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Comment by brian_cloutier | Hacker News Reader

This is a lovely collection of role models.

However, as lovely as Maciej's talks are I cannot support the inclusion of pinboard the service in this list. It used to be amazing, and no longer is. Three of my support emails have never been answered. Exporting your archive no longer works (2 of my unanswered emails). Search does not reliably find my bookmarks (1 of my unanswered emails). Multiple times I have had to resort to scrolling through my bookmarks to find bookmarks I knew I had pinned, after searching on some substring of the title failed to return the bookmark.

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Exact same problem here. Archive backup doesn't work, mails are not answered. And it's not the first time.

When he was having fun dabbling in US politics, Pinboard was regularly misbehaving.

Archiving didn't work for weeks and months, after repeated mails, archiving worked again, failed again three weeks later. I went through that cycle several times.

There doesn't seem to be any monitoring or canaries in place, it's always "my account misbehaves, he does something, and the problem is manually solved". For me, not everyone else, presumably.

For god's sake, set up two or three dummy accounts and have them re-bookmark the same site again and again, see if it works. Have them export their archives every week, see if it works.

It became much more reliable when election season was over, but now it looks like he's lost interest in Pinboard again.

My subscription renewal is coming up and I'm thinking hard about leaving Pinboard. I like the interface, I like the features, I hate that it breaks all the time and the operator doesn't care.

You should check out Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovation. It's what pushed pinboard to success, and it's what will eventually be its downfall.

I understand your frustration, but a funny thing here is I get these comments the most when I'm actively working on the site. Doing this stuff solo means not being able to work on every level at once. I just spent a month out in California during the fires setting up a boatload of hardware to add capacity to the site, in part so that even very large archives have a truly remote backup, but that's not a benefit people see in their day-to-day use of the site.

At this point the only accounts that can't get an archive download link are the truly big ones, on the order of 100GB. Raising that threshold (which I believe affects you) was another reason to schlepp out to California.

So I get why it's frustrating to not have pet features like substring search built for you, or unanswered emails, but find it equally frustrating from my side sometimes. It's an old, complex site, and I'm an old, complex guy running it.

Maybe hire another person?

Thanks for the response! I was hoping that putting this somewhere public would be the way I find out you're still working on it :)

> but find it equally frustrating from my side sometimes

Yes, I've tried in my requests not to come off as mean or indignant, I understand you're a single person supporting what's now a rather large project. You probably don't get this enough: thank you for building pinboard and maintaining it. For many years it was a shining beacon of excellence that you didn't get enough credit for.

If you say you're working on raising the limit (the site claims mine is ~90GB, I guess it's just on the threshold) then I believe you and I'm happy to stick around a while longer. My complaint comes from not knowing what you're up to. Until this comment I hadn't seen any signs of life for quite some time. I know you've chosen to keep this a one-man thing, which limits the number of emails you can respond to, but even a twitter account with updates about the service would be appreciated.

> I get why it's frustrating to not have pet features like substring search built for you

I think I chose the wrong phrasing for this, I'm not asking for a new feature. Say that there's a bookmark with the title "COVID Recovery", a search for "COVID" might not return that bookmark. I haven't found a pattern to it, search usually works, but if I can't rely on search that sharply reduces the value in having a lot of bookmarks.

That’s a shame, because the article led me to listen to this talk:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c

Which I thought was amazing and inspiring.

This was fantastic, thank you for the link

I don't know if you've visited @pinboard on twitter recently, but it seems like Maciej's priorities may lie elsewhere at the moment, and I for one am OK with that.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard

That is the main problem with Small Tech. People suddenly lose interest.

I don’t agree that that’s a problem with small tech. Startups get bought and are shuttered; big companies change priorities and drop products. I don’t see a big difference.

Sure, but getting ignored or people moving on is hardly exclusive to Small Tech. In my experience, it's far more prevalent in growth-heavy startups than in small businesses.

There are a lot of big tech products where the megacorp has lost interest. Google has websites dedicated to listing their abandoned products or services.

Or people have multiple interests!

I'm reading those tweets and I don't understand the context. Could you clarify what are those priorities?

US elections by the looks of things.

Maciej is an absolutely brilliant writer, and it feels like that's where his passion lies. I agree that it might be time to either hire someone to take care of Pinboard for him or wind it down gracefully. The world needs his incisive, empathetic writing, and I don't think he has time for both.

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