The Bookmarking Data Model Is Wrong for Highlighting

FWIW, lately I've been keeping my notes as markdown files in a `~/wiki/` directory, and the most common links are now HN posts.

I find the HN discussion often adds a lot that will be relevant. For example, in `~/wiki/machine-learning.md` the section on specific LLM models is a nested bulleted list, with the top level the names of specific models (sometimes as links to their canonical landing package, and the bullets under each are usually very relevant HN post links, and links to official other pages for that model.

I only polish it when I really have to: the priority is to capture the info, because 15 seconds now might save me days or an entire endeavor later. But spending more time than that can discourage capturing info, or later make me resistant to doing a quick split of pages or sections that really should happen immediately (because I don't want to spoil the polish that I spent time on).

In Markdown, my current HN post links look like:

    [HN, The Bookmarking Data Model Is Wrong for Highlighting (lgug2z.com),
    2023-05-16](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964335)

(My Emacs mode hides the URL part, and makes it look like an underlined blue hyperlink, with the remaining markup characters de-emphasized.)

It's a variation on the familiar citation format, which I also use:

    [Jane Doe, "Some Article Title", *Some Journal*,
    2023-05-16](https://journal.example/12345)

In the rare case I want to quote an entire HN comment in my wiki (e.g.,, some super-useful insider scoop that might disappear), I'll just click to its page, select it and copy&paste the test with `>` characters, and then turn the header line into a Markdown link to the comment page URL.

Someday, I'll make a browser plugin for the copy&paste parts, while still keeping it very simple.

This discussion conflates comments with highlights, which are two different animals altogether.

The distinguishing feature of highlights is that they are anchored to a specific passage in a (hyper)text, which you want the bookmarking tool to make visibly distinct, searchable, and so on. Ideally you want this feature to work seamlessly across paginated texts as well as on PDFs.

Comments are an entirely different animal, and the way they do (or don't) interact with highlights will depend on how people use the site socially, which is not really within the control of the site author.

Binning bookmarks, highlights, and comments together as "content" is like calling wedding cake, bobcats and lighter fluid different kinds of "matter"; it's reductive to the point of uselessness.

> the URL is an imperfect proxy for the article

I find this part important but misleading. The URL is a fine way to identify the article, but it's important to separately identify and link to the multiple discussions that can be had about any given article. For example, an article URL doesn't unambiguously identify a HN discussion as the same URL is submitted and discussed multiple times.

Rather, this may be the gist of OP: Because we post URLs without top-level commentary here, the HN discussion (and HN URL) isn't a single, meaningful conversation either. Only when we get to each top-level comment (identified by the comment URL), we have conversations that it may make sense to highlight.

Part of the challenge of firehoses of links or hilights being less valuable to others, is that they are the residue of an particular persons thought process and that thought process was clear to them but obviously not us. A description of the list might help, but there is something more. We have these thoughts for a reason and my motivations will be very particular to me and you probably won’t care so much about them. So yes knowledge can be social but it is first hyper personal and then social if you can find people with similar motivations and thoughts. But to most, that residue of thought will just feel like a pile of stuff they don’t connect with. It takes a lot of effort to recast it for a broader audience and that’s more blogging than note taking. Finding your cohort is an altogether different project as well, you need to find an existing nexus of the right people if it exists or become the maintainer of one and attract those people, this is more like being an influencer or party planner. The idea that any note taking platform will be the nexus is unrealistic, so I think we will always have these hyper personal digital gardens and out of them we will harvest things to share with others, sometimes you put out a stand of free carrots at the end of the driveway, sometimes you bring a basket of raspberries to a friend you know who loves them, most likely you take it all to the farmers market, lastly maybe after much planning and work you host a garden party but it won’t be in the actual garden beds but in the adjacent lawn. :-)

so essentially what amazd (1) could have been 10 years later if i had kept working on it. I remained amazed (pun intended) that 10 years later (after I started working on this), we still don't have a very popular platform for this sort of workflow. Full disclaimer: I've come to use readwise.io more recently

(1) http://amazd.com/ahmad

https://histre.com/ (d: founder) does use the page url to tie the highlights[1] together with the notes and highlight-specific notes. But each of them can be referenced individually too of course.

People share collections of notes / highlights / bookmarks with their team. Public collections live here: https://histre.com/public/collections/ but you're right that highlights of one user are hardly useful for another random user. It is extremely helpful for the team that's working on the same project though.

[1] https://histre.com/features/highlights/

More context from a HN thread here.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35942325

If you want to call it with an early-2000s-vabing name, "webquotes"