wrote:
| What kind of idiot pays more than they owe in taxes? I'm
| sure you don't either.
|
| 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.
| bshacklett wrote:
| It's not just humans. This behavior seems to go pretty
| deep: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-
| dont.html
| [deleted]
| _jal wrote:
| The cool thing is that cheat detection/unfairness
| detection seems to happen at the semantic level of
| reasoning. You can see this with kids - one example I
| recall is a friend's 5 year old being upset at seeing
| another kid with ice cream. $Parent said it was that
| kid's birthday (who knows), and her kid immediately got
| over it.
|
| So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest
| their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
| [deleted]
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Maybe something about a previous life?
| snthd wrote:
| The monkey experiment:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg&t=71
| 14 wrote:
| I am curious as to the niceness point. Are you sure he
| randomly decided not to show up? Perhaps he and management
| had a quiet agreement where when his chronic diarrhea showed
| up he stayed home. Work is informed but when you ask they
| make up some excuse, we don't want to hurt his feelings, but
| really that is just the way of not telling you as his medical
| history is personal and not your business.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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).
| fdjlasdfjl wrote:
| Lol, I do the same thing with Oracle at my oppressively
| bureaucratic workplace. Servers? No. New software? Fuck no.
|
| It's amazing what I've managed to make this clunky language
| do, because its the only tool I can effectively use.
| nikhizzle wrote:
| To get access to the Hadoop cluster you also needed special
| permissions and to go through a committee. At Facebook,
| access was given to all technical and non-technical (after
| an afternoon of training) people.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Sure but you went through the committee once and then had
| as much computing resources as you needed. I don't
| remember it being hard and my whole team got access
| pretty early and quickly. Compared to the five servers we
| had to nurse for 2 years because that's all we'd get
| before then.
| vidarh wrote:
| I led the European billing engineering team[1] at Yahoo
| 2003-2005. We processed millions of dollars worth of payments
| for European premium services every year, so we had a very
| clear idea of our value to the business, and I had to deal
| with that exact same thing when we needed a server upgrade
| _once_ in that three year period that cost a fraction of what
| I got approved in bonuses for my team every year.
|
| 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.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Jerry Yang is Taiwanese. I'd like to think I work hard, but
| my current boss is of Taiwanese extraction. The cultural
| commitment to suffering is hard to explain. My usual joke
| with her is asking if she slept well on her bed of nails.
|
| I can imagine he may feel like his employees should be
| grateful for the opportunity to exhibit their suffering.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work
| [... ] I took it to management
|
| out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of
| your business?
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| What if you need that coworker to do your job?
| outworlder wrote:
| Then it would be a bad working environment, but for
| another reason. Companies should assume that anyone can
| be run over by a bus at any time and plan accordingly.
| dangus wrote:
| That "niceness" is a textbook example of "ruinous empathy."
|
| https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-
| hone...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thanks for that link!
| edm0nd wrote:
| Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo
| mrnobody_67 wrote:
| ... and walked out with a fortune
| mmahemoff wrote:
| You can at least draw a line from Delicious to Reddit.
|
| 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.
| g5becks wrote:
| I was wondering if anyone was going to point this out. I can
| remember digg being bigger than everything besides maybe
| stumbleupon for a short while when it came to bookmarking
| sites.I never would have imagined reddit being what it is
| now.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I miss the days when big sites/companies would sometimes go
| under.
| rtx wrote:
| Beautiful.
| joshu wrote:
| Digg wasn't a bookmarking site at all. They put that on for
| a bit because Delicious had raised money.
|
| Delicious was about 10x-15x the size of Digg.
| bE9a3S5So8igd3 wrote:
| Digg was massive right at the tail end of seeker-net. I
| myself watched nearly every episode of Diggnation. Great
| times.
| jobigoud wrote:
| And Yahoo Pipes, to build your custom feed by taking multiple
| RSS feeds and building a graph with filters, split and merge.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that
| Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained
| from spying to make gazillions from advertising.
|
| 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.
| g5becks wrote:
| I'm guessing you never promoted ypn ads or chitika. Yahoo
| wanted to compete, but had poor execution. To give them
| credit though, there was a time when they had great tech. I
| remember when they shutdown yahoo pipes, at the time there
| wasn't anything else like it. Yahoo mail was much bigger than
| gmail for a time as well.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I don't know how Yahoo spied on their users, privacy wasn't
| that big a thing in the early 2000s.
|
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| Agreed. I remember when someone first showed me Google's
| search page. It was so uncluttered it was shocking. I
| didn't notice anything about the quality of search results,
| or how they compared with Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos or the
| rest. Just that it was so clean and uncluttered.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Yes, Google's search page was a work of art that would
| make Edward Tufte proud.
|
| 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.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.
|
| 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.
| smolder wrote:
| Privacy was always a thing and a concern, just not for kids
| jumping into the internet that don't know better, and
| that's still a problem today.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I should have mentioned privacy _on the internet_.
|
| 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.
| dilandau wrote:
| You left out the worst of them: Twitter.
|
| Slot-machine of the internet. rage, outrage, xenophobia,
| name-calling, name-dropping, celebrity, manufactured 140
| chars at a time. It's a culture killer.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Which is also the US media ...just about all for profit
| outlets...they are fear/ outrage inducers, stereotype/hate
| fuelers and sensationalized trash!
|
| For me I avoid Twitter and ignore all news media(minus some
| local news).
| brazzy wrote:
| Google succeeded by making keyword-targeted advertising
| available to the masses, didn't even need any spying for that
| at first because search provides the keywords quite
| naturally.
|
| Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For
| Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad
| campaigns.
| mav3rick wrote:
| All that talk but forgot to say what Yahoo didn't do - show
| you what you wanted on the first page. You can run circles
| around it they just weren't good enough. But sure nostalgia
| is great and bringing delicious back will be amazinggggg
| dexterdog wrote:
| Who shows you what you want on the first page? Facebook
| shows you what they want. If you don't have an ad blocker
| Google shows you what they are paid most to show. Amazon
| the same.
| mercer wrote:
| If you do a search from the browser search/url bar, my
| experience is that with Google as the default search
| engine, the first page will still show me what I want, on
| the first page, better than any past tools.
|
| 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...
| cvwright wrote:
| Duck Duck Go
| mav3rick wrote:
| What a disingenuous comment. Google gets what you want
| often in a box even before the search results.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Yahoo spied on users the same as the rest of them, they were
| just incompetent and bled users for years. They were never
| especially well managed, but Verizon was the worst and
| basically took a company on the road to destruction and
| stomped on the accelerator.
|
| > 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.
| greyhair wrote:
| For internet, in my town, you choose between Verizon and
| Comcast. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
|
| Verizon FiOS is excellent as far as connectivity, but as a
| corporation, they suck.
| ghaff wrote:
| It seems to be a pattern with mega communications
| companies which have always tended towards natural
| monopolies or at least duopolies etc. Ma Bell and Western
| Union weren't exactly warm and cuddly. Lots of
| international examples too.
| mcny wrote:
| > but Verizon was the worst and basically took a company on
| the road to destruction and stomped on the accelerator.
|
| 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...
| eternalban wrote:
| Back when it was called NYNEX it certainly was
| incompetent.
|
| > 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_.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > Whether or not they are incompetent, companies that
| came from the mother bell, att, Verizon, CenturyLink, ...
| And all major ISPs are scary.
|
| 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.
| saltminer wrote:
| >a world that employs less than half the number of
| journalists than 20 years ago
|
| 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...
| dillutedfixer wrote:
| Awesome!! I hope they bring back that feature that would load a
| random bookmark. I used to discover so much weird and cool stuff
| on the internet that way, kinda like HN ;) Conversation starters
| for days. The Roy Orbison wrapped in clingfilm fanfic group was
| still by far the most "unique" thing I ever came across.
| cryptos wrote:
| I had a large link collection there, but migrated away when the
| stumbling began. After trying some of these services, I've
| settled with diigo.com and never looked back. It seems to be a
| rock solid business that won't appear anytime soon. As much as I
| like the idea of a one-man show like pinboard, I don't want to
| trust thousands of links to a service with a "bus factor" of 1.
| Maha-pudma wrote:
| I used to use stumbleupon a lot. I had an xmarks account for
| bookmark syncing before that went paid for. I now just use
| Firefox's built in syncing service.
|
| 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.
| jwr wrote:
| I use pinboard to get a bottomless bucket for interesting
| bookmarks that is shared between browsers and platforms.
| Browsers and platforms come and go, but Maciek's service stays
| reliably the same.
|
| I could use better (as in faster and incremental) search, but
| otherwise I love the functionality.
| Maha-pudma wrote:
| Fair play to the guy for creating pinboard, I don't use it,
| but assume since it's a subscription service he/the site
| isn't selling your data for advertising. I just can't see
| myself needing it, much as I like discovering new stuff (one
| of the reasons I'm on HN), I won't pay to store bookmarks.
| MH15 wrote:
| I love how he doesn't even link to Pinboard. It seems he's doing
| this just out of personal obligation.
| whym wrote:
| Ask HN: Why did delicious.com fail? (2017)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15493212
|
| 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).
| conjectures wrote:
| This made me nostalgic for RSS. Is anyone reviving that in a
| nice way?
| sanderjd wrote:
| Why does it need revival? I've been using feedly for like a
| decade now with no issues.
| JohnL4 wrote:
| Seriously, why does this question keep coming up? What am I
| missing?
| zimmund wrote:
| Because it was convenient and powerful. Ever since Google
| Reader shut down I lost track of technology news. Yes, I
| can read the same sites/blogs I read before one by one, or
| subscribe to their newsletter, or follow them on Twitter...
| but it's not the same. And the tools that were available to
| replace Reader were always short in some aspect. Google
| Reader was killed in favor of Google+ (which failed
| horribly). After that RSS went downhill.
|
| 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.
| JohnL4 wrote:
| How did RSS go downhill?
|
| 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.)
| stef25 wrote:
| It was awesome having google.com/ig as a homepage. There
| hasn't been anything to replace it that I know of.
|
| I still subscribe to feeds in a different tool but it's
| not the same.
| ballenf wrote:
| Would RSS be in a better place now if Google Reader had
| never existed?
|
| 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.
| nicholassmith wrote:
| That's a great question! I think over time RSS would have
| ended up where it is anyway because of what it is, you're
| very intentionally opting out of spending time on site to
| consume the content elsewhere which for the web of today
| is exactly what they want to avoid.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Wanna know how I landed on this post?
|
| RSS.
|
| What I can't figure out is why there's a persistent myth that
| RSS has somehow vanished from the internet...
| giantrobot wrote:
| Everyone removed the orange "XML" and blue "RSS" images
| from their sites and people assume RSS was removed as well.
| The link tags to the feeds still exist so feed readers and
| browsers can still easily find them.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| It's still there, but support isn't great - a lot of sites
| don't have a feed, or it's waaaay outdated.
| SllX wrote:
| A lot of sites that do have a feed don't make it easily
| discoverable. You can play around with three URL path, or
| you can use a browser extension to find it. If it's a
| Substack site, the feed URL probably exists and is probably
| just /feed/, at least on the sites I've tried.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| There's browser plugins that fix the feed discovery
| issue. For example:
|
| Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| CA/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
|
| Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-
| finder/ijdgeed...
| SllX wrote:
| To tack on to this, NetNewsWire on Mac OS X also provides
| a Safari extension.
| genmon wrote:
| Check out NetNewsWire which is a free (and open source) RSS
| reader for Mac and iOS, under active development:
|
| 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.
| 0-O-0 wrote:
| It never went away. If you want experience similar to Google
| Reader - there are several clients (but better ones require
| paid subscription). RSS feeds are still there.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _RSS feeds are still there_
|
| And so heavily truncated, spoiling the point in many (but
| not all) cases of having an RSS feed entirely.
| basscomm wrote:
| > 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.
| pixelbath wrote:
| Well, it's up to the feed author what they want to
| include, and that's fine. To me, the point isn't "show
| all published content" in the feed, it's to notify me
| that new content is available. I don't mind clicking
| through if the content is worthwhile (which it is,
| because why else am I subscribed?).
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| It's frustrating, but not new; there were sites doing
| this back when Google Reader was big. I don't know if
| it's more prevalent.
| osmarks wrote:
| Some RSS reader applications can fetch/view the page each
| RSS entry points to if the actual entries don't have the
| right information.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Certainly true enough! I'm just saddened, I suppose-that
| such a feature needs to exist in the first place.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| Newsletters are the new RSS. Different protocol, but simpler
| for non-technical users and a viable business model. Some
| recent apps (Stoop and HEY) make the reading experience more
| like traditional RSS readers too.
| dajohnson89 wrote:
| adding rss feeds to (say) google reader doesn't require
| technical expertise. email newsletters require your email
| address, which is obviously prone to abuse and spam.
| newsletters aren't the new rss, but rather an arguably
| inferior replacement.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| ah, but newsletters allow you to serve adverts, which is
| really why RSS "died".
| captainmuon wrote:
| Nothing stops you from putting ads in RSS.
|
| I personally think RSS was killed when social networks
| shifted to social media...
| mmahemoff wrote:
| And charging a recurring fee is also viable now in the
| age of patronage. It's more standard than charging for a
| premium RSS feed and easy for publishers on various
| systems to set up.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| "x is the new y" indeed means it's not the same thing,
| but a replacement (inferior or otherwise).
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| ActivityStreams is essentially a revival of RSS. It is the
| foundation of stuff like ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and the
| upcoming Social Linked Data (SoLiD) effort led by the W3C. So
| I'd say that there's plenty of reviving going on.
| kome wrote:
| RSS is still great to get the news and blogs, I use
| https://theoldreader.com/
| dexterdog wrote:
| Most recent blog post, 18 months ago. Most recent tweet, 13
| months ago. I wouldn't rely on that service as a daily
| tool.
| ink_13 wrote:
| It's a feature-complete paid service which has been 100%
| bug-free in the seven years I've been using it, yes,
| daily.
|
| It is possible for software to be finished and only
| require minimal maintenance.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| No news is good news, unless you're talking about an RSS
| reader.
| ralfd wrote:
| I had to laugh about the guy in charge of development and
| rewriting it as a SPA:
|
| > 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.
| joshu wrote:
| good thread. i like the guy explaining to me that i am wrong
| about what happened.
| aws_ls wrote:
| Yes, I noticed that, as well :)
|
| So what do you think, does del.ico.us can have a second run
| under Pinboard creator?
| joshu wrote:
| I think that the size and activity of it made for the
| vibrancy however that size also is antagonistic to his
| goals, which is to charge for it.
| stef25 wrote:
| Hey Joshua! Many years ago I saw you give a presentation
| about del.icio.us at a web conference in London (forgot the
| name, organized by a guy called Ryan?)
|
| 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!
| joshu wrote:
| congrats!
|
| i still have nagios nightmares.
| millstone wrote:
| This is old school weird web!
|
| 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.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| At some point I started searching directly in del.icio.us over
| google because it would give me higher quality results. I guess
| someone bookmarking a site was proof enough it was useful.
| smolder wrote:
| Sadly that never lasts for long. Fake users trickle in,
| exploitative bookmarks get added, then it all goes to shit,
| much like the search-driven web did in general.
| smolder wrote:
| Old school is web 2.0? I'm really old, I guess.
| kome wrote:
| ahaha! i was thinking the same...
| jaeming wrote:
| yeah, it was still "new Web" in my mind. Old Web is pre dot-
| com era.
| 1f60c wrote:
| I remember seeing it on AddThis widgets (remember those?), but
| I've never used it so this was really insightful.
| lowwave wrote:
| did they get bought by yahoo a long long time ago?
| millstone wrote:
| They did, and let it rot, before shutting it down. At the
| time it seemed like a huge waste. But perhaps, if you can
| escape becoming the yahoo/AOL/etc homepage, you have a chance
| to live again.
| curation wrote:
| I was so sad when del.icio.us stopped. I wonder if old logins
| will work - I still remember mine!
| h2onock wrote:
| It sounds like they will, if you go to http://del.icio.us/
| you'll see:
|
| 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
| idlewords wrote:
| Yeah, they should work. Mine does, at least! I'll have a live
| login page up soon.
| ngcazz wrote:
| 100%. Loved how anything you could reach navigating it with a
| browser could also be exported to RSS. Around 2007 I had kind
| of my own personal video podcast by subscribing to the
| del.icio.us video tag on iTunes for example
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Yep, I have fond memories of delicious (they featured a browser
| add-on to ease the bookmarking process).
|
| Delicious, Digg, Technorati, StumbledUpon - those were the
| days!
| pedrocx486 wrote:
| I'm still sad at how Technorati ended, loved the service back
| then.
| piva00 wrote:
| Delicious, Digg, StumbledUpon and slashdot were my main fresh
| content feed back in the days, found so many useful articles
| and fun websites through them...
| doctor_eval wrote:
| And Freshmeat...
| EE84M3i wrote:
| >StumbledUpon
|
| _StumbleUpon_
|
| I have very fond memories of spending hours clicking
| 'stumble' during the early years of high school.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Was there a way to find people with the same link(s)? I don't
| think I'm going to get anybody I know starting to use this
| again, but I'm going to try it out.
|
| No algorithms. What a refreshing idea!
| r_klancer wrote:
| Back in 2006 I actually had a moment where I overheard
| someone at a university talking about an obscure subject
| (synthetic biology) I had spent the last couple of years
| saving del.icio.us links about.
|
| 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!)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Yes you could see who had bookmarked what you had and how
| many people had bookmarked it.
|
| 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.
| EricE wrote:
| I used Limewire the same way for music - you could browse
| other sharers directories. I found more off the wall stuff
| that I liked that otherwise I would have never found. My
| spending on CDs went up dramatically too (something the
| music industry swore wouldn't happen).
| mercer wrote:
| I still haven't found something that is quite as good as
| delicious was for finding other 'curators' with similar
| tastes (and then being able to filter what they curated by
| tag, iirc).
| diroussel wrote:
| Yes I did this too. I found some great links this way. I
| was crawling a web of links.
|
| 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.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| del.icio.us along with Flickr were the darlings of the old "Web
| 2.0" ethos.
|
| 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 :-)
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Fond memories.
| nobrains wrote:
| Delicious popular was my Hacker News back in the day.
| nikolay wrote:
| Isn't this the Pinboard.in's author?
| circa wrote:
| wow great news. I used it all the time back in the day!
| kontxt wrote:
| Kontxt.io is a modern version of Del.icio.us, but it has advanced
| features like inline highlights, comments, etc.
| maxraz wrote:
| I almost forgot about this one. Nostalgic.
| binarysneaker wrote:
| I gave up on delicious a long time ago, after it has changed
| hands several times and the code-base had reverted to a steaming
| pile of pre-web-2.0 shit. The browser extensions has all mostly
| died a long time before, and mobile apps were non existent. I
| tried every replacement, but nothing was quite like delicious was
| in the glory days.
|
| 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 )
| jahlove wrote:
| https://raindrop.io
| wackget wrote:
| Does it support working offline only? If it can't connect to
| the internet, it can't spy on you.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Well, your saved bookmarks can be accessed by people you
| didn't not authorize (GRU...) which I guess the same applies
| for del.icio.us or pinboard.in (NSA and others).
| gkanai wrote:
| Memepool was before del.icio.us but Memepool was not open to
| everyone...
| g5becks wrote:
| This makes me feel kind of nostalgic. Makes me think about when I
| first got into SEO and ezinearticles dominated serps, and the
| best places to post content was hubpages and squidoo. Reddit,
| digg, delicious, stumble upon, furl, fark, etc were just places
| we used to link to our article pages. I never really would've
| thought reddit would be what it is today.
| microcolonel wrote:
| Awesome, I missed del.icio.us, it is my childhood.
| nicc wrote:
| Nice to see Delicious in Poland!! GO, POLAND!
| psychart wrote:
| What got me hooked on delicious back on the days was the addons,
| replace firefox bookmarks and well integrated add button, not
| like nowadays javascript bookmarklets opening a popup, im trying
| bookmarks.dev but dont see the point in using it how it is today.
|
| And of course suggested tags.
| known wrote:
| "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
| one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore
| all progress depends on the unreasonable man" --George Bernard
| Shaw
| jacek wrote:
| I absolutely loved del.icio.us back in the day and I would love
| to use it again. No other method of bookmarking/collecting sites
| worked for me as well as del.icio.us. And I have never found the
| right alternative.
| mtkd wrote:
| I was only thinking of it last night when reading the Deja News
| discussion -- so many useful services that got acquired and
| ceased (Wunderlist, Skitch and many more)
| amwelles wrote:
| At least on Mac OS, Cleanshot[1] is a decent Skitch
| replacement if you were using it for marking up screenshots.
|
| 1. https://cleanshot.com/
| factsaresacred wrote:
| Diigo is arguably better (bookmarks, tags and highlights) and
| is going strong 10+ years later.
| Tenoke wrote:
| The idea behind it is great and I was using diigo on and off,
| but I found it started breaking on more sites as the web
| became more js-heavy. Maybe they've figured out more
| workarounds by now, or maybe I was just unlucky to frequent
| sites which abused js (e.g. LessWrong "2.0").
| binarysneaker wrote:
| I searched and searched for a replacement too. In the last year
| I found raindrop.io, and I'm really happy with it. (No
| affiliation)
| Tenoke wrote:
| I can recommend raindrop.io, too.
|
| 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.
| neovive wrote:
| I recently started experimenting with Notion web clipper
| extension and it's been pretty good. The extension populates
| the page meta data and content to a Notion table. It works
| well on desktop and mobile and I've been quite happy having
| my bookmarks together with my other notes on Notion.
| Unfortunately, you can't add tags directly from the
| extension, so you have to open the page in Notion.
| test1235 wrote:
| pinboard was what I started paying for, after reading lots of
| HN praise.
|
| https://pinboard.in
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| The message on del.icio.us is by the same guy behind pinboard
| (Maciej Ceglowski)
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm another happy Pinboard customer. It's a fine no-nonsense
| replacement for Delicious.
| 12bits wrote:
| I find myself periodically looking for delicious alternatives.
| Out of all the web apps that have come and gone this was my fav.
| Bookmarking inside the browser has never come close to this for
| me.
| jelv wrote:
| Pinboard/Maciej bought it 3 years ago and put it into read-only
| mode. Details:
| https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...
| omega3 wrote:
| > Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.
|
| hilarious :)
| markstos wrote:
| So is the news this month that he plans to make it read/write
| again?
| idlewords wrote:
| Someone just saw a parking page and it ends up on HN. I'm not
| sure why.
|
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I don't think write is in the works.
| ihuman wrote:
| If it's still read-only, then what's changing?
| ink_13 wrote:
| You'll be able to get your old bookmarks out and then
| migrate to Pinboard.
| fab1an wrote:
| Hell yes. A few days ago I word by word googled "Delicious
| bookmarking alternative 2020" and was dismayed to find that there
| does not seem to exist anything as lightweight today. Can't wait
| to use delicious again.
| rawfan wrote:
| 100% use pinboard.in. Moved there when all the shenenigans with
| delicious started and never looked back. For a couple of bucks
| extra, I even have an archive of the websites I bookmarked so
| that I can still access them when they go down eventually.
| dchest wrote:
| Pinboard.in, from the current owner of delicious?
| Jugurtha wrote:
| This feels like a John Connor pirate radio message.[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7bSYG0qL3Y
| aahhahahaaa wrote:
| Maciej Ceglowski is a generally clever and entertaining guy.
| Check out his (mostly unrelated) blog too... it's very well
| written.
|
| https://idlewords.com/
| rasikjain wrote:
| Wow...I had ton of sites bookmarked in del.icio.us. Was using
| their service heavily. Good to see the effort by Maciej to bring
| it online.
| fosco wrote:
| I do not use this or pinboard, but I like this guy.
|
| 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!
| recroad wrote:
| I use pinboard. It breaks pretty frequently for me (I use the
| JSON feeds for some non-traditional purposes) but he's always
| quick to respond and get it back up, so that's what keeps me a
| paying customer. For normal bookmarking, it's a great app.
| chanux wrote:
| This reminded me of rememberthemilk.
|
| It's still there! https://www.rememberthemilk.com/
| immigrantsheep wrote:
| I still use it :) It's been 12 years. Took a break for a while
| but back as a premium user.
| Louno wrote:
| Premium user since 12years here. I absolutely love Remember the
| milk and the way it is run by its team.
| kwanbix wrote:
| What does it have to do with delicious?
| devin wrote:
| It was very much of the same era.
| EwanToo wrote:
| For those who are wondering who's involved, Maciej Ceglowski is
| the owner of https://pinboard.in/
| jslakro wrote:
| After del.icio.us shutdown my bookmarking simply exploded,
| splashing in any existent service, Keep, twitter favs, feedly
| read-laters, g+ +1 posts, myself emails, plaintext, around 8
| browsers favs (mobile and desktop) along 10 years.
| incanus77 wrote:
| <3 this so much. I made my leap to self-employment the first time
| in 2006 on the back of a Mac del.icio.us client called Pukka.
| I've been an avid user of Pinboard (though, these days, not in
| the social way) but regardless I'm glad to see del.icio.us come
| back.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not to rain on the parade, but serious question: are bookmarks
| actually useful anymore?
|
| 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?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| ralphc wrote:
| 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.
| racl101 wrote:
| I use Pinboard a lot, all the time.
| specialp wrote:
| 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...
| umeshunni wrote:
| > 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.
| masukomi wrote:
| 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.
| danmg wrote:
| 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.
| searchableguy wrote:
| 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.
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| hhsuey wrote:
| 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).
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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.
| glxxyz wrote:
| 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.
| g8oz wrote:
| >> 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.
| masukomi wrote:
| 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.
| Chirael wrote:
| 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" :)
| hhsuey wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| hhsuey wrote:
| 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?
| masukomi wrote:
| 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.
| didip wrote:
| I agree, for any hierarchical needs, I just put them on my
| private git in the form of markdown folders.
| fuball63 wrote:
| 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.
| joshu wrote:
| 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
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| joshu wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| idlewords wrote:
| HN is 100% the place for this attitude.
| markstos wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| fergie wrote:
| Great news! I was genuinely baffled when they shut it down.
| Easily one of the best and most influential websites of its time.
| In terms of content it was on a par with HN, Slashdot and Reddit,
| with a slight bias towards design.
| notatoad wrote:
| 2 weeks ago on twitter: "No, I am not bringing back the insanely
| popular free competitor to my primary source of income."
|
| https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1283932062794186752
| raister wrote:
| Why? There's a lot of synchronising apps saving your bookmarks
| already - this wagon has passed...
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Delicious was a social bookmarking site, not a bookmark
| synchronisation backend.
| Arkanosis wrote:
| Maciej is the owner of Pinboard.
| relyks wrote:
| Maciej Ceglowski owns Pinboard. Perhaps, opening it up again
| will make using Pinboard more attractive. He could use it as a
| form of upselling
| [deleted]
| bhrgunatha wrote:
| For me it was the communal curation effect.
|
| Find someone else with an obscure site or tag and check what
| else they have saved. It was a deep, deep rabbit hole.
| jimueller wrote:
| The new owner is the developer of pinboard.in. The pinboard API
| was modeled after del.icio.us, so it might just be a data
| import into pinboard exercise.
| [deleted]
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Aw yeah! I used to use this site all the time, I had quite a lot
| of bookmarks in here. I think I have an export floating around
| somewhere but it will be great to see the site up again.
|
| 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.
| peebeebee wrote:
| I still use pinboard.in Just a single guy programming it, and
| asking a small fee. No ads. No extra stupid features. The web
| like it should be IMHO.
| gjkhkldajghl wrote:
| Maciej, the person who posted this update to del.icio.us, is
| the owner and maintainer of pinboard.
| ObsoleteNerd wrote:
| I wonder how that's going to work, whether he's going to
| keep both as-is in parallel or what the plans are.
| Gaelan wrote:
| I believe he's said he will run Del.icio.us read-only.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I wouldn't say that the model itself has disappeared,
| folksonomy is still the foundation for hashtags after all. It's
| just that few people are working on crowdsourced bookmark
| directories ala del.icio.us these days. Hopefully we'll end up
| with a federated standard for web directories, where users and
| trusted organizations can "endorse" their bookmark collections
| and put their reliable identity behind those endorsements.
| random3 wrote:
| I just bookmarked this HN thread on pinboard which I've been
| using since 2011. I had used Delicious since 2007 or so until it
| got too painful to do anything.
|
| I'm thankful for pinboard. I wish there would be an equivalent
| for Google Reader and RSS too :)
| drukenemo wrote:
| NetNewsWire is great:
| donatj wrote:
| Interesting. I was literally clearing out my bookmark bar the
| other day and way at the end was a link to del.icio.us and it
| didn't work. Interesting to see it picked up again.
| maxbaines wrote:
| the bookmark space for me is still broken, I think delicious were
| close to fixing this in there early days pre yahoo.
|
| I cant wait to see all my bookmarks from 2000's probably just
| gifs but memories.
|
| good luck Maciej Ceglowski
| whatch wrote:
| Haven't used the service from original post. But I already feel
| like that about the stuff I saved in Pocket since 2011 (now
| owned by Mozilla). Back then it was called Read It Later
| zimmund wrote:
| This also reminds me of my bookmarks from StumbleUpon. Flash
| games and cool sites -most of them not working today-.
| [deleted]
| CalRobert wrote:
| I never used del.icio.us but am I wrong in thinking that getting
| bookmarks from 10 years ago will just give a bunch of 404's?
| simongr3dal wrote:
| Probably not, Maciej (from the GP link) did some testing on
| Pinboard's collection of bookmarked links back in 2011.
|
| https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/05/remembrance_of_links_past/
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Would be interesting to see how things are 9 years later.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| That's why he offered an archiving service :)
|
| 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)
| CalRobert wrote:
| Ah, cool!
| SNACKeR99 wrote:
| I loved del.icio.us back in the day. So much, that when it went
| down for a few days in 2003, I wrote a clone of it that I still
| use to this day, self-hosted. I also archive the text content of
| the page, which has saved me a few times. At this point I have
| about 11,000 bookmarked URLs, and if nothing else, it's a fun way
| to find out what I was doing on a given day.
| nvarsj wrote:
| del.icio.us was the epitome of web search and discovery for me. I
| used it over other search engines back in the day. It was great
| at finding sites on esoteric topics. I think human curated search
| like this is the best kind. Unfortunately those days are long
| gone and we have the Web by Google now.
| julienchastang wrote:
| I completely agree. del.icio.us search results were often
| phenomenally good, better than Google for certain types of
| searches at the time.
| localhost wrote:
| Many, many years (15!) ago Jon Udell posted a screencast that
| introduced me to del.icio.us [1] through the lens of evolving
| tagging vocabularies in public discourse, and I still remember it
| to this day. Well worth watching to see this time capsule of what
| the web once was.
|
| [1] http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/delicious/delicious.html
| westurner wrote:
| The Firefox (and Chromium) bookmarks storage and sync systems
| still don't persist tags!
|
| "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...
| iso1631 wrote:
| I'm shocked by the number of people calling a website founded in
| 2003 as "old school". That was 3 years after the dot-com bust!
| toyg wrote:
| The web changed pretty dramatically around 2010, when the
| iphone and single-page apps took off and VPS became dirt cheap.
| codingdave wrote:
| People born during the dotcom bust are now old enough to be
| starting in this industry. I think that qualifies anything from
| even near that era as "old school"
| benibela wrote:
| We should bring back the webrings
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| There's a couple starting back up.
|
| https://geekring.net/
|
| https://weirdwidewebring.net/
|
| https://wiby.me/ (not exactly a webring)
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I remember webrings and browsing around was so serendipitous.
| Id certainly welcome them back
| zanderwohl wrote:
| webring.js - who's got dibs on the javascript library?
| benibela wrote:
| No!
|
| For the old-school feel it must be without javascript
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not Web 1.0 but it was right in the middle of Web
| 2.0/read-write web. Mobile/Facebook/Twitter/etc. are
| collectively a whole new generation.
| kerrsclyde wrote:
| I went to a talk by Joshua Schachter not that long after
| del.icio.us started gaining traction. It was a most fantastic
| time for the web, the possibilities seemed endless. I happen to
| think if it hadn't been bought by Yahoo! who seemed to have no
| vision for it then it would still be a tool I relied on.
| julienchastang wrote:
| I am surprised to see Joshua Schachter only mentioned once
| throughout this entire thread. I loved the story of how he
| started Del.icio.us from essentially nothing. He was one of my
| heroes at the time.
| joshu wrote:
| :)
| julienchastang wrote:
| Josh, what are you up to these days? The wikipedia page
| dedicated to you is out-of-date.
| joshu wrote:
| I'm raising a venture fund and working on some new
| projects in the meantime. I also do a bunch of plotter
| art stuff at http://instagram.com/jodhus
| julienchastang wrote:
| That's cool. We had a plotter (HP, I believe) in the
| early 80s. In some ways, nothing compares to old-style
| plotters.
| joshu wrote:
| Yep. I use a CNC router converted to hold a
| paintbrush/pen/whatever, but also an HP 7575a, which is
| glorious.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Why is this posted now? Macej bought Delicious a few years ago.
| relyks wrote:
| Looks like he'll be putting it back up relatively soon
| according to what he posted there
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Thanks. I reread the history and see that's new information
| now. My fault for misremembering.
| palotasb wrote:
| For future reference, this is what the page says as of this HN
| post:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200729083406/http://del.icio.us...
|
| > 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.
| encom wrote:
| https://archive.ph/FNNuc
| chriszhang wrote:
| I really think a bookmarking service alone is not sufficient for
| the modern web. The modern web is ripe with linkrot and
| disappearing websites.
|
| 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.
| azeirah wrote:
| Pinboard Will archive your links for you, costs a little extra
| but whatever.
| egorfine wrote:
| How relevant would be del.icio.us these days?
|
| (edit: typo)
| [deleted]
| eddiegroves wrote:
| Very useful in my opinion, given the decline of Google
|
| Edit: Referring to ways of discovering non-mainstream content
| Scarblac wrote:
| It's content discovery without any algorithms involved, and
| only works well on things that have actual URLs (so no
| dynamically generated "feeds" and so on).
|
| Who knows, maybe the world is thirsty for that.
| sawaruna wrote:
| I've been writing a bit about content discovery sans
| algorithms and I think there is at least some number of
| people would be interested in it. Social curation is
| appealing, though I'm not sure how popular a dedicated site
| for curated link sharing would be. While things like Reddit,
| Twitter, etc. are not 1 to 1 replacements, I think it serves
| a similar purpose for a lot of people.
| jpindar wrote:
| I would really love to see the links collected or curated
| by certain people I follow on Twitter.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Reddit, Twitter etc. are quite okay for naturally-ephemeral
| content but if you want to share a stable/growing bookmarks
| collection, or even cooperate with others sharing their
| own, there's nowhere to do it. DMOZ used to work quite well
| aside from the usual controversies relating to its
| centralized moderation, and a federated variety of that
| plus something like delicious/stumbleupon for "tags" and
| folksonomy would be interesting to experiment with.
| sawaruna wrote:
| >if you want to share a stable/growing bookmarks
| collection, or even cooperate with others sharing their
| own, there's nowhere to do it.
|
| There's http://are.na
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Haha I swear I read something on here the other day about how
| trends are circular and it won't be long until del.icio.us is
| back, and here we are!
|
| 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.
| Kunix wrote:
| I loved StumbleUpon, and I find myself missing a discovery tool
| like that one. Reddit and other websites give me the impression
| of running in loop. If anyone has good discovery tools to
| recommend!
| Sodman wrote:
| As a college student outside of the US who had never heard of
| YCombinator, StumbleUpon was how I discovered HN. Now I work
| at startups and can't imagine going back to a bigger company.
| Strange to think that in a world where StumbleUpon didn't
| exist, I may still be working at BigCorp.
| ergest wrote:
| I second this! Algorithmic discovery tools solve for sameness
| whereas StumbleUpon solved for variety. It was a wonderful
| tool for breaking out of thought bubbles.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I started using del.icio.us VERY early in its inception but
| stopped well before the sell off. This part struck me though.
|
| >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.
| pupdogg wrote:
| Some great old memories right here! Thank you for doing this.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I had the Delicious Firefox plugin until that stopped working.
| I've been meaning to go through the Firefox sqlite databases and
| try to export all my old bookmarks/tags that were synced. I can
| grep references to delicious in there, so they might still exist.
|
| 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.
| xabi wrote:
| Wow, it used to be one of my daily sites to visit. I also created
| a web called populicio.us with data from del.icio.us.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Hmm next what, people will abandon Facebook and flock back to
| thematic PHPBB forums?
|
| (I honestly can't wait!)
| gocartStatue wrote:
| Those were the days, my friend!
| sn41 wrote:
| Honestly, I would definitely enjoy that. Somehow the discussion
| on such boards was much more engaging.
| conjectures wrote:
| It feels to me like some of that was having _the same_ group
| of random strangers interacting. Rather than a constant flux
| of single comments.
| mercer wrote:
| Being able to (usually) personalize your comments I think
| also played a huge role in fostering community: avatars,
| taglines, signatures, etc.
|
| 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.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| This sound interesting. Do you have some more details or
| maybe even some code somewhere?
|
| 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.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I love to think back on the early social web and consider
| how much we got right, particularly with forums. Presence
| and personality via avatars went a long way to feeling
| like a community in an era when the masses were still
| figuring out how to do that via technology.
|
| I still find chronologically ordered, flat discussion
| threads to be far superior to nested and vote ordered
| discussions.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| _> 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| By default HN almost hides usernames. The byline on this
| comment will be a smaller font than HN's already small
| body font size. It'll also be a light gray almost fading
| into the background. You'll need to spend extra effort to
| notice my username and try to remember it. I'm not likely
| to remember yours later.
| Scarblac wrote:
| And threads stick around, rather than disappear after a few
| days.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Maybe that's why the web feels so different now from how
| it used to be. It's like being in a house where the walls
| and furniture shift whenever you aren't looking.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| This is the biggest single change for me. On Reddit I
| sometimes see a thread which is exactly in line with my
| interests, I have extensive knowledge of and would love
| to discuss with people. And then I see it was posted 22
| hours ago, and so it's almost pointless replying to it.
|
| 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.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Or you find a 6 months to year old thread, for something
| like a movie discussion or timeless/semi-timeless topic,
| and it is locked. Back in the day threads could go for
| years, there is good (thoughtful discussion across time,
| changing opinions) and bad (spam, bots) to that but
| mostly good.
| _joe wrote:
| The real throwback would be going back to use newsgroups, and
| only have competent people posting.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Probably setting karma limits to allow only high-ranking
| users write. Plus moderate it to block gaming the system.
| Right?
| dagw wrote:
| One really nice things about newsgroups was that most
| clients let you write your own scoring rules for posts,
| meaning I could moderate each group and set "karma limits"
| based on what I cared about.
| oblio wrote:
| The all-mighty account creation hurdle will kill all such
| initiatives.
|
| And to fix this, you'd need buy-in from major tech companies.
| All of which don't want to solve this problem.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| > The all-mighty account creation hurdle will kill all such
| initiatives.
|
| 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?
| oblio wrote:
| Because the numbers back it up. People flock to Facebook (1
| account for many things), Google (1 account for many
| things), Amazon (1 account for many things), Apple (1
| account for many things), Reddit (1 account for many
| things). Blogs are dying, forums are moribund, small online
| stores are dying.
|
| 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.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Sorry, I don't think I communicated my point properly. I
| agree with you that the average user doesn't want to deal
| with separate credentials. What I mean to say is: why is
| this the case?
|
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| OpenID 3.0 to the rescue!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The all-might account creation hurdle will kill all such
| initiative.
|
| Doesn't federation solve this? You're identified by the
| server you signed up on.
| oblio wrote:
| Federation of what? Which protocol?
| viraptor wrote:
| Isn't that what Matrix and Mastodon do? (It is for me) And to
| some extent Slack/Discord I guess...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| the chat thing is better done by XMPP, and mastodon... well..
| if it ever gains real traction, it'll get swarmed by mob
| behavior just like Twitter is now.
| viraptor wrote:
| I guess we're just doomed to that cycle until some
| breakthrough. It's like an eternal eternal september, we're
| going to jump to new services which are temporarily better
| before everyone uses them.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The federated architecture is a powerful check on mob
| behavior. A Mastodon instance that enables the sort of mass
| harassment and mobbing you routinely see on twitter will
| just be refused federation by well-maintaned instances,
| just like Gab has been.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I'm not sure breaking the federation is a solution good
| enough to call it a 'check'. Users who want to disperse
| outrage of different kinds will just use other instances
| and will gather in mobs from them. You see, just a
| hundred mobbers can spoil any real discussion and turn it
| into a stinking pile.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| People aren't remembering the negatives to these. I still use a
| normal style forum sometimes.
|
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > People keep asking the same questions or repeating the same
| stuff again and again.
|
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I meant all in the same thread. It's hard to go through it
| all when threads get longer. Say a dozen or two pages. The
| same question might be asked 5-10 times. Then answered that
| many times too, but with varying correctness.
| mercer wrote:
| > 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I wrote that in response to all the people here lamenting
| for those old style forums again. Specifically for that.
| Not as a general statement.
|
| 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.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| HN is a perfect exampele of this. With its own
| peculiarities and all
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > People keep asking the same questions or repeating the same
| stuff again and again
|
| 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.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I meant all in the same thread. It's hard to go through it
| all when threads get longer. Say a dozen or two pages. The
| same question might be asked 5-10 times. Then answered that
| many times too, but with varying correctness.
|
| --
|
| 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.
| kerrsclyde wrote:
| I've found the quality of discussion on forums vs Facebook is
| far higher for my hobby (steam powered transport). Post a
| picture on a forum and get some interesting replies, post a
| picture on Facebook and just get 101 likes and nothing else.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| I occasionally wonder where forums have gone.
|
| 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?
| dbrgn wrote:
| https://threema-forum.de/ was migrated to "WoltLab Suite
| Forum" a while ago. I didn't know that software before, but
| everything seems to work really nicely. Still has the classic
| forum features but it doesn't feel like it's from 1999.
| (Note: It's not open source and costs 100EUR per year to
| license. I'm not affiliated in any way, just a user.)
| giantrobot wrote:
| For niche areas forums are still doing alright. More general
| purpose forums sort of melted away and moved to Facebook and
| the like.
|
| 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.
| foxhop wrote:
| Would you pay $15/mo or $100/yr for a new age forum?
|
| (I run Remarkbox and I'm trying to find product market fit)
| toyg wrote:
| _> there seems to be no modern forum software?_
|
| Discourse is pretty modern.
| tomekw wrote:
| IMHO that's what Discourse is about :)
| jedimastert wrote:
| I used to teach computer literacy for a highschool co-op (home-
| schoolers would come in once a week) and the school used a
| free-housed phpbb for everything. The amount of engagement and
| discussion was actually somewhat surprising
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Good vibes!
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