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Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

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Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#21

After increasing problems with pinboard, I recently cancelled my subscription and moved to ggather.com. It's been pretty good so far.

What is their business model? It's so hard to find information about them on their site without creating an account.

They charge for the service, although IIRC they do have a free version with limits on number of bookmarks.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#23
post #6

I signed up a month ago to the annual plan for easy mobile bookmarking via Pindroid. So far so good, but I haven't upgraded to the archiving service yet. If I was to take a total guess I would say the archiving service might be getting abused for mass data scraping, and the archive servers are buckling under load. Scraping can use a fair amount of server resources.

Nah. It’s always been like that, witness the amount of “oops, the API fell over two days ago, i just restarted it” twitter posts over the years. It’s always been a pretty haphazard operation, but Maciej used to pay attention. Now it really looks like his primary activity is political organising and he’s lost any interest in maintaining the site.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#24
post #11

I cancelled my subscription last year after similar problems with full text search. I did get a download of my data, albeit it took a while, after requesting it from my settings page. I've never had a reply to any of my emails to him. Alhough I did eventually get a reply on twitter, which said "Sorry for the terrible support" But then I heard nothing more, and got no replies to further emails either. I think he's too…

Being a celebrity?? I was thinking he must be ill in some way, is he in the news somehow?

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#25

After increasing problems with pinboard, I recently cancelled my subscription and moved to ggather.com. It's been pretty good so far.

What is their business model? It's so hard to find information about them on their site without creating an account.

pretty sure he makes money when folks pay him to have the site cache the pages you bookmark in case they go away. Also allows you to search the content of the bookmarked pages, not just the stuff you typed in when bookmarking it.

I don't check how quickly the cached copies are created after bookmarking. All i knows is that they're there when the site has disappeared. He's got about 7.8GB of stuff stored for me and i've been happy with the service.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#26
Sad to read these comments. Like many others, I viewed pinboard as a rare gem of a service that just worked and had the perfect balance of features: minimalist UI, zero bloat, no ads, nice API, sustainable business model.

I've got thousands of carefully-tagged bookmarks in there, and add more every day. I dread the idea of having to switch to another service, and after evaluating several others—haven't found any that come close.

What are people here switching to? Or am I an out of touch old geezer for even thinking that saving bookmarks is a useful thing anymore...

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#27

Maciej has been busy using Pinboard to fund political candidacies[1] and opining on character tests for CEOs[2]. I've voted Democrat in every election, this isn't a political thing. I'm embarrassed by his very public lack of self-awareness, and upset for people who trusted him. [1] https://twitter.com/Pinboard [2] https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1050583549164703744

I don’t see the problem with this. It’s their business, and hence their right to do what they want with the funds and time that business allows him. Besides the service being provided to customers, Maciej owes anyone feeling entitled to more nothing.

I think the problem is that people would rather their bookmarking service be more concerned with operating as a bookmarking service than tweeting about politics. As a paying customer, I am in this very non-partisan boat. I mean the guy can do what he wants, but so can I and I’m looking for alternatives after being a paying pinboard customer for 4 years now. The service seems more and more like abandonedware.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#28

Maciej has been busy using Pinboard to fund political candidacies[1] and opining on character tests for CEOs[2]. I've voted Democrat in every election, this isn't a political thing. I'm embarrassed by his very public lack of self-awareness, and upset for people who trusted him. [1] https://twitter.com/Pinboard [2] https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1050583549164703744

I don’t see the problem with this. It’s their business, and hence their right to do what they want with the funds and time that business allows him. Besides the service being provided to customers, Maciej owes anyone feeling entitled to more nothing.

That’s not how businesses work. It’s not how businesses should work. It’s why this business will/has stopped working.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#29
I'm also concerned about pinboard. I have a long-time archiving subscription and just recently extended it for the next 5 years. When my bookmarks didn't archive since October, I mailed support. No reply, but now all bookmarks are archived again. I'm not sure if something got fixed, or I just got lucky.

It's obvious that Maciej has put all his attention into political campaigning over the last year - good on him! But the pinboard blog hasn't been updated since 18 months, and the quality of its minimal-by-design service starts eroding.

I really do hope he can clarify here or on his blog what's the future plan for pinboard. I always liked pinboard being very down to earth with the marketing, but that's no excuse for ignoring the paying customer base.

Re: Ask HN: What happened to Pinboard?

#30
Helpful to know I am not the only experiencing archiving pains. Most of my bookmarks didn't archive for over a month. About a 1/3 of my archived pages currently result in an internal "Forbidden" error. My support experience since end of October has been no response after sending to 2 email messages and a private twitter message. The rest of the site is so damn useful compared to its competitors that I'm willing to overlook this lack of professionalism. Currently the promises of support on https://pinboard.in/tour/ are misleading: "If you have an idea, or need help, you can bring it up directly with me and be sure of a prompt response." I hope he returns and gives the site some love.
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