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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

I started using Delicious, and then Yahoo completely changed the service. Utterly. It broke a bunch of features.

Switched to Pinboard and never looked back. And it's stayed just as rock-solid as it was on day one.

Also, if you're using Delicious to archive some personal bookmarks, I trust those to be on Maciej's servers more than Yahoo servers. I don't know what kind of privacy settings Delicious has, but even if it's as painless as Pinboard's, I wouldn't really trust it.

In particular, all of your bookmarks will certainly be analyzed on Yahoo servers. Whereas I trust Maciej not to perform experiments on random people's bookmarks.

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> In particular, all of your bookmarks will certainly be analyzed on Yahoo servers. Whereas I trust Maciej not to perform experiments on random people's bookmarks.

Well, there is this blog entry from August:

Researching Link Rot "This week I'll be running a little experiment in link rot,in preparation for an upcoming conference talk" https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/

Which includes this paragraph:

"If you are uncomfortable with this research and wish to opt out, please email me with your username, and I'll keep your bookmarks out of the pool. If you have questions, ask me on Twitter or email me privately, and I'll be happy to answer them."

While there's only so much privacy you can technically expect from an operator of a web data storage service, I think being upset about an opt-out study - announced only via blog and twitter - that would benefit the operator personally and users almost not at all isn't really unreasonable.

Edit after downvote: I use Pinboard and like it, think Maciej is a fantastic guy, and don't personally have problems with this study, but come on guys. He'll be alright with some dissent.

I don't think it is owned by Yahoo anymore.

Or whoever. If it's a free service, it's subject to monetization.

Why does it matter that much though? It was other issues that made Delicious fail, including that Yahoo sucked at acquisitions back then (they have since improved).

Depends what you're bookmarking. Some people value their privacy. A bookmarking service probably knows almost as much about your political affiliations, your sexual orientation, etc as Facebook or Google does, after you use it for a couple years. I trust Maciej not to exploit that information.

So it's not really about whether another bookmarking service can deliver or not, for me. It's whether they're faithful steward.

Science Inc. owns it

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