A proposal for a better bookmarking service | Hacker News Reader

A proposal for a better bookmarking service

github.com

22 pointsvommina10 comments

This sounds like a service that I'd like to use, assuming that it had a strong privacy policy (never share my information with anyone, etc.) and was not financed by ads (I'd pay a yearly fee for it).

Another feature that I think is essential is having an effective way to search through my tens of thousands of bookmarks, including an ability to sort them by age. I'm constantly bookmarking articles which are interesting today, but which I'll have no desire to read in a year (e.g., political stories). In fact, it would be nice to be able to give a bookmark an expiration date when I create it, so I won't have to go back and manually purge all these unread bookmarks that I probably will never get around to reading. (Alternatively, there could be a feature that allows me to delete all bookmarks matching a particular hashtag that are older than a certain date.)

Auto-purging with an expiry date is a brilliant idea!

I have this huge repository of bookmarks too, most of which has become too outdated for me to visit again.

I can vouch that a personal crawler is useful - if a link goes away, I put it in an archive and update the link to The Wayback Machine. It's also nice to have a timestamp showing when the link was last available and the current "title" tag and meta description for the page (along with the original metadata on the date I linked the page.) It makes it easy to prune or correct broken links.

Someone pointed me to this thread today based on a tool that I just built that emails you all the bookmarks you set at the end of the day. You can find it at linkdrop.co.

Sounds very nice. A feature I'd love to see is not directly a timeout but a periodic reminder. I often start reading something (or I do read it) and then decide that I don't have the time now, but would love to read it (again) sometime. Giving me some of the booksmarks I haven't seen in a while (months) would be great.

Also, obligatory: automatically archive each site that I bookmark. Too often I've found myself trying to return to a bookmark only to find the page gone.

Author of the manifesto here. Thanks for the validation.

> A feature I'd love to see is not directly a timeout but a periodic reminder

Makes sense. That's something I had in my mind too. The default behavior will be a timeout-less, periodical reminder. I just felt having a timeout will help me prioritize an article when I'm in the zone.

As for me, most times there's this bursts of interest in certain areas (the zone) that gradually fades away with time. I'd like to use the zone, to complete my reading list related to that area of interest and hence the timeout.

It's great to see ideas on improving something like Pinboard - but I don't think this service is for me. A bookmarking service is just a digital version of my personal bookshelves. Although I often try to organize books in order of priority - I ultimately have come to realize that I prefer a big bucket that I can dip into. I've also gotten much better at looking through my old bookmarks to rediscover good stuff. And cultivating that discipline within is more valuable to me than farming the discipline out to a computer to nag me about.

I realize I am portraying the system in a negative light - but I am tired of being surrounded by automated systems, notifications, reminders and such. I wouldn't be surprised if most people would find this system helpful and very useful. I do believe that as we build massive personal information 'stores' that we are going to continue to need new tools and better archival/navigation skills - this might be part of that, I'm just not on board yet.

Your point is completely valid. I wish I have that discipline to go over my bookmarks and read interesting items. Most times, I head over to HN and pick up more items for my reading-list than to go over my bookmarks.

This project should be helpful to people who aren't used to go over bookmarked links periodically unless encouraged to.

Absolutely - and I do hope that this project can help you achieve your aim! If you can do that and help others as well - then this will all be _very_ worthwhile. For myself, I feel like I get too caught up in solving my problems technologically, when the problems are human. Curating my links was very repellant at first, but has now become a favorite past time now that I feel some competence. But good luck to you - we are all different, with very different motivations and struggles.

This sounds interesting. I'm using a mix of Pocket, Todoist and an "inbox" browser bookmarks folder to handle my reading list. It kind of works, but I'm not 100% happy with this setup. While I like your "expire date" idea, for me personally it's more important to not get every interesting resource that I find onto my reading list in the first place.

A shameless plug - I have written Static Marks [1], my own bookmarking app. I'm using it for most of my regular bookmarks. I've tried using it for my reading list as well, but I've came to the same result as you did - I rarely went through the list to actually consume the content.

[1] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

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