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Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

113 points by douge1 ↗ HN
Perhaps I'm not in the know, but I find it hard to imagine that we encounter a site, we bookmark it into what's often a poorly self-curated / organized taxonomy, and then rarely ever go back to it, what do other people do to manage their bookmarks, or to even share them? I love "awesome lists" as well, which are often just a bunch of well organized bookmarks anyways, so what do people do that's better than this?

137 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] thread
slater
pinboard.in & raindrop.io ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
altneu
I organized my sources into a simple RSS reader I visit daily: https://altneu.me/rtr/
te
Oooh, I like this a lot. Source available?
altneu
thank you! sure i can give you the source. i just made it, no back-end ui still... drop me a line (link in my profile)
kcartlidge
I love the layout and font choices (the background is a little too dark for my tastes, but at least it won't hurt the eyes on mobile).
altneu
thanks for the feedback, i get what you're saying. i am thinking of doing the dark version too.
codetrotter
If something is particularly interesting I just post the link to HN :^)
bo1024
One effect of the massive complexity of web standards is lack of innovation and competition in the browser space.
rasz
They have, its called having 400 hibernated Tabs open :)
CodesInChaos
For people suffering from terminal tabbitis (I hit 7.5k), I can recommend the one-tab extension.
baal80spam
> I hit 7.5k

...how?! Why?!

I'm pretty sure my maximum was ~15 tabs.

tobr
It’s easy[1] to open a new tab and forget about it. There’s no specific time or prompt to revisit it and make a decision to close or keep it except when your machine gets slow.

1: That is an understatement - easy as in, 100% automatic and subconscious, like taking a breath. Think about how fast you’ll rack up 7.5k breaths. It’s not a big number.

douge1
LOL, I've seen like 50+ on someones screen / zoom, and I'm like Matt how do you even know what's open!
theonemind
Bookmarks mostly get implemented in the browser, and going for big market-share drives the UI and features toward targeting the lowest common denominator. Some people out there don't know the difference between facebook or google and the WWW itself.

I still use Firefox in part because the bookmark tagging and the awesomebar work marginally better than what Chrome does.

Browsers and web UI have gotten dumbed down since even the more power-user oriented days of Firefox and prevalence of RSS.

atarian
I've started using the Arc browser as my daily browser and really like how it treats bookmarks as tabs. Basically, bookmarks and tabs are on the same visual level but separated by a divider.
ahelwer
I don't know about anyone else, but "giant list of media to consume in the future" be they games, movies, books, or blog posts is antithetical to me actually eventually enjoying that media. The value of having a list of things that I thought might be interesting but not interesting enough to read immediately is basically zero.
alanbernstein
For me it's more often quick searches about an idea for something I want to buy/make/research, maybe as part of a larger project.
mekoka
That's certainly a take on living in the now. Consume it now, or don't. Don't save it, don't delay it. If you want it, find it and read it. Now. All of it.

I think not. Bookmark.

johnthuss
In Safari at least, bookmarks appear as results in the search bar so the fact that they are unorganized is mostly irrelevant. That said, I only bookmark things that a web search doesn't easily return, which is a small set of things.
savolai
Not sure why bookmarks should be separate from your knowledgebase otherwise. Why not use Notion clipper and a database in notion for maximum flexibility?
douge1
This would work too, but can't as easily share, and need to switch back and forth, I suppose, but instead of using Notion, I use a markdown-based document, that I manage a lot of this in now + some firefox bookmarks.
voisin
It would be great to have AI suggest tags/categories, ability to snooze and recall at set times, and see when the site was last accessed.

I think bookmarks fail because they are buried away and not front and centre, and they mix the concepts of “notes for future reference” and “regularly visited favourite sites”.

douge1
Yea, like, I wish it can combine both, and relate them, even suggest to me, what else I should be reading, that's related to it, but isn't a google search related topic.
voisin
It would be great if you could highlight the thing on the site that matters to you when you bookmark it so that the context was preserved. I find I forget, months later, why I bookmarked something.
paultopia
I feel like you could probably roll your own decently well here with a scraper plus a topic modeling library.
hunter-2
Del.icio.us used to be really good. It's a shame they got acquired and shut down. I don't think there is anything that does a good job with bookmarking today.
darrmit
Pinboard is every bit as good as Del.icio.us.
MollyRealized
Respectfully, it is not, unless you mean that as heavily backhanded. It seems as if Maciej has mostly abandoned any form of customer assistance or help, even for those who've paid money to him.
theshrike79
It used to be, but the sole admin has a habit of just disappearing off the face of the earth randomly.

I paid for the archival and all, but I'm moving my stuff to raindrop and seriously considering self-hosting something.

dotcoma
I’m mostly happy with pinboard.in
tkuraku
The need has been mostly eliminated for many people with the ability to search.
wilg
Yes, I don’t really ever use bookmarks.
douge1
Yea, that is true for sure, like it's so easy to Google Search, but often times I find something related to let's say "data versioning" that might be something like "slowly changing dimensions" but and they're both 'related' but I can't for the life of me remember that they are related 3 months after when I go back to look at it.
TylerE
Or just autocomplete. Most of the sites I use on any sort of regular basis will autocomplete off 2 or 3 characters.
nmeagent
My perception is that Google search is getting markedly worse over time, and many other free search engines seem approximately as useless. I can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future (or now in some cases) when many users will wish they had bookmarked various interesting sites because they can no longer reliably find them.
TylerE
URL’s stopped being canonical
falcolas
IME: Link rot. When your URLs aren’t valid for more than a few weeks, there’s no reason to keep them; it’s easier to search (not that search is always reliable over time either).

Any reinvention would have to incorporate search and keep track of sufficient content from the page to do a search for its new location. Either that or link to 3rd party content storage (i.e. archive.org et.al.)

douge1
Definitely see that, 90% of the time, I forget about those links, and thus they rot, but sometimes I need to go back, or want to have a well maintained list, also, would love for that list to be updated with AI and "refreshed" with updated / related content.
Froedlich
I go through my bookmarks every five or six years, weeding out the dead links.

Surprisingly, many of them go back to the 20th century, and a few even to 1995, when I was running Mosaic on SCO Unix.

Now that disk space is so cheap I've been archiving many of the old links to local storage. A really nice bookmark function would do that automatically, but most modern browser interfaces seem to be following Chrome's lead and shuffling bookmarks off into a submenu ghetto as everything turns into a kiosk-style UI.

cglong
I've used the Collections[1] feature in Edge for this. It essentially acts as a one level deep folder where you can store links and text notes related to a subject. It also has built-in support for sharing.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not in Edge.

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/organize-...

douge1
I like Collections, it's a good concept, I'd love to have something that I can use across devices, and share a collection with people, would be kewl to have it integrated with "awesome list" concept from GitHub.
throwaway1777
Well there’s always Pinboard. I think the problem is there’s not much money in it unless you go the route of a social network or advertising/leadgen site.
Centigonal
for bookmarking articles, you have https://getpocket.com/ and https://www.instapaper.com/

"Social bookmarking" started with deli.co.us and has largely been subsumed by reddit.

Beyond some level of complexity, Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, etc become bookmarking tools

...but the ultimate place to find the bookmark managers are in the Chrome and Firefox extension stores:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/bookmark?_category...

There doesn't seem to be any money at all in this space, and any really groundbreaking innovation will be folded in by the browser vendors, so I don't expect there to be much more thwn what's already here.

douge1
Cool sites, related, yes, agreed about "social bookmarking", but feels like, why do we create all of these "awesome list" for GitHub then, like that's a way to share a curated list of links, kinda like deli.co.us.
elnygren
audience

GitHub is the logical place for an “awesome react” list even if it’s not necessarily intended for that.

sdwr
I think there's a fertile middle ground in the triangle between wikipedia, reddit and pinboard.
douge1
why wikipedia? I can see reddit + pinboard.
sdwr
Bookmark as reference page / community cork board. Invert the "feed" structure. Instead of going to r/whatever, see new comments on all of your saved bookmarks.

Can also piggyback off / strangler fig existing website structure. Ex. bookmarks to titles on goodreads.

Add in a similarity graph (people also bookmarked x), and a democratic way to merge bookmarks that point to the same object.

And if you want to get really nutso, add a resource management system where ppl pay for attention - mint bookmarks as NFTs, commenting has a cost, invest in a bookmark to boost global visibility and get a % of commenting cost

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LunarAurora
Why just invert, when you can offer multiple view simultaneously ? :

1- We keep the r/whatever (subject matter) stream like view

2- We can always have that enhanced "saved bookmarks" view you talked about. They are not mutually exclusive.

3- To expand on your "reference page" (Wikipedia-like) idea, the bookmarks should be more malleable: We ought to be able to collaborate on reorganizing them under different tag-systems/hierarchies (while they keep their original comments and score)

So it is 3 complementary views: stream view (current Reddit/HN link-posts), personal view (current bookmark managers), and reference view (a more structured “awesome lists”)

Most sites do have at least two (mostly 1+2), but one at least is always rudimentary (like the HN favourites). I myself tried to combine 2+3 (for a private team) using the coda raindrop pack https://coda.io/packs/raindrop-io-11475

sdwr
Yeah, good points. #3, "tag cloud" idea is great, and lends itself to view by tag.

I'm coming at it from the direction, where I see the primary action as "collecting" / "cultivating". Ex.

1. See an article you like

2. add it to bookmarks/instantiate the global bookmark

3. curate it a bit - add an archive link, some tags, link to related article

and then the reward is

4. get notified when someone else bookmarks it + comments, a week or a month later

so the inversion is - on HN/reddit, something gets posted once and there's a big discussion and it disappears. this is the opposite where the page grows over time

How did your project turn out?

LunarAurora
You are correct. The primary action is key.

Yesterday, a Show HN [1] was an RSS reader that displays related HN/Redddit comments. I can imagine bookmark managers alerting you in a similar fashion. It will not be as integrated as you specified (single thread by link...), but the scale will be much bigger : Theoretically you can link it (crawl/api) to any site, then you get a dashboard+notification on your existing bookmarks for new

- discussion threads (HN/Reddit...)

- annotations/notes (Hypothesis.is...)

- reviews (alternativeto.net...)

My coda/raindrop "project" is just a "doc template" we use sometimes to organize bookmarks in a small team. It is not supposed to scale beyond that. Many Coda features [2] come handy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34188734

[2] like voting, grouping columns, collapsing outlines, hover cards, and word/tag clouds

sdwr
The closest thing I've seen is https://ampie.app/, which goes in a similar direction. I bounced off of it (too cluttered, privacy concerns w browser extensions), but it has a lot of the pieces there.
longnguyen
Not exactly “reinventing” bookmarks. But I’ve been working on a micro SaaS[0] to send interesting articles, newsletters and RSS to Kindle. And it kinda “forces” me to actually read those articles, and not just send them into oblivion.

If you’re developing a reading habit in 2023, give it a try.

[0]: https://ktool.io

douge1
Actually, I have a Kindle, and this is a great idea, I like the distraction free point of Kindle's, I'll need to "bookmark it" and give it a shot
longnguyen
I see what you did there haha.

My most favorite routine now is to subscribe to Hacker News RSS[0] and read top posts on my Kindle. Best of both worlds to me since HN could be quite addictive and unproductive sometimes

[0]: https://hnrss.github.io/

tippytippytango
The only time I need to save a website it's in the context of some notes, I prefer to cut and paste the exact url into my notes. Bookmarks without context aren't that useful otherwise.
douge1
Often times, I copy/paste it into a markdown notes that I keep, and then search for it in there, but I feel it's locked away a bit in there, as much as I love markdown!
tenebrisalietum
Shiori is a self-hosted bookmark manager that uses tags and it's what I use now. https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

I've been strongly preferring methods that let me tag items and have a good search - either in addition to or instead of putting them in a folder. If I don't like the "taxonomy" I can just add more tags, instead of constantly trying to figure out the one folder where everything should go.

I can share by creating an additional visitor user, or use the import/export commands. I hope those get built into the UI sometime, but I rarely share more than a single bookmark at a time.

It is an extra step to copy/paste links into Shiori versus browser built-in features, but I prefer not to trust or rely on browsers for my bookmarks unless at work. Seems like everyone wants sync those to accounts without my explicit consent.

douge1
Clever, surprisingly, I've never seen this, I'm going to clone it, also I'm a gopher as well :)
ShamelessC
Pocket, Collections and reading list fit this description. Really though, it’s just not the way many people think. We don’t navigate rigid taxonomies in order to remember things. Given an excess of available information, a loose semantic connection to a given website is all you really need to know how to get back there (or at least to find similar information again via another search) at a later date.

Also - make use of your address bar’s search functionality. Bookmarking as implemented is still useful.

Seems like something a librarian might enjoy though heh.

NelsonMinar
I have run a linkblog for 15+ years now. It's basically bookmarks (and stored in Pinboard) but my focus is on publishing a social media feed for others to read. https://www.somebits.com/linkblog/

Linkblogging used to be a thing people did in the heydey of early 2000s blogging. Now it's mostly lost as a form. The spirit of it lives though in the way Mastodon, Slack, Facebook, etc make it easy to share a link and have a preview for it. What's missing is an archival backup view of that sharing. Pinboard gives me mine, but I seldom use it other than to search for something specific I vaguely remember.

kcartlidge
I just popped over there and the second entry was "Poppy War influences". So I wanted to thank you for reminding me that I really enjoyed the first book and need to get around to the others in the series.
ei8ths
Yes finish it, its a good series.
ilyt
My bookmarks now are my browser's history and search results But I gess there is Pocket, I used it for a bit as method to mark site from phone to look at on desktop
crdrost
Yeah so the biggest problem with bookmarks is that they don't sync across devices very well, and a secondary problem is that you can't tag them or leave a note about why you care.

If something is ONLY relevant to me in a work context at my work web browser I will store it as a bookmark there.

If something is related to one of my broader life projects, like it makes me take a different perspective on that thing, then I take the time to open up Google Keep, write a blurb about my new perspective, link the article, and tag it accordingly.

I've been contemplating moving these to Obsidian so that the notes can be aggregated and cross-linked, but I am noticing friction where this defeats the abstract point of bookmarks where they are "dump and go". Probably I want to keep using Keep but then have periodic checkins where I move everything from Keep into Obsidian and delete it from Keep?

pantulis
On macOS, I don’t use browser bookmarks any more. I just drag from the address bar to a specific iCloud Drive folder as a.weblog file. Its slightly cumbersome, but then you get sync and browser independence, which is nice.