I'd say their original recommendation system was the best ever, and nothing like it existed. Is there anything like this these days? if not, I'm thinking of making a decentralized alternative.
The recommendation engine has yet to be built so would love to hear more about what you liked best.
I'd say this kind of recommendation is not hard to do. Pocket simply went to the dark side for monetization reasons.
This is why I wanted to look for a decentralized alternative that can be self hosted, yet communicates with other nodes for recommendations.
* Some links I added a long time ago are permanently lost because the original page got taken down. It'd be much better if a permanent snapshot was taken(including all the images, this is pretty easy to do with something like https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile) of the page and is available even if the original page is lost.
It just misses a recommendation system.