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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Those of you trying to curate large amounts of link should get together and create a public index of all that content. You could call the site yoohoo or something ;-)

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Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article again based on what I remember from it.

This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.

Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the content of the article you can't find, although you're sure you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...

In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search".

Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".

It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.

> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.

What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".

[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.

This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.

It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history?

I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.

Memex solves this problem.

Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title.

https://memex.garden/

I hate it when that happens, more often that not i remember the visuals of the site, then i try to find it in my browser history like a sucker.

I have yet to find a solution for this.

One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice side project idea I guess.

Install a web proxy (is Squid a thing anymore? It used to be the proxy server), configure your web browser(s) to use it, and have the proxy save all its content so you know where to search for a "known item search."

Seems like a nice companion to run on a pi-hole.

If I had a dollar for every topic I've read about and found fascinating and can hardly describe with any more detail than that ...

> This doesn't always work

The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens.

OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.

I have experienced that for sure.

Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.

I've used this website for years, for just that purpose. Can't believe it's still up, actually.

https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/

I unironically think social bookmarking is a missing product. Not because it doesn't exist, but because nothing has gained enough mindshare and momentum to be dominant and widely used.

Del.icio.us was a big deal ~15 years ago. I made a Mac client for it (Pukka) that sold pretty well and the service was much talked-about in tech circles, not just for researchers. This was in the early era of social networking as a whole ("Web 2.0") as well as this idea of "wisdom of crowds" for emergent context to bubble up from public tagging.

Yep. I was there for and loved all that era. But nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for it. Pity.

Folksonomies was one of the terms used back in the day when delicio.us was one of the current hotnesses. I still use pinboard and it's handy. But, like RSS, this sort of thing mostly appeals to researchers/analysts/journalists/etc. The average person mostly doesn't care about saving and even loosely organizing a lot of information.

The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no money to be made in this type of website. These sites come and go, it is very difficult to monetize them.

I think it's great that there's no giant making money on top of this concept. It lets people do whatever they want to store and share links :)

Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and positive sum, I think.

And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are there any other examples at all?

I’m very close to having an old Delicious style site ready. Do you think people would pay $1 a month?

How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/ mo)?

Beyond some differing features and interface, there wouldn't be much difference.

They pay pinboard enough for idlewords (HN user) to live off it, and buy Delicious when they went broke.

Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for 35k.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102

Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running costs in 2017.

There are some detailed blog posts from the time about running costs somewhere.

Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose (cached version of content, super smart search function not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy, bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr. ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links, etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like for bitwarden.

Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against the growth of that network.

Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, tagging and the ability to search for links by page description, tags and user. The subscription fee would mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't be interested in selling ads based on user base size.

I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.

I already do: raindrop.io

Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked - if you get enough network effects, there must be some way to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that this is not the case.

so they need a different model for funding

StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love to have it back, particularly if the contents could be curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month")

If somebody can figure out a note/link app that becomes as easy to manage when you're adding your first note as when you're adding your thousandth note then such services will stop dying out.

Yes, I loved that era of the web!

I know it's not exactly what you're describing but a somewhat comparable option is https://www.are.na

delicio.us was pretty great in it’s day

Yes! One of the other comments got to the crux of this: nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for this. I think it's a shame.

i don't think any of the things I've liked that found a sustainable business model remained the way I liked them either

Pinterest?

I don't think so? But Pinterest makes no sense to me so maybe it is this and I just don't get it?

Isn’t that Reddit ?

Nope.

Hoarding data does not have to be a negative thing necessarily. Might I suggest checking out https://archive.org/about/. Create an account and install the browser extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...

WARNING: archiving can be habit forming.

I think this is a great answer to the issue of needing a service to manage archives.

Now the issue to me is how to convince folks it is worthwhile

There is likely no single good answer. Personally I break the issue into the long and short term. Long term (100s 1000s of years) the answer seems somewhat obvious. Preservation of information can be useful to future generations. Short term our societies are experiencing rapid change. Many things are built and soon discarded based on factors other than utility. So preserving the knowledge is useful for the minority of people that found those things useful. Also there is intentional mass truth distortion amplified by technology occurring. Preservation of the original sources of information is the first line of defense against it.

We've re-invented dmoz[1]. Now someone just has to slap AI and blockchain on the idea, and they could raise for a "modern" dmoz.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

didn't there exist a browser toolbar called stumble upon that allowed people to share interesting links

Or Google!

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