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).
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).
So what do you think, does del.ico.us can have a second run under Pinboard creator?
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!
i still have nagios nightmares.
Only ocassionally.
> 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.
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.
I personally think RSS was killed when social networks shifted to social media...
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.
It is possible for software to be finished and only require minimal maintenance.
Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-finder/ijdgeed...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I still subscribe to feeds in a different tool but it's not the same.
Also, "not the same"... can you be more specific? (And which tool?)
Inoreader is the only RSS reader I'm comfortable with, Thunderbird's also ok. They aren't "widget" pages though.
RSS.
What I can't figure out is why there's a persistent myth that RSS has somehow vanished from the internet...