Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

This is a type of FOMO. You start collecting Absolutely Essential Reading in tabs, stuff that you'll for sure read later, no joke, seriously.

You never will.

But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily.

I got over my tab-itis with Pinboard[0]. If stuff seems to sit in my tabs for too long, I can send the link easily to Pinboard, slap on a few tags if it's an unique one or grab a few of the suggested ones if it's a common bookmark.

With the Archiving feature it'll even mirror the content for me so it doesn't get lost in the tides of time.

I'll never look at most of the stuff I pin, but my mind is at ease because the precious stuff is stored =)

[0] https://pinboard.in/

One way to combat this FOMO is to remember that the subset of web pages you'll never read that also just happen to have caught your attention is dwarfed by the billions of web sites you don't know about and won't ever read. There's no particular reason to privilege this former set in your mind based solely on the randomness of having noticed the items within it. They're just more pages in the set of billions of pages that you won't ever read.

The water that splashes into your boat is the same as the rest of the water in the ocean.

Chiming in to say this was one of my checks notes currently 508 tabs that I saved to read later which I did eventually come back to read and engage in so tab hoarding isn't entirely always fruitless.

> But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily.

Tabs are hardly any different.

I do the same thing, especially the "not reading later" part. but it's a kind of hack that works for me.

By posting this, you just prompted me to do my routine of "evaluate, add, close".

Problem is some of the short-term ones that I "really want to read" – well, I'm not closing those. So it's a partial solution.

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