As someone who does not belong to the old-timer crowd, and in fact pays an extra $25/year for an archival account, the news that Pinboard is even being maintained comes as a blessing.
In the past year things have happened like the API returning invalid JSON for weeks[0] and the search returning an error whenever I wanted to use full-text search (one of the selling points for the extra archival fee.) Not to mention the ongoing issues with page archiving in general (things frequently fail and need to be manually re-queued).
I really like Pinboard, I do, but the reliability issues have made me want to look somewhere else. My subscription is set to renew at the end of March and after seeing this I guess I'll give it another year. Here's hoping things trend upwards.
This is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project.
But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms!
I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.
how about development bounties by DAO? i’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t already been attempted (i don’t pay close attention to this topic)
I think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever.
Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”
I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.
Anyone can promise anything they want. I prefer to lean on my track record. Not a lot of sites can brag about staying continuously online and not losing data for over a decade (exceptions include stavros right here on HN, who runs a competing site to mine). Pinboard is certainly business performance art, but part of the schtick is taking it seriously.
> Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”
I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.
Interesting comment and I think it touches on a couple of points.
First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here.
Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?
I'm taking the following comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506951) out of the context it was posted in, but I don't believe this particular case takes liberties with the original intent:
---
> analog31
> ... Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.
> Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).
> Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.
> One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...
---
I think emergence is perhaps the most intuitively accessible way of reasoning through the impact of bureaucratic network effects. We've simply never before in history had to deal with human social cohesion at the scale we do today, so we've never reached the point where we've *had* to understand the dynamics correctly in order to make any progress.
As much as I love maciej's blog and twitter, Pinboard has been pretty flaky for the time I've used it. I signed up for Pinboard in 2015, have an archiving account prepaid to 2024.
The API isn't reliable, archiving is lucky if it gets most of the page, it's not been a great experience so far. I used to use Pinboard with IFTTT and Wordpress to autopost favorite links with a description; two years ago I removed the Pinboard link to my IFTTT account because it just wasn't reliable.
Happy to hear of upgrades, one thing I would like to see is getrevue.co integration and full page screenshots of bookmarked pages (also accessible from API). Full page screenshots alone would justify my money.
I had some frustrations with the service in the years when it was running on auto-pilot, but since it mostly worked I shrugged it off (although I warned people not to join).
If I had been paying $22/year at the time I would have been a lot less happy and would probably have closed my account.
I'm a long time (yearly plan) user with a similar experience.
The crux of the issue is that Pinboard's centralized architecture is unsustainable in the long run. It's essentially an on-demand archive.org service with the same ever-increasing storage requirements, which becomes a bigger problem as more users join.
It must be difficult for a one (or two) person team to manage, especially since they also chose to manage their own hardware. I assume this is to avoid cloud storage and hosting costs, and I respect the decision, but this can add a lot of overhead on top of just keeping the software performing optimally.
The sustainable model for this type of service is self-hosted. https://archivebox.io/ seems like a nice solution I've been meaning to try.
The decision to run my own hardware is due to the extremely high cost of storing and moving ~80TB around on the cloud, as well as running a high-memory MySQL instance. I haven't priced it recently, but the last time I looked it would have raised my costs by an order of magnitude.
I can understand that, but have you considered a pay-per-use / tiered business model?
It's clear from this thread that there are users who have thousands of bookmarks, using dozens of GB of storage, and those who use it much less and whose storage costs are negligible. Having either group pay a flat rate doesn't make sense to me, and you end up losing revenue either way.
A tiered model could allow you to offset the cloud storage costs, maybe migrate things into the cloud and ease some of the maintenance burden on yourself.
Depends what you mean by sustainable. Pinboard has taken care of my bookmarks since 2011, it’s still here in 2021. Nothing I put up on my VPS in 2011 still exists.
This would actually be ideal for a 1-person business. If you pay $25/year, then the guy only needs to find 10,000 people, to make $250,000/year. Not a bad salary.
Now, the question is, what type of SaaS service can you make, to find 10,000 people paying $25/year. One that hasn’t already been consumed by the big players.
A little bit more than 12 answers a day. But if they are basic questions you should be able to resolve a lot of them with a FAQ before you get to 10k customers.
One strategy that works more often than you’d expect is to pick a business that’s successfully being run by Big Players today and wait for them to self destruct as a result of their need to get Bigger.
The business we’re discussing here is a good example of this process.
I have an old grand-fathered-in Pinboard account, but I couldn't deal with the constant issues so I'm happily paying for https://larder.io/ now – powered by a small, independent business, but the product actually works.
Another interesting and quite original business model. I like the idea of 'use the product for six months and discover it's so essential, you'll continue subscribing'. What I couldn't find out from the site is whether or not there's an option to export your data if you do decide not to continue - any idea?
I'm an old-timer and I haven't actually used Pinboard in years. I'm curious how others are finding it useful in an era of synced browsers and saved tab groups etc. If there is any utility at all, the paid plan is a steal.
It's indispensable to me. I've had my account since December 2010. There are over 9,000 bookmarks and 1,600 tags. It is one of two repositories that replaces a long-term memory that I sort of kind of don't have.
1) I take links from there and automatically share them elsewhere. I've got about 2,500 who read them in various places (Twitter/Facebook/Dreamwidth/Livejournal)
2) It's invaluable when I find something debunking the latest nonsense, and can easily find it again 5 years later when the same nonsense resurfaces.
Of my 67k+ bookmarks, I would reckon that at least 85% are from automation (Twitter/Feedbin/Facebook/Pocket/Flickr/Instagram/Fediverse favourites, things I've tweeted/facebooked/flickr'd/instagram'd, etc.) There's no way that works with synced browsers and saved tab groups.
As others have said. I don’t see any comparison to browser syncing. People say the same thing sometimes about password [managers]. For that too, I don’t see it.
> I did not make this change retroactive, since that felt like going back on a promise. [...] I have noticed this has created some feelings of annoyance in the paying group, odd expectations in the one-time group, and a general confusion about pricing policy.
These two things seem difficult to reconcile. I wonder why Maciej is taking the "ask people to voluntarily convert" approach rather than the fairly typical "new features will only be available to paid subscribers" "carrot" approach, which may cause some annoyance for one-time payers, but is probably still more generally in line with people's sense of fairness. Perhaps because he needs the funding to develop those features in the first place.
Agreed. As long Pinboard is alive and profitable, he gets to keep trolling inflated SV egos and they can't even hit back with their usual tactic of, "what do you know, you don't even run a startup". That's worth the annual fee by itself.
This comment made me flip. Just signed up for a 10 year archive account.
Never used pinboard but frequently enjoy and admire the whole story and the level of dedication that flows into it. It’s like watching the story of „UP“ (the movie) happening in the internet.
Most businesses are neither fair nor transparent in their business decisions which is often interpreted as a sign of strength and thus fosters trust by users. Moves like this are uncommon and could / should give us faith in the product, but don’t , because we interpret transparency as a sign of weakness.
For those arguing that asking for money is somewhat a moral question: try to run anything someone relies on for more than year, then come back discussing the right topics.
How many old time users there're anyway? If a business came to a position to raise cost on a small group of users I'd be questioning the project future overall.
> Right now, about 2/3 of Pinboard users with basic accounts are people who signed up, like you did, in 2009 or 2010 with a one-time payment. The remaining 1/3 pays $22 a year.
Not qualified as active but looks like this is the majority of users.
> I would describe my work like single-handedly running a restaurant in an old château. It’s cool and fun, and the ambiance is great, but occasionally the soup is served cold or not at all because I have to chase a bunch of bats out of the kitchen, or replace a collapsed beam, while the diners sit and wait. This is no fun for either me or the diners, who rightfully complain that it ruins their dinner.
I'm an old timer. I paid a small, one-time fee over ten years ago and have used Pinboard (not without some frustration) ever since. I paid the subscription fee when I received the email a couple days ago. It only seems fair.
I'm one of the old-timers and upgraded my membership immediately upon finishing this email. I use Pinboard multiple times a day and am happy to see it still being maintained.
An old timer and haven't used Pinboard for bookmarks for a couple of years now (since mainly switch to org-mode). But still subscribed to some people's bookmarks via RSS, and nothing comes at par in terms of quality of (semi-curated) content. Seems very fair to me.
Not sure about who specifically I can recommend, but in terms of 'how' sometimes I search the site for some interesting link I liked, to see who bookmarked it. Then judging by tags I might explore what other tags the person has, in case our interests overlap. Similar for specific search terms.
My trick is that historically when I was bored (or on the toilet) I would always reflexively reach for social media (mainly reddit) to pass the time.
A couple years ago I made the conscious decision to stop using reddit, but wanted something to replace those little moments of downtime[1] with.
So I bought a nice-looking Pinboard client[2] for my phone, and have trained myself to reach for pinboard in those little moments of boredom, generally reading through things in my "read later" queue.
I'm an old timer who still uses pinboard every day. I converted my account immediately. The new pricing still represents great value and I've had incredible value from my original account.
Maciej's approach to this seems to be entirely reasonable: he's being open about the position he's in and giving users the option to support the site whilst not forcing change on them.
We could do with more services like pinboard - real utility, reasonably priced and not dependent on VC money and / or needing massive user growth to have a sustainable future.
I did something similar for Remarkbox [0] and switched all accounts to full access and changed the model to pay-what-you-can. I want Remarkbox to become a utility as well and this was the best idea I could think of.
My biggest fear was forgetting to pay and losing all bookmarks but I asked and the answer was it would fallback to my old account so then it was a no-brainer: support pinboard and get archiving all for one small fee.
By way of the Shortcuts app, every iPhone has a pre-installed Pinboard integration. I’ve taken to just using that to make new bookmarks, because you can make shortcuts that accept URLs from the share menu as inputs.
OMG, I had just been looking for this exact thing a couple of weeks ago and missed it! Thank you for this comment! I’ve become intolerably disappointed with Pocket and this should enable me to self-host my reading list and still be able to use the iOS share sheet without having to get a costly dev license (or device) from Apple.
You would know pretty quickly if Pinboard stopped being maintained.
Try the new Pins for Pinboard app, which just came out.
I'm hopeful that once I get the new API out, it will be a lot less painful to build on top of, and we'll see some life in the apps department. The current API is a calque of the 2004 delicious API and lacks a lot of basic features (like "tell me what changed since time X") that clients need.
Pins is new. Pushpin is my favorite Pinboard interface/client in any capacity. It tells me how many times I’ve used a tag when auto completing tags. I love it!
I’ve paid for both. Pins is available on Mac too. It’s still new.
I am on “old timer” and signed up partly to support Maciej and partly for the site’s quirkiness. As others have said, I am surprised he is still tending to the website because it is in shambles and completely unreliable. I have had warnings from ifttt.com several times now that pinboard is offline. I will not be joining the subscription plan and am instead searching for an alternative that is reliable.
Your skills as an expert politician and deflector are on full display here. Why is your and IFTTT’s issues my problem as a paid customer for your service? If I paid you a yearly subscription, is there any chance you’ll fix these decade old bugs? I don’t think so.
Old timer here, I have been using pinboard for a long time: I have never used any kind of integration, just manually curating my links when I have the time.
I feel that it's unfair to call the site "in shambles": I never had a single issue with it and I enjoy casually browsing the "popular" link.
And,yes, I will upgrade to the yearly payment.
Yup -- I get that too, and I am paying for archiving. I asked in another comment, but I'll ask directly here too: is it more financially beneficial for me to pay you $39 a year for archiving for would the $22 a year for the service work better? I assume it is the former (especially given the relatively small size of my archive amortized over storage prices per year), but I'll go with whatever option gives you the most money.
How do we re-up? I vaguely remember seeing somewhere I’m good until 2021. I’m likely close to my prepaid yearly archival subscription coming to an end.
As someone who spent five minutes writing a pinboard client for my own personal use [1], it was frustrating that there was no way of testing these kinds of cases since even a test account would require extra payment. If pinboard were to pivot to a more api-friendly service, having some kind of test account(s) would be high on my wishlist.
[1] Almost the only feature is to prefill things like title, description, etc. because I wasted so much time, when using pinboard, viewing source and copying these manually.
37000 should be fine. Try changing the device’s auto-lock setting to 5 mins and leave it undisturbed for that amount of time for the initial download to go through. I’ve got a few users with 100000 bookmarks.
> You joined the site back when there was a one-time signup fee.
I wouldn't if it wasn't the case.
I am much more willing to pay a one-time fee for a lifetime unlimited plan than a subscription. No matter how expensive is the former or how cheap is the latter.
I just feel extra constant anxiety for every thing I don't own which sucks money from my account regularly, also ready to fail me as soon as I stop paying or move to another country or something. I feel insecurity and anger every time I'm offered a subscription.
Having bought something on a single-pay basis, on the contrary, floods my brain with the senses of achievement and security. Paying some bucks manually every month may do too (provided I find the service extremely useful), but not annually and not automatic (by the way I was extremely delighted to find an easy option to disable automatic payments in Pocket - the only service I've found to offer this).
This feeling runs contrary to the practical reality. Paying once for a service someone else is running doesn’t actually mean you “own” it; Pinboard could disappear at any time.
By contrast, if you’re paying a recurring fee, you’re incentivizing the company to continue operating the service.
I understand, but I want to feel the problem solved once and forever and I am not going to have to pay any more ever. This is not really rational, I just feel this way. I am not going to be mad if the author actually discontinues the service (provided he lets me export the data).
This probably is because I'm a gig survivalist and have never had a long-term stable source of income. What I buy during a prosperity time is what is going to keep me warm during a broke time and help me out of it.
Regular payment obligations are a danger, a paid-forever thing is an asset.
To add, with subscriptions there can be an increase in price (or decrease in features) without customers having a say in the matter, so it isn’t even a predictable cost.
Pinboard offers one-time-ish payments for very long time periods. Cleverly, my money for using this service in 2024 is already earning the founder interest instead of me:
“Pinboard charges $22 per year for a regular account, or $39 per year for archiving and full-text search. You get discounts for multiple years...”
Meanwhile, looking under the hood of most “lifetime” offers means for the expected life of that version of the product. My experience is even the 90th percentile expected value is below 5 years. This service has stood out in contrast to that.
I appreciate your extra constant anxiety, yet manage to also be anxious whether I’ll miss noticing when the pre-paid months finally come due in Feb 2025. Hopefully by then pinboard will still let me pre-fund the founder’s money market account.
That's a false sense of security though. It will only last as long as it's profitable. No one is going to keep a business going into perpetuity if it's a continual money loser. I tend to always check if a service has autopay through paypal, that way it's easy to stop it.
I believe it started at two bucks and change, and went up a penny every 40 users. The original payment model (in 2009) was an anti-spam measure, because I remembered how much delicious had suffered from growing pains. Joshua Schachter came up with the idea of bumping the price with every signup, which was brilliant.
Old timer here. I actually wound up building something that worked a little better for me (I wouldn't deign to call it a competitor) but the value pinboard has provided me for years makes this a no brainer. I will pay for at least one year.
Thanks for being so straightforward about this and letting us use it for free all this time!
I try to not sign up for things where I'd be super sad if I stopped paying and things went away, like old emails on an account I haven't used in ages.
I'm really tempted to do this. I fear there is no going back if I do though. I've been in tight spots financially before so commitment of this kind makes me a bit nervous.
The worst-case scenario (apart from bus accidents) is that you switch over, stop paying, and then your stuff gets locked into read-only mode. Expired accounts don't get deleted.
174 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadIn the past year things have happened like the API returning invalid JSON for weeks[0] and the search returning an error whenever I wanted to use full-text search (one of the selling points for the extra archival fee.) Not to mention the ongoing issues with page archiving in general (things frequently fail and need to be manually re-queued).
I really like Pinboard, I do, but the reliability issues have made me want to look somewhere else. My subscription is set to renew at the end of March and after seeing this I guess I'll give it another year. Here's hoping things trend upwards.
[0]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272
But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms!
I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.
Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”
I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.
I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.
First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here.
Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?
While closing tabs recently I stumbled on a particularly interesting (to me) HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007) from a couple months ago.
I'm taking the following comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506951) out of the context it was posted in, but I don't believe this particular case takes liberties with the original intent:
---
> analog31
> ... Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.
> Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).
> Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.
> One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...
---
I think emergence is perhaps the most intuitively accessible way of reasoning through the impact of bureaucratic network effects. We've simply never before in history had to deal with human social cohesion at the scale we do today, so we've never reached the point where we've *had* to understand the dynamics correctly in order to make any progress.
As much as I love maciej's blog and twitter, Pinboard has been pretty flaky for the time I've used it. I signed up for Pinboard in 2015, have an archiving account prepaid to 2024.
The API isn't reliable, archiving is lucky if it gets most of the page, it's not been a great experience so far. I used to use Pinboard with IFTTT and Wordpress to autopost favorite links with a description; two years ago I removed the Pinboard link to my IFTTT account because it just wasn't reliable.
Happy to hear of upgrades, one thing I would like to see is getrevue.co integration and full page screenshots of bookmarked pages (also accessible from API). Full page screenshots alone would justify my money.
If I had been paying $22/year at the time I would have been a lot less happy and would probably have closed my account.
The crux of the issue is that Pinboard's centralized architecture is unsustainable in the long run. It's essentially an on-demand archive.org service with the same ever-increasing storage requirements, which becomes a bigger problem as more users join.
It must be difficult for a one (or two) person team to manage, especially since they also chose to manage their own hardware. I assume this is to avoid cloud storage and hosting costs, and I respect the decision, but this can add a lot of overhead on top of just keeping the software performing optimally.
The sustainable model for this type of service is self-hosted. https://archivebox.io/ seems like a nice solution I've been meaning to try.
It's clear from this thread that there are users who have thousands of bookmarks, using dozens of GB of storage, and those who use it much less and whose storage costs are negligible. Having either group pay a flat rate doesn't make sense to me, and you end up losing revenue either way.
A tiered model could allow you to offset the cloud storage costs, maybe migrate things into the cloud and ease some of the maintenance burden on yourself.
Now, the question is, what type of SaaS service can you make, to find 10,000 people paying $25/year. One that hasn’t already been consumed by the big players.
If half of them has even a basic question, that's already 5.000 answers to deal with.
The business we’re discussing here is a good example of this process.
Larder is so small, there’s no real community around it. I think there’s a cli on GitHub.
1) I take links from there and automatically share them elsewhere. I've got about 2,500 who read them in various places (Twitter/Facebook/Dreamwidth/Livejournal)
2) It's invaluable when I find something debunking the latest nonsense, and can easily find it again 5 years later when the same nonsense resurfaces.
These two things seem difficult to reconcile. I wonder why Maciej is taking the "ask people to voluntarily convert" approach rather than the fairly typical "new features will only be available to paid subscribers" "carrot" approach, which may cause some annoyance for one-time payers, but is probably still more generally in line with people's sense of fairness. Perhaps because he needs the funding to develop those features in the first place.
Never used pinboard but frequently enjoy and admire the whole story and the level of dedication that flows into it. It’s like watching the story of „UP“ (the movie) happening in the internet.
Most businesses are neither fair nor transparent in their business decisions which is often interpreted as a sign of strength and thus fosters trust by users. Moves like this are uncommon and could / should give us faith in the product, but don’t , because we interpret transparency as a sign of weakness.
For those arguing that asking for money is somewhat a moral question: try to run anything someone relies on for more than year, then come back discussing the right topics.
https://vimeo.com/190908762
But, having said that, I'm planning to replace pinboard with my self-developed bookmarking site on repl.it.
or we'll convert you forcefully.
How many old time users there're anyway? If a business came to a position to raise cost on a small group of users I'd be questioning the project future overall.
Not qualified as active but looks like this is the majority of users.
I enjoyed this.
https://idlewords.com/#archive:~:text=ceglowski.com-,Threat,...
I’m also an old timer but didn’t get an email. I wonder if it’s due to having a low number of bookmarks which I regularly clean.
Now I guess I can send emails quicker.
After 6 yrs (still adding), I admit I never came back to fetch any of them.
A couple years ago I made the conscious decision to stop using reddit, but wanted something to replace those little moments of downtime[1] with.
So I bought a nice-looking Pinboard client[2] for my phone, and have trained myself to reach for pinboard in those little moments of boredom, generally reading through things in my "read later" queue.
[1] https://xkcd.com/303/
[2] https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/
Maciej's approach to this seems to be entirely reasonable: he's being open about the position he's in and giving users the option to support the site whilst not forcing change on them.
We could do with more services like pinboard - real utility, reasonably priced and not dependent on VC money and / or needing massive user growth to have a sustainable future.
Great solution Maciej!
I did something similar for Remarkbox [0] and switched all accounts to full access and changed the model to pay-what-you-can. I want Remarkbox to become a utility as well and this was the best idea I could think of.
[0] https://www.remarkbox.com
My biggest fear was forgetting to pay and losing all bookmarks but I asked and the answer was it would fallback to my old account so then it was a no-brainer: support pinboard and get archiving all for one small fee.
My biggest pain point is the lack of maintained iOS clients.
Here’s my shortcut to add an item to my Pinboard unread list. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/486bc6782a60453cbdbcf9988c3...
[1] https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622
Try the new Pins for Pinboard app, which just came out.
I'm hopeful that once I get the new API out, it will be a lot less painful to build on top of, and we'll see some life in the apps department. The current API is a calque of the 2004 delicious API and lacks a lot of basic features (like "tell me what changed since time X") that clients need.
I’ve paid for both. Pins is available on Mac too. It’s still new.
Maciej's writing is great too!
He's just generally a person worth sponsoring/supporting IMO.
Try raindrop.io or stavros's historio.us.
I feel that it's unfair to call the site "in shambles": I never had a single issue with it and I enjoy casually browsing the "popular" link. And,yes, I will upgrade to the yearly payment.
Also, this is the first time I've noticed © Nine Fives Software which is just the best tech business name ever.
> nothing to see here
If you're looking for a modern client for Pinboard, give it a try.
[1] Almost the only feature is to prefill things like title, description, etc. because I wasted so much time, when using pinboard, viewing source and copying these manually.
This support article for Pins would give a bit more detail: https://get-pins.app/posts/pinboard-sync-v1/
I wouldn't if it wasn't the case.
I am much more willing to pay a one-time fee for a lifetime unlimited plan than a subscription. No matter how expensive is the former or how cheap is the latter.
I just feel extra constant anxiety for every thing I don't own which sucks money from my account regularly, also ready to fail me as soon as I stop paying or move to another country or something. I feel insecurity and anger every time I'm offered a subscription.
Having bought something on a single-pay basis, on the contrary, floods my brain with the senses of achievement and security. Paying some bucks manually every month may do too (provided I find the service extremely useful), but not annually and not automatic (by the way I was extremely delighted to find an easy option to disable automatic payments in Pocket - the only service I've found to offer this).
By contrast, if you’re paying a recurring fee, you’re incentivizing the company to continue operating the service.
This probably is because I'm a gig survivalist and have never had a long-term stable source of income. What I buy during a prosperity time is what is going to keep me warm during a broke time and help me out of it.
Regular payment obligations are a danger, a paid-forever thing is an asset.
“Pinboard charges $22 per year for a regular account, or $39 per year for archiving and full-text search. You get discounts for multiple years...”
Meanwhile, looking under the hood of most “lifetime” offers means for the expected life of that version of the product. My experience is even the 90th percentile expected value is below 5 years. This service has stood out in contrast to that.
I appreciate your extra constant anxiety, yet manage to also be anxious whether I’ll miss noticing when the pre-paid months finally come due in Feb 2025. Hopefully by then pinboard will still let me pre-fund the founder’s money market account.
At some point it became a fixed price and then the annual price used today.
Thanks for being so straightforward about this and letting us use it for free all this time!
I'm really tempted to do this. I fear there is no going back if I do though. I've been in tight spots financially before so commitment of this kind makes me a bit nervous.