Ideas that have been beaten to death
ruky.me
ruky.me
What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do.
We don't know why we really make those bookmarks.
Bookmarking is not broken. We are.
I think a lot of us do know why we save bookmarks. I think your point depends on equating bookmarks with a "future todo reading list". (Similar concept: https://www.google.com/search?q=tsundoku)
But a more complete taxonomy of bookmarks:
- (1) saved urls for often visted websites like weather, status pages, etc. This saves time from having to recreate the google searches that finally lead you to that url or you found a deep url that bypasses a bunch of clicks.
- (2) an archival "memory" of urls you already read that may be referenced later. The bookmarks are not a "todo list" because the content has already been read. However, a future piece of information may make a connection back to some of them. The personal url archive acts as a more manageable subset of the entire web for reference.
- (3) a future reading list. Bookmarks are an alternative to opening up 100 tabs on the browser to read later
Most of my "bookmarks" are category (2) but I just save the urls in a text file instead of using a bookmark manager. For the really important references, I try to save as mhtml local files.
I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later. Keywords: digital gardening, data hoarding, Buddhism, hedonic treadmill.
This change in perspective turns your library from a "failure of accomplishment" to a "curated resource for future enrichment".
I love your comment and share your approach: my bookmarks are what will pop up if I search something before Bing tries to take me somewhere else.
By bookmarking, I both accept that I do not have the time (not now or ever) and therefore I may never read this, unless serendipity or need drives me to type the exact same keywoard
> I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later
No, as that would be an attachment: instead, you should let this comment go :)
Unfortunately these hard resets do not occur any more. So I have to close the tabs that I find not that interesting after some days. But closing tabs is much easier than deleting old bookmarks. I assume this is, because you have not commited yourself that much.
I wrote this as a manifesto - https://github.com/joelewis/readmelater and later went on to build a version of that vision not because I wanted to beat that idea to death, but just to scratch my own itch.
I want to be able to browse a curated collection of the web around some topic. I've come across a handful of really, really good tech blogs over the years. I'd like to be able to flip through them in one place. I'd like to be able to peruse my collection of in-browser games.
I want to get faster access to sites I use often. This might be seeding the autocomplete algorithm in the address bar, some kind of launcher, etc. I don't know what form this would ideally take, but it's a use case I want for bookmarks.
1) Link rot. I have bookmarks from as late as 2016, that 404 because the site is no longer hosted.
2) With smartphones, my browsing is split across PC and mobile, and I don't sync bookmarks across them (personal preference). This leads to more Google-first behaviour.
3) More and more stuff is getting bookmarked inside of apps. Reddit 'saves', Pinterest 'pins' and Twitter 'bookmarks'.
I find bookmarks work just fine for me in Firefox. However, it only works well for the 10 bookmarks that I use weekly.
If I bookmark anything and I don't use it soon after, it inevitably languishes. I have dozens of bookmarks from years ago for lectures I wanted to watch, tutorials I wanted to follow, games that I wanted to play, blog posts that I wanted to read. It was a list of things I wanted to be or do, but haven't taken the time.
A bookmarking tool can't change whether I have follow through. It's a tool to keep track of things, but I have to spend the time.
Better would be to save the entire page, not just the URL, as that would likely have more keywords that you'll remember later.
That's what I do, just save pages into a folder.
I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what a lot of examples are made of.
And once that technical thing is solved, the emphasis is on design.
I refer to my notes a lot. I worked with a guy who never took notes and was able to remember everything. I’m not that smart!
E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc.
Also I quite like writing a list at the end of the day for tomorrow. For me anyway get the day going well as its laid out there for you fresh, until the new fires arrive!
Funny, I believe in the exact opposite: if you forgot about the 12th, it wasn't as important as the first 11th. By not adding things to any list, I let my mind dynamically curate the priorities and expunge cached entries that I'd like to rationalize as "important"... but that aren't enough for me to bother remembering them.
Forgetfulness can be a wonderful tool, because there will always be more things you may want to do than time. So instead of trying to achieve the impossible, I use this wonderful tool that comes factory installed in all human beings!
I think there are two types of memories, and two types of notes as a result -- there's specific figures where you might only have to remember it for a couple days, and the exact value might be important, so that note/memory's value is very temporal. Then there's the stuff like problem solving strategies, where hopefully that information is integrated into your brain at some deeper level. The former might never be looked at again if it turns out you don't need the figure, the latter might never be looked at if the integration was successful.
New notebooks get a label on the front and only when they are full or I retire that hobby do they go in the notebook bin.
Every indie-hacker is bound to see gaps in existing solutions based on their biased ideas of organizing. Many times these ideas won't work out for the creators themselves as they over-estimate their capacity to maintain discipline over a stretch.
I find tagged notes insanely useful. I can't count enough times when I remember I read something about the subject but have no clue how to find that particular article. Luckily all those end up in whole, clipping and / or link form in my note keeper.
For anyone looking for a “Read Later” option, [Paperback](https://readpaperback.com/) is lovely as well, like Instapaper before all the bullshit.
"What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it .
Google is useless in these situations. I need an index contained by my prior search history. Had anyone built this yet?
Is it? I just googled the keywords from your sentence "fence before tear it down" and the first article is titled "Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking"
You can and should use it. Even if you don't directly, typing in the address bar usually plucks from your bookmarks first.
The lack of adoption for paid services (and lack of development for better in-browser functionality) is just our acceptance and recognition that the things we bookmark don't really matter. Any site that matters to you, you'll remember. Any site that you forget about but may need to bring up later, you can just as easily google for. And anything else is generally irrelevant or accepted as ephemeral, even if slightly stimulating.
I can't find most of the links I saved by using a search engine, and I think that's part of the problem.
I casually read a huge amount of interesting technical/business info on the web. But when I want to use that knowledge later (say in a business presentation or technical design), it's nearly impossible to find the original webpage! I can remember the basic idea, but I can't turn it into search terms that are precise enough for Google. ("What was the name of that programming law about tearing down fences?")
What I want is the ability to constrain my searches by pages I've personally visited. Even better would be able to "star" pages to say "this is good, rank higher in future personal searches".
Has anyone built that yet? Why or why not?
Maybe FF is not doing it because they own pocket. But true there is conflict of interest that I didn't see until I read your comment.
What people really need is a way of recalling instantly every snippet of information from every website they have ever visited on any device in a timely fashion. Which sounds tricky to implement.
I use Pocket so that if ever I’m out of network I’ve got a collection of interesting articles to read but rarely remember to do that either.
I did it because even I used to bookmark stuff but then forgets all about it. So having it sticking out to your face every time when you open a new tab will at least make you go out and read it.
Unless we have amazing memory, or put in work to build something like a memory palace, nothing accomplishes that.
Chrome's poor bookmarking must be intentional to push people to search – other browsers poor bookmarking I can't as easily explain – but some browsers used to have better/more useful interfaces for these kinds of things.
I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it.
I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now.
Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me.
I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as pseudo-tags) while saving a bookmark, with the hope that I'll be able to use the correct keywords later when looking for the bookmark.
I would, however, like save them neatly in folders.
In case someone from the Chrome team is reading this, some features that would really change the game for us bookmark hoarders are:
1. bookmarks search: allow us to search exclusively within a folder.
2. bookmarks search: option to search only folder names.
3. when saving a bookmark, give us a search box we can use to search folder names, and then quickly identify and pick a folder to save the bookmark in.
4. tags for bookmark (similar to tags in Gmail).
You would then only need to add tags such as "read this on the weekend", "send to my wife later when I'm not at work" or "use this one in my upcoming blog post".
Otherwise, having them organized would be really handy when you are browsing your bookmarks or trying to find something you saw a few months back but can't remember the right keywords for it to show up in a search again.
#2 is an interesting, I'll think about it!
This short video gives you the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kg9yVMMAM&list=PLhaw8BE1ki...
I converted some to "Web Apps" (Linux Mint)
Zotero + the web connector basically allows me to do a lot of things that are usually only achieved with paid products. For example, full text search, saving HTML copies offline, linking related websites, adding tags and notes, all of this (and more) is possible.
No Firefox I don't actually want you to stick them in an account forever. The weight of my unfinished projects is crushing.
Honestly, and as someone who uses >1 browser, you are an outlier.
For the vast majority, you click the "beachball" or the "red fox" and that's how you internet.
And among those that use >1 browser, I don't want bookmarks or other stuff interoped/shared. I'm specifically using seperate browsers to keep things seperate.
I don't know how well Firefox Pocket works, but Google seems to have no issue keeping bookmarks between phone and desktops synced just fine.
But, I use Firefox everywhere except for one Android table that because of Google stupidity/cupidity/rapaciousness doesn't have room to install Firefox even though it has a nearly empty 128 GB SD card.
From a consumer perspective, a product has to be 10x better for me to pay for it. There’s simply no way to make a bookmarking app that’s 10x better - there’s just not that much room for improvement.
So no thanks, I don't want to pay to rent an extra organisational unit, and feed my obsession.
So personally I dump a ton of stuff into https://raindrop.io should I ever need it again (which is seldom).
You're inadvertently hinting towards an elegant solution: forget about trying to organize bookmarks. Instead, just hit a button to add that page to your micro-web, and later only use Google-like full text search for retrieving things.
It's the content search part that browsers are missing -- can anyone confirm whether Raindrop or other bookmarking services do it well?
Not really a web, is it? The web is not hierarchical like the folder/sub-folder structure of a browser's bookmarks; the web has a network organization.
One thing that hasn't been implemented ad nauseum would be a powerful, simple, easy, convenient and effective logic for reorganizing and untangling a hopelessly confused, poorly organized, redundant, error-infested and ill-conceived hierarchical knowledge base such as an outline of a extensive subject, a decades-old bookmarks folder, or the hierarchical call tree of mission critical enterprise software system.
What about:
- browser saves content of each bookmark
- browser’s search bar searches both existing bookmarks _and_ queries the user’s configured search engine
- browser shows results (not too many) from bookmarks above the search engine’s ones (in place of its adverts and removing duplicates would be better, but that might lead to lawsuits about tampering with web pages/deteriorating search results)
Maybe, your browser should also search your entire hard disk, email, etc?
It worked extremely well for me.
Hence the list of bookmarking apps mentioned, :p. I think they're all trying to solve this problem in one way or another.
If you really want to make a good bookmark app, you need to understand that the act of bookmarking, organizing bookmarks, and using bookmarks are three completely separate activities. When you create a bookmark, you want minimal interaction - click the star, maybe add a tag, and move on. When you're organizing bookmarks you want to review and restructure what you've already bookmarked into folders, a mindmap, etc. while taking into account the content behind each link. When you're using bookmarks, you want to leverage that existing organization scheme to find what you want quickly. Most bookmark features/plugins are decent at the first step of capturing the link, but are terrible at or completely ignore the rest.
I would love to see a bookmark app that was designed in the spirit of "Getting Things Done" - where ideas are captured quickly but then funneled into a system where they are later reviewed regularly and acted upon. Just capturing a list of bookmarks and regurgitating them to the user is not sufficient and can be easily replaced with a text file.
> Finally there is no problem to be solved in the first place. And everyone is creating a solution in search of a problem.
Personally I stopped using bookmarks except for something temporary that I use multiple times a day for a short period of time (e.g. work related notes, designs etc). The more general purpose solution is, well, Google because at the end of the day you will have a huge bookmark list that you will have to search through anyway.
The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers. I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it. So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.
That's like saying "I'm pretty happy with the address bar. I try to only click links and avoid ever typing in a URL."
I think having more links than that it's HOARDING. You have the feeling of creating value by saving the links but in practice you won't use most of them and anyway you have history and search to help you out.
Chrome even remove the bookmark bar by default. You have to add it back. That is to say Bookmarks is for power users and the most powerful ones are probably just being collectionist rather than pragmatist.
in practice you won't use most of them
No, you won't use most of them. Because you're not a bookmarks user.
I used Google to find an old tweet of mine to get a link to an old product today. It was very easy.
Any specific bookmarking app adds an extra step to any URL you would record on any other website in its context. So the solution is basically amounts to organizing uncontextualized URLs (hard to remember anyways) or make a somewhat useless record when there's a more contextualized record elsewhere.
A better tool would be something which captures URLs in their context. Like dated list of HN posts/comments I upvoted. Dated list of interactions with Jira. Etc.
Same thing with Spotify Liked Songs. That's basically bookmarks for songs. It's just A) better integration and B) social-it is it's own contextualization.
* [https://ruky.me/2022/02/01/ideas-that-have-been-beaten-to-death/ Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me)
** [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166357 HN discussion (2022)]
* [Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me)
* [HN discussion (2022)]
I think the reason this comes up is that people have more and more stuff to keep track of, and more and more of peoples stuff is accessed in a browser. Not so long ago there were standalone apps for email, word processing, spreadsheets, group chat, bug tracking, CRM etc etc. Now all of that stuff is inside some web app I get to in Chrome - me all all the other billion+ knowledge workers using Chromium. Thats why everyone has 50 tabs open at any given time.
When almost everything I want to track has a unique URL it opens up possibilities and the browser builders have not been keeping pace.
That's my favorite tool now for capturing videos, bookmarks, articles, etc content.
Totally worth the price - especially due to the permanent copies. There have been multiple times where the content disappeared from online shortly after I found it, but since Raindrop.io had a backup, I got to read it still.
My closing words: Stop searching for the best manager and make Raindrop.io your new friend :)
DISCLAIMER: I'm in no way connected to the service nor will I receive anything for endorsing it. I'm just a really happy customer.
The thing is, I usually don't read it later.
Next time you bookmark something to read later, or send it to yourself, or whatever you do - maybe stop and ask: am I actually ever going to open this again?
Chances are you're reading articles to procrastinate, and if it's too long or not interesting enough to read even then, bookmarking it is just procrastinating on the procrastination.
A generic online storage system with Excel-like properties.
If that existed, then people would use it for bookmarks, and probably also for a host of other types of online storage needs.
And the author seems to forget about pinterest
In fact I’ve been blogging about it as I build it https://omnindex.substack.com/
I am sure there are some people making money with bookmarking somewhere…
I think you've never heard of Pinboard. Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard, it will crush you.
If you would allow me to plug my own personal bookmarking app - Mrkff [0] - pronounced `Mark off`. I went through YC in 2019 for it, and I launched it in 2020.
I also built a cross-platform web-extension for it too using a small framework (Desolate-Zero) I made for the web extensions to make use of all the features of both chrome and firefox. It just a simple click extension and click bookmark and the server takes care of the rest.
Basically I opted to make a full-text searchable version of every webpage I bookmark. A copy is also stored on the server, I intended to paywall downloading the actual webpage text, but make it searchable in the free version. This way I can search for obscure words or phrases that were on the webpage that I remembered while not remembering the actual webpage. I had an auto tag system on it too derived from the actual text of the web page. V2 is set to expand from text to video, pdf, audio etc.
I had a lot of fun with it, but this version is lacking in certain aspects, and I've spent the last 6 months working on version 2 of this app. I certainly didn't know how widespread this type of app was to be honest. But I use my solution on the daily, so I'll probably continue working on it.
[0] - https://mrkff.com
Think simple: even something that could just ingest bookmarks from chrome/edge sqlite database and process them into a custom search engine (that would NOT expose said links to say google, even if they are public links) using good old tf-idf would be extremely valuable.
That's my only criterion.