[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?
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Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?
Perhaps I'm not in the know, but I find it hard to imagine that we
encounter a site, we bookmark it into what's often a poorly self-
curated / organized taxonomy, and then rarely ever go back to it,
what do other people do to manage their bookmarks, or to even share
them? I love "awesome lists" as well, which are often just a bunch
of well organized bookmarks anyways, so what do people do that's
better than this?
Author : douge1
Score : 33 points
Date : 2022-12-29 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
| rasz wrote:
| They have, its called having 400 hibernated Tabs open :)
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| For people suffering from terminal tabbitis (I hit 7.5k), I can
| recommend the one-tab extension.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > I hit 7.5k
|
| ...how?! Why?!
|
| I'm pretty sure my maximum was ~15 tabs.
| elliewithcolor wrote:
| ADHD
| tobr wrote:
| It's easy[1] to open a new tab and forget about it. There's
| no specific time or prompt to revisit it and make a
| decision to close or keep it except when your machine gets
| slow.
|
| 1: That is an understatement - _easy_ as in, 100% automatic
| and subconscious, like taking a breath. Think about how
| fast you'll rack up 7.5k breaths. It's not a big number.
| douge1 wrote:
| LOL, I've seen like 50+ on someones screen / zoom, and I'm like
| Matt how do you even know what's open!
| ilyt wrote:
| My bookmarks now are my browser's history and search results But
| I gess there is Pocket, I used it for a bit as method to mark
| site from phone to look at on desktop
| crdrost wrote:
| Yeah so the biggest problem with bookmarks is that they don't
| sync across devices very well, and a secondary problem is that
| you can't tag them or leave a note about why you care.
|
| If something is ONLY relevant to me in a work context at my work
| web browser I will store it as a bookmark there.
|
| If something is related to one of my broader life projects, like
| it makes me take a different perspective on that thing, then I
| take the time to open up Google Keep, write a blurb about my new
| perspective, link the article, and tag it accordingly.
|
| I've been contemplating moving these to Obsidian so that the
| notes can be aggregated and cross-linked, but I am noticing
| friction where this defeats the abstract point of bookmarks where
| they are "dump and go". Probably I want to keep using Keep but
| then have periodic checkins where I move everything from Keep
| into Obsidian and delete it from Keep?
| pantulis wrote:
| On macOS, I don't use browser bookmarks any more. I just drag
| from the address bar to a specific iCloud Drive folder as
| a.weblog file. Its slightly cumbersome, but then you get sync
| and browser independence, which is nice.
| luketaylor wrote:
| I've been loving https://mymind.com/, which brings a lot of new
| innovations to a product that's more or less bookmarking.
|
| It tries to do a lot of curation and organization automatically,
| and it does a very good job at resurfacing what I'm looking for,
| given that I just throw things in there with minimal hand-
| categorization effort.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Because it's faster to Google something than to look for
| something in your bookmarks.
|
| A few people will bookmark things. Even fewer of them will ever
| use those bookmarks. In most cases this will limited to a few
| sites with weird URLs that will often be for work and these will
| be on the prominent real estate just below your tabs on Chrome.
| Anything hidden behind a menu is strictly WORN (Write Once Read
| Never).
|
| The act of organizing bookmarks in an exercise in building a
| hierarchical categorization, much like we had in the early
| Internet with the Yahoo directory and similar. These are never
| natural to use. The mental model is always imperfect and poorly
| remembered when you try to use it. It's the same reason "tagging"
| persists while "directories" don't.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| the only bookmarks i actually revisit with regularity are
| webpages that have some kind of tool on them (e.g. a BPM counter,
| a javascript minifier, etc).
|
| otherwise, the rest of my bookmarks end up being generated when
| i'm on some random site, see something interesting on the page,
| think wow this is really great let me bookmark it, press Ctrl+D,
| and then never go back to the site ever again. which isn't all
| that bad.. there's something nice about the feeling of just
| seeing all of the titles of those sites (and remembering when you
| found all of those URLs) when you click the bookmark menu, and
| all of the titles show up. it feels lived-in, like an old house
| with history.
|
| at some point, i decided an even better way of capturing
| bookmark-able moments was instead to take screenshots of
| something specific on the page, and collect them somewhere else,
| like on a blog. i dont need to go back to the actual page via a
| bookmark, because the image is enough.
|
| for example, here's where i collect curious and/or spam-like
| findings, in lieu of a bookmark:
| https://jollo.org/LNT/bb/effexor1for1dogs/
| douge1 wrote:
| Yea, I can see that, taking a screen capture, at one point, I
| was recording my daily work activities (when I was a
| entrepreneur) to be able to back to, I rarely went back to
| them, but something about possession of being able to go back
| and check on something I did.
| theonemind wrote:
| Bookmarks mostly get implemented in the browser, and going for
| big market-share drives the UI and features toward targeting the
| lowest common denominator. Some people out there don't know the
| difference between facebook or google and the WWW itself.
|
| I still use Firefox in part because the bookmark tagging and the
| awesomebar work marginally better than what Chrome does.
|
| Browsers and web UI have gotten dumbed down since even the more
| power-user oriented days of Firefox and prevalence of RSS.
| atarian wrote:
| I've started using the Arc browser as my daily browser and really
| like how it treats bookmarks as tabs. Basically, bookmarks and
| tabs are on the same visual level but separated by a divider.
| krapp wrote:
| Bookmarks, like email, don't really _need_ to be reinvented IMHO,
| they work just fine. If you don 't organize them well or don't
| use them, that's your problem.
| trhr wrote:
| I never found a solution to what I actually want/need:
|
| - Snippet bookmarking. I don't want to browse to the whole page
| again, just highlight and save the piece of it I need to
| bookmark.
|
| - Annotations. I want to highlight, underline, bold, and comment
| on what I've bookmarked so that I know why I bookmarked it or
| what I intended to remember later.
|
| - In an open standard, like JSON, so that I can do things with
| the bookmarks other than view them in your proprietary website.
|
| Seems like a fairly simple ask, but all the software that
| promises to do it fell short of my expectations.
| jskulski wrote:
| Not a consumer grade solution, but Org mode handles this with
| some setup and browser extensions
| douge1 wrote:
| Yep, that makes a ton of sense too, especially annotations +
| JSON.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| Memex [1] is good at Annotation-bookmarking. Research Notes [2]
| is a less slick option
|
| Both are local and offer export.
|
| [1]
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/memex/abkfbakhjpmb...
|
| [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/research-
| notes/cad...
| ahelwer wrote:
| I don't know about anyone else, but "giant list of media to
| consume in the future" be they games, movies, books, or blog
| posts is antithetical to me actually eventually enjoying that
| media. The value of having a list of things that I thought might
| be interesting but not interesting enough to read immediately is
| basically zero.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| For me it's more often quick searches about an idea for
| something I want to buy/make/research, maybe as part of a
| larger project.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| What about blogs themselves?
| archsurface wrote:
| My tabs are mostly related to a current project, or topic - I
| find Opera's workspaces are great for this. But I use firefox.
| I've written a slightly cumbersome but necessary cli tool to
| extract tabs from the session file and add project or topic tags,
| then open a filtered list in a window. I find this preferable to
| all the firefox workflows I've tried. All I wanted for christmas
| was firefox workspaces.
| johnthuss wrote:
| In Safari at least, bookmarks appear as results in the search bar
| so the fact that they are unorganized is mostly irrelevant. That
| said, I only bookmark things that a web search doesn't easily
| return, which is a small set of things.
| viburnum wrote:
| About ten years ago I switched to saving pages as PDF into my
| dropbox folder. Works a charm and on my Mac spotlight search
| works with it remarkably well. I still use browser's bookmarks
| bar for sites I use frequently but I deleted all the other
| bookmarks.
| savolai wrote:
| Not sure why bookmarks should be separate from your knowledgebase
| otherwise. Why not use Notion clipper and a database in notion
| for maximum flexibility?
| douge1 wrote:
| This would work too, but can't as easily share, and need to
| switch back and forth, I suppose, but instead of using Notion,
| I use a markdown-based document, that I manage a lot of this in
| now + some firefox bookmarks.
| voisin wrote:
| It would be great to have AI suggest tags/categories, ability to
| snooze and recall at set times, and see when the site was last
| accessed.
|
| I think bookmarks fail because they are buried away and not front
| and centre, and they mix the concepts of "notes for future
| reference" and "regularly visited favourite sites".
| douge1 wrote:
| Yea, like, I wish it can combine both, and relate them, even
| suggest to me, what else I should be reading, that's related to
| it, but isn't a google search related topic.
| voisin wrote:
| It would be great if you could highlight the thing on the
| site that matters to you when you bookmark it so that the
| context was preserved. I find I forget, months later, why I
| bookmarked something.
| paultopia wrote:
| I feel like you could probably roll your own decently well here
| with a scraper plus a topic modeling library.
| slater wrote:
| pinboard.in & raindrop.io -\\_(tsu)_/-
| crazygringo wrote:
| Del.icio.us re-invented bookmarks way back in 2003, and it lost
| popularity for a lot of reasons specific to it. But I think the
| reason there isn't another re-invention is because:
|
| 1) Browser sync became a thing, so your bookmarks are everywhere
| (del.icio.us let you access bookmarks through their site, but
| sync made that unnecessary for your personal devices)
|
| 2) Searching your personal synced browser history got a lot
| better using the "omnibox" (no need to create bookmarks to find a
| site you visited in the past, it's there in history -- and if
| it's not, it's probably easy to find it with Google)
|
| 3) Site "discovery" (remember StumbleUpon?) got replaced with
| social media newsfeeds and Reddit. People bookmarked and shared
| fun lists of sites in the early days of the internet, but now
| algorithmic feeds that learn your interests have taken off
|
| I keep a list of bookmarks of 20-30 very specific URL's for
| certain _pages_ on sites to skip navigating through the site,
| some special bookmarklets, etc. But that doesn 't need much
| organization, and it's not for sharing. For everything else,
| there's the three things above.
| stranded22 wrote:
| Stumbleupon! Thank you for the reminder!
| hunter-2 wrote:
| Del.icio.us used to be really good. It's a shame they got
| acquired and shut down. I don't think there is anything that does
| a good job with bookmarking today.
| darrmit wrote:
| Pinboard is every bit as good as Del.icio.us.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It used to be, but the sole admin has a habit of just
| disappearing off the face of the earth randomly.
|
| I paid for the archival and all, but I'm moving my stuff to
| raindrop and seriously considering self-hosting something.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| Respectfully, it is not, unless you mean that as heavily
| backhanded. It seems as if Maciej has mostly abandoned any
| form of customer assistance or help, even for those who've
| paid money to him.
| dotcoma wrote:
| I'm mostly happy with pinboard.in
| douge1 wrote:
| Yea, I remember the name, but didn't use it, I'll need to do
| some research on https://archive.org/web/
| pneumatic1 wrote:
| I made a page on my personal website that shows unread bookmarks.
| I can add bookmarks by text message or bookmarklet in a browser.
| Check a box once I've read it to remove it from the list.
| 0xPIT wrote:
| Safari Tab Groups are cool, also there is Toby, a tab grouping
| extension for chrome. Both sync across devices.
|
| Seems like a small change, but for me a true and very productive
| reinvention of bookmarks.
| tkuraku wrote:
| The need has been mostly eliminated for many people with the
| ability to search.
| TylerE wrote:
| Or just autocomplete. Most of the sites I use on any sort of
| regular basis will autocomplete off 2 or 3 characters.
| wilg wrote:
| Yes, I don't really ever use bookmarks.
| douge1 wrote:
| Yea, that is true for sure, like it's so easy to Google Search,
| but often times I find something related to let's say "data
| versioning" that might be something like "slowly changing
| dimensions" but and they're both 'related' but I can't for the
| life of me remember that they are related 3 months after when I
| go back to look at it.
| TylerE wrote:
| URL's stopped being canonical
| riantogo wrote:
| My covid side project was attempting to find a solution in this
| space. I envisioned users publishing their bookmarks in related
| forums (not unlike subreddits). The differentiating factor was
| allowing forum owners to monetize (as opposed to the platform
| appropriating all revenue). After thing reopened I got busy
| readjusting, but I plan to revive the efforts starting Jan:
| https://discoflip.com
| douge1 wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of Substack, I know it's a different space,
| but kinda gave me that moment of, huh, one spot to see all cool
| stuff, and have it updated regularly.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| Tools are not the main problem. What need to be "re-invented?"
| first is our personal approach to information overload.
|
| One of the bigger issues with bookmarks is they always seem
| valuable the moment you add them, then that value somehow
| evaporates most of the time.
|
| Between Bookmark-Hoarding and Zero-Bookmarks, thoughtful curation
| will always be an art form.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What about search that is limited to your bookmarks? Shared
| bookmarks that really work between phones, tablets, computer,
| vr headsets, etc.?
|
| I am not afraid to kill browser windows because I can look up
| anything in my history.
|
| I want to bookmark something and get a webhook notification
| that I handle so I can build a database of my bookmarks side by
| side with other content that comes in through webhooks.
| LunarAurora wrote:
| Notion.so is great. There are good extensions that bookmark
| tabs directly to its databases [1] (no webhooks needed)
|
| And there are scripts to import your existing bookmarks using
| the Notion API. Look at this API too if you want to webhook
| other custom content.
|
| It is Online so it will auto sync between devices.
|
| [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notion-web-
| clipper...
| kyriakos wrote:
| Bookmarks today are called browser tabs. People hoarde 100 open
| tabs with their most visited sites. Both Edge and chrome now
| support sleeping tabs which essentially turn your tab into a
| bookmark that loads from hibernation as soon as you open it.
| angelbar wrote:
| 542 tabs are ok?
| falcolas wrote:
| IME: Link rot. When your URLs aren't valid for more than a few
| weeks, there's no reason to keep them; it's easier to search (not
| that search is always reliable over time either).
|
| Any reinvention would have to incorporate search and keep track
| of sufficient content from the page to do a search for its new
| location. Either that or link to 3rd party content storage (i.e.
| archive.org et.al.)
| douge1 wrote:
| Definitely see that, 90% of the time, I forget about those
| links, and thus they rot, but sometimes I need to go back, or
| want to have a well maintained list, also, would love for that
| list to be updated with AI and "refreshed" with updated /
| related content.
| cglong wrote:
| I've used the Collections[1] feature in Edge for this. It
| essentially acts as a one level deep folder where you can store
| links and text notes related to a subject. It also has built-in
| support for sharing.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not in Edge.
|
| [1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
| edge/organize-...
| douge1 wrote:
| I like Collections, it's a good concept, I'd love to have
| something that I can use across devices, and share a collection
| with people, would be kewl to have it integrated with "awesome
| list" concept from GitHub.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Well there's always Pinboard. I think the problem is there's not
| much money in it unless you go the route of a social network or
| advertising/leadgen site.
| Centigonal wrote:
| for bookmarking articles, you have https://getpocket.com/ and
| https://www.instapaper.com/
|
| "Social bookmarking" started with deli.co.us and has largely been
| subsumed by reddit.
|
| Beyond some level of complexity, Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, etc
| become bookmarking tools
|
| ...but the ultimate place to find the bookmark managers are in
| the Chrome and Firefox extension stores:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category...
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/bookmark?_category...
|
| There doesn't seem to be any money at all in this space, and any
| really groundbreaking innovation will be folded in by the browser
| vendors, so I don't expect there to be much more thwn what's
| already here.
| douge1 wrote:
| Cool sites, related, yes, agreed about "social bookmarking",
| but feels like, why do we create all of these "awesome list"
| for GitHub then, like that's a way to share a curated list of
| links, kinda like deli.co.us.
| elnygren wrote:
| audience
|
| GitHub is the logical place for an "awesome react" list even
| if it's not necessarily intended for that.
| longnguyen wrote:
| Not exactly "reinventing" bookmarks. But I've been working on a
| micro SaaS[0] to send interesting articles, newsletters and RSS
| to Kindle. And it kinda "forces" me to actually read those
| articles, and not just send them into oblivion.
|
| If you're developing a reading habit in 2023, give it a try.
|
| [0]: https://ktool.io
| douge1 wrote:
| Actually, I have a Kindle, and this is a great idea, I like the
| distraction free point of Kindle's, I'll need to "bookmark it"
| and give it a shot
| longnguyen wrote:
| I see what you did there haha.
|
| My most favorite routine now is to subscribe to Hacker News
| RSS[0] and read top posts on my Kindle. Best of both worlds
| to me since HN could be quite addictive and unproductive
| sometimes
|
| [0]: https://hnrss.github.io/
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Here's what I'm going to try instead - beyond URLs:
| Ask HN: Full-text browser history search forever?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30696451
|
| I.e. store the full text content of the websites I visit, and
| easily search it.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| The only time I need to save a website it's in the context of
| some notes, I prefer to cut and paste the exact url into my
| notes. Bookmarks without context aren't that useful otherwise.
| douge1 wrote:
| Often times, I copy/paste it into a markdown notes that I keep,
| and then search for it in there, but I feel it's locked away a
| bit in there, as much as I love markdown!
| kolinko wrote:
| For me, instead of bookmarks I would love to have
| optimised/nicely searchable browser history, and a bookmark as a
| way to mark more significant history pages.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| What about a branching structure visualizing from which
| websites you clicked on what links to. I Can't be the only one
| who remembers context easier than URLs
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Shiori is a self-hosted bookmark manager that uses tags and it's
| what I use now. https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori
|
| I've been strongly preferring methods that let me tag items and
| have a good search - either in addition to or instead of putting
| them in a folder. If I don't like the "taxonomy" I can just add
| more tags, instead of constantly trying to figure out the one
| folder where everything should go.
|
| I can share by creating an additional visitor user, or use the
| import/export commands. I hope those get built into the UI
| sometime, but I rarely share more than a single bookmark at a
| time.
|
| It is an extra step to copy/paste links into Shiori versus
| browser built-in features, but I prefer not to trust or rely on
| browsers for my bookmarks unless at work. Seems like everyone
| wants sync those to accounts without my explicit consent.
| douge1 wrote:
| Clever, surprisingly, I've never seen this, I'm going to clone
| it, also I'm a gopher as well :)
| altneu wrote:
| I organized my sources into a simple RSS reader I visit daily:
| https://altneu.me/rtr/
| douge1 wrote:
| Well, that's a good idea, nice.
| te wrote:
| Oooh, I like this a lot. Source available?
| kcartlidge wrote:
| I love the layout and font choices (the background is a little
| _too_ dark for my tastes, but at least it won 't hurt the eyes
| on mobile).
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Pocket, Collections and reading list fit this description. Really
| though, it's just not the way many people think. We don't
| navigate rigid taxonomies in order to remember things. Given an
| excess of available information, a loose semantic connection to a
| given website is all you really need to know how to get back
| there (or at least to find similar information again via another
| search) at a later date.
|
| Also - make use of your address bar's search functionality.
| Bookmarking as implemented is still useful.
|
| Seems like something a librarian might enjoy though heh.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I have run a linkblog for 15+ years now. It's basically bookmarks
| (and stored in Pinboard) but my focus is on publishing a social
| media feed for others to read. https://www.somebits.com/linkblog/
|
| Linkblogging used to be a thing people did in the heydey of early
| 2000s blogging. Now it's mostly lost as a form. The spirit of it
| lives though in the way Mastodon, Slack, Facebook, etc make it
| easy to share a link and have a preview for it. What's missing is
| an archival backup view of that sharing. Pinboard gives me mine,
| but I seldom use it other than to search for something specific I
| vaguely remember.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| I just popped over there and the second entry was _" Poppy War
| influences"_. So I wanted to _thank you_ for reminding me that
| I really enjoyed the first book and need to get around to the
| others in the series.
| codetrotter wrote:
| If something is particularly interesting I just post the link to
| HN :^)
| douge1 wrote:
| haha
| pflanze wrote:
| I just use a Git repository with plain text (and some custom
| marking up) files, as my knowledge repository, that also includes
| copy-pastes of the important information that I found in the
| articles in question, thoughts etc.
|
| My custom markup consists of:
|
| - a number of '*' at the beginning of a line, for important
| things (more stars = more important; usually just 1 or 2,
| sometimes 3, if I'm super excited some more.)
|
| - '#' for comments from me between copy-pasted text
|
| - '[' .. ']' on separate lines to group things together, possibly
| nested (Emacs allows me to easily jump over them, and down or up
| nested groups).
|
| - '-' on a line between a copy-pasted comment and its reply; '-
| -' on a line between two comments (or sub-threads grouped with
| '['..']') on the same level.
|
| - '\SOME_UPCASED_CATEGORY_NAME' for marking something as
| belonging to that category
|
| I'm organizing the files into a hierarchy of folders. In case of
| ambiguity, I use symlinks.
|
| I've written a number of tools to handle such a repository well
| (search names by regex, search names and content by regex, cd
| into a directory matching a regex, etc.), currently mostly
| written in Perl[1]. I've recently started using Rust and will
| probably move those over to Rust over time. One tool I still want
| to write is for automatically updating symlinks when they break,
| by looking up moves in the Git history; I'll definitely write
| that one in Rust.
|
| It's got more than 17K entries now (including symlinks) after 7
| years. The size of the .git folder after `git gc` is 51 MB. I
| synchronize it (simply via Git) between various machines. I use
| it to find information again pretty regularly. Even though I call
| the repository "bookmarks", I'm now also tracking projects in it
| (ideas, plans, sources etc.), as well as job postings and my
| handling of them.
|
| So the only bookmarks I keep in the browsers are for pages that I
| use regularly.
|
| [1] in my big pile of scripts, currently _not_ well grouped for
| consumption: https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin
| bo1024 wrote:
| One effect of the massive complexity of web standards is lack of
| innovation and competition in the browser space.
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(page generated 2022-12-29 23:01 UTC)