Pinboard Turns Eleven
blog.pinboard.in
blog.pinboard.in
Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary."
OMG. I think I stopped and laughed for a solid 30 seconds when I read this.
I don't think I've ever felt so "seen" in my whole 25 years as a programmer.
But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut.
What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked.
I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.
I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.
...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.
Almost all of those are automatic, though, from Twitter/Instagram/Pocket/RSS favouriting thanks to their own account linking and IFTTT.
My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing, but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Yes, Microsoft is horrible, but they're also spectacularly wealthy. Ultimately I didn't subscribe.
Businesses need to ask from time to time if their business model is the right one for the current year. Expecting people that don't know you to give you $22 for a bookmarking service, without a trial period, might be wishful thinking in 2020.
[1] In a Western country that is. I know $22 can be a lot of money depending on the circumstances.
I later resubscribed at a higher price (I am fickle and decided I did actually want to use the service) - which I wouldn't have done had the customer service been poor when I asked for the refund first time.
Glad you decided to come back!
On reading my comment back it seemed a bit snarky - just want to be clear to all it was nothing Maciej said in his emails around the refund that made me think it was a pain to do - he was perfectly accommodating - I just personally assumed that it would have been annoying admin to issue the refund.
Thanks for making Pinboard Maciej.
??
I'm not giving $22 to someone I don't know and then saying, "Well the service sucks, but it's not much money." He claims to give refunds, but the time cost for me - assuming I actually get it - would be far more than $22. Again, this is 2020, the world has moved on from this type of business model.
Pinboard is an old school business. You pay money for a service, and if you don’t like it you get a refund.
"I use Google Reader, and Google isn't going anywhere."
I imagine requiring a credit card up-front cuts down on a ton of automated spam, and this tradeoff is worth it to pinboard.
You're actually (a) leasing usage of affordances provided by a system which someone else took the time to design and build, and (b) leasing hosting for your collection of bookmarks on someone else's system.
Why would you do that? Because you don't want to do any of these things: You don't want to spend time downloading and installing some bookmarking program, you don't want to design and build it yourself, you don't want to deal with storing data locally (even though it might be really a simple sqlite3 database).
Likely, you've rationalized you're lack of want through convenience, security, risk of data loss, someone else has done a better job at "solving bookmarking", etc. etc.
This is a line of reasoning which is perfectly valid. It's totally fine just subscribe to a service. However, it just so happens that your demand for such a service creates a market. And it's equally valid for others to charge you for what they offer.
Everything else is just opportunity cost calculations on your end. You don't want to fork over 22$? That's valid. But then you have to abide by whatever else the market is going to offer. If Pinboard ends up losing subscribers to Microsoft and sunsetting, then that has nothing to do with the quality of the service, but the very fact that potential customers are far too keen on compromising what they want, need and value in favour of the free, yet less-then-ideal offering from a corporate competitor.
The problem with "free" is that it's the very bottom of the barrel. It doesn't pay the operating costs of a service. The difference between Microsoft and Pinboard is that the former has the financial leverage to cover the costs of a "free" tier. It's this leverage that defines the edge when it comes to conquering markets, as it allows corporations such as Microsoft to set up a far more effective sales funnel. It just so happens that it also drives competitors out of a market, and stalls any form of innovation. As far as Microsoft is concerned, they have no need to build a Pinboard clone with feature parity, if customers are all too willing to abide with whatever OneNote allows them to do, even when that's less then ideal.
In short, there's simply no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the market tries to convince you otherwise. It's totally valid to feel that Microsoft is "horrible", but by the same token, customers eagerly relying on "free" services equally sets the bar for them to simply get away with "horrible".
For me, it's "Pinboard" vs. "text file". At $11/year, I would choose Pinboard any time. I've been a subscriber for years and I don't expect anything for free. But at $22/year, I'll go with the text file.
But it's now a yearly fee. Which is good for us grandfathered people, since it means the service will stay around.
I requested a refund and got it straightaway. Along with a kind reply from the owner. No issues. (I think I had paid via PayPal so I was hardly worried). Also... $22.
Must everything be a free trial? There’s a lot of issues and costs associated with that for businesses (and increasingly regulation).
Now that I see this post from the owner, I’m inclined to sign back up again. I could have been one of those actually attempting to do a mass import when he was fixing it. And him being on 10-year old tech probably greatly contributed to my personal experience.
As the product itself goes, I think it’s worthy and useful. Having it be mobile-friendly will be helpful not so much for me but when I want to share a list of links to some other people I know who haven’t used a full-size keyboard in five years.
For what it's worth, one feature I want to make work on the site is "create a sharable list of links to give people", it's a use case that comes up a lot.
I'm at 17,614 bookmarks 2,530 tags. And it's incredibly valuable to be able to go back and find things, even things I bookmarked and categorized a long time ago.
> so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers.
I agree. In fact, that was the second thing I noticed, right after the declining revenue numbers. Earlier this year I went ahead and paid for 5 years of archiving service (my account predates the switch away from a one-time payment so basic bookmarking is free) partly because I trust maciej to still be around in 5 years but mostly because I wanted to be sure I'm supporting the site.
I STRONGLY want this to be profitable and successful because it is such a valuable service.
In 2017^: revenue was $259k, costs were estimated $17k, archives 31.8TBy, 126M URLs.
In 2020: revenue was $212k, costs were not specified, archives 82TBy, 192M URLs.
Archives are 2.58x higher, URLs are 1.52x higher. So taking the higher of the two multiples and pessimistically multiplying the 2017 costs of $17k (the cloud has gotten cheaper but let's ignore that), we get $44k in costs (this is probably too high by 2x), leaving a profit of $168k.
Users dropped from 29K to 19K, so you should start worrying when users reaches 5K, assuming that costs scale linearly with data (which they definitely do not).
In all likelihood, you probably don't need to worry until users reaches 2K. At current rate, that's probably about a decade, assuming ten more years of no changes to the site (such as mobile support) and etc.
A couple of data points to help you calculate:
* active users is not the same as paying users, it's people who did something in the last month
* costs in 2020 will be something like $17,000 for hosting plus $8,000 for hardware and a few thousand bucks in travel/hotel costs to the colo. So say $30K.
* the reason hardware costs are high in 2020 is... massive expansion, so maybe people in this thread are missing something
It's been a frickin' journey. ~2004, started using Delicious. ~2005, built my own search site because Delicious couldn't handle searching through a few thousand bookmarks with a few thousand tags! 2006, contacted by a researcher looking into tag clouds because mine had more unique tags than bookmarks. 2012, migrated to Pinboard for a fixed lifetime fee. Best money I ever spent! Today, heard about the bookmark archive functionality and signed up immediately.
It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain.
I must admit my heart sank a bit when I read about the rewrite opening the door to new features. For my uses, Pinboard is pretty much perfect as is [and I've never noticed any problems using it on mobile]. I really hope the developer doesn't start adding loads of extra bells and whistles [read "bloat"] to try and attract new users. I just want my bookmarking service to be boring, reliable and so unintrusive that most of the time I forget it even exists... til I see an article like this on HN.
PS: Off-topic. But I really like the way "maciej" writes. He comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth, self-deprecating and funny guy. Such a refreshing change from all the 'trying-far-too-hard-to-be-hipster-cool' writing out there at the moment.
But with a name like "five nines software" customer expectations should be implicitly tempered ;)
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fibelatti....
If only more websites were like that!
[Yes I'm looking at you eBay, Amazon et al... who greet me by name, show me what I've bought recently and then ask me to login!]
I need to get going.
This looks like maybe a table shoved into the corner of a tiny restaurant, away from the main area.
Apparently it's night time.
I guess it's as good a place to write code as any other. :-)
"I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania."
https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
I suspect that's the kitchen :) My own kitchen table during this confinement period isn't too dissimilar...
The white bottle is just Greek table salt, though. No fun pills.
I’m geniounly curious because the way I treat bookmarks is that they are temporary links I wanna go back to, so they all end up being deleted sooner rather than later. When I want to visit a website I just type in the website’s name in my browser and either let autocomplete do its magic, or just let it take me to Google where I tap on the first link. The idea of keeping bookmarks saved and organized/tagged is alien to me.
The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.
Yeah I think this is my problem. I’m on iOS so I use Safari’s reading list feature to keep track of articles I want to read. But it’s just a dump, no organization, and after I read an article I don’t know what to “do” with it anymore so I just delete it.
I think I need to figure out a system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for the same things over and over again. Pinboard seems like it could help
Yep, this often frustratingly turns nothing up for me. Hence, Pinboard :)
So if I see, say, a good online tool for checking an email for spam-like features, I might bookmark that with tags of 'email', 'spam', etc. Then if in future I don't need to Google "email spam tool" and find 1001 irrelevant things, I can just search my bookmarks instead and find that it was https://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ (I just did this very search as I couldn't remember what that tool was called).
Pretty much every valuable tool or site I've ever seen is organized in such a way that I can bring it up on a second's notice.
I also can bring up things I once thought were neat and that I've totally forgotten about just by searching for a tag.
I also bookmark stuff I want to get back to; for instance, I do eventually want to start an SaaS, so I've got a lot of 'business', 'marketing', etc. links.
At work once, someone mentioned some particular technology and I said, "I think I have some links for that!" His office-mate promptly said, "You have a link for everything!" :-)
Everything I come across that I might want to be able to find my way back to goes into Pinboard as a bookmark.
The full-text indexing feature means it's my own personal search engine of (most things) I've ever seen. I imported my previous bookmarks, which go back to 1994.
Everything I come across that I will likely want to go back to and digest later goes into Pinboard as a bookmark set to 'unread'.
When I have some time to relax, catch up, and read, I open my list of unread bookmarks and work backwards. Or I skip back a month, or a year, or several. It's amazing what I'm reminded of. Sometimes I decide I don't care any more and delete or just keep links as bookmarks, but more often than not I'll go and read whatever it was I'd left as a gift for future me.
I wish it had a browser plugin but besides that it is amazing
just my opinion.
(i'm a customer, I love pinboard, and this affects nothing as far as i'm concerned.. I haven't ever needed customer service -- it just strikes me as rude.)
I've had a similar experience. Last year the site just wasn't working when I needed it, so I did not renew and moved to Larder.
Now I use pinboard for my youtube subscriptions, every time I subscribe to someone on youtube, I add it to pinboard and tag it.
Very useful when your subscriptions range from several different sports to tech or gaming.
Would do same for instagram but I have too many subscriptions and it's useless when someone changes their @account.
They could really do with a lists feature ala twitter.
It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.
So many the technology refresh did break something! ;-)
Disclaimer: I'm a customer.
Best $6,28 I ever spent...
Not directly related to this post, but I highly recommend his other writing too. Gluten Free Antarctica is a personal favourite: https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm
3 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinbo...
4 years (broken HTML in the elevenversary post): https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/07/pinboard_is_four_years_old/
5 years (broken HTML in the elevenversary post): https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/
6--7 and 10 are valid.
Nine is apparently Right Out.
Something happened in 2018. There are no stats for that year too.
This implies he just forgot about it.
I also saw a bug where it didn't include the end of tweets (possibly some sort of character limit). But that was pretty minor.
People get bored of maintaining, polishing or developing new features once the revenue stream is consistent. The product stagnates. Income stream starts to dry. People that once could manage frugally get used to have plenty. What do they do to get back on track? They increase prices. This is the beggining of the end. An order of magnitude smaller, but been there.
google:
tags:
- search engine
url: https://google.com
duckduckgo:
tags:
- search engine
url: https://duckduckgo.com