Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#151

Post by hooande » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

My problem with bookmarks isn't managing them, but remembering that they exist. It always seems faster to type words into google than to try to remember whatever taxonomy or tagging scheme. And I never go back to check for "something cool on the internet" at all.

I made an app that shows me N of my previous bookmarks per day at random, loosely following spaced repetition. Seeing the same articles/conversations/tutorials multiple times helps me to recall them when needed, and I sometimes have serendipitous ideas.

I've been doing this for years and it's amazing how much of the internet is broken. Maybe 20% of my bookmarks don't load and require the wayback machine. hacker news comment pages always work though :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#152

Post by monadgonad » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

nounaut wrote: post #100

munmaek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except with google it’s becoming impossible to find links from several years ago. Unless I remember exactly the right keywords and maybe the website name... How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is vi…

Google (and related services, such as youtube) allows you to use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to only show results that were created before or after a certain date.

I think you're missing the wood for the trees a bit there. The point is that there's so much on Google now - and a lot of it is effectively just crap data like pinterest posts - that it becomes increasingly impossible to find specific needles in that haystack. If I know at some point in the last 10 years I've read an article online that could have been written any point in the last 30 years, before and after dates don't really help.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#153

Post by kasperset » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #117

kasperset wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved pinboard.in and had the subscription with archival support for more than 5 years. However, the search "full-text" did not work all the time. I used to get some server-side error. As a bookmark only tool, it still works excellent almost all the time.

During the time when Maciej was campaigning (he supported several US Senate candidates), Pinboard was constantly broken. Archiving rarely worked. Now that he's again paying attention to his service, I haven't had issues again.

That makes sense. I may try archival plan again and see if it works consistently.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#154

Post by icedchai » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

hooande wrote: post #151

My problem with bookmarks isn't managing them, but remembering that they exist. It always seems faster to type words into google than to try to remember whatever taxonomy or tagging scheme. And I never go back to check for "something cool on the internet" at all. I made an app that shows me N of my previous bookmarks per day at random, loosely following spaced repetition. Seeing the same articles/conversations/tutori…

Same here. Bookmarks basically became obsolete once search got good enough.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#155

Post by modzu » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

with thumbnails! i can quickly "see" what the bookmark is about better than i can tag it. and thumb images are automatic while tags require effort. generally this and chronological sort gets me by. check out my speed dial extension for ff, its open source of course, please feel free to comment to contribute!

https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#156

Post by bookofjoe » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

I'm so glad you posted this question. It gave me a reason to see how many bookmarks I have in Chrome. 32/screen x 33 screens = 1,056 (according to Siri). My list seems pretty manageable: I search it many times daily for specific sites, and after all these years have a general idea of where they are, in terms of top/middle/bottom.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#157

Post by thfuran » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #154

hooande wrote: post #151

My problem with bookmarks isn't managing them, but remembering that they exist. It always seems faster to type words into google than to try to remember whatever taxonomy or tagging scheme. And I never go back to check for "something cool on the internet" at all. I made an app that shows me N of my previous bookmarks per day at random, loosely following spaced repetition. Seeing the same articles/conversations/tutori…

Same here. Bookmarks basically became obsolete once search got good enough.

But after search got good, it got bad. Or at least increasingly strained by the sheer magnitude of shit now online.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#158

Post by karmakaze » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

Bookmarks are write-only for me. I create them in Firefox (for personal) and Chrome (at work) and rarely if ever use most of them. As in I don't recall looking up a single bookmark in the last two months, but also only created a handful or two.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#159

Post by icedchai » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #157

icedchai wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Bookmarks basically became obsolete once search got good enough.

But after search got good, it got bad. Or at least increasingly strained by the sheer magnitude of shit now online.

It's still better than the early 2000's, which is the last time I really needed "bookmarks."

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#160

Post by lifeisstillgood » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

A while back someone on here posted a reply to a similar question for me - and it was one of those 'road to Damascus' moments for me.

The poster pointed out that we should not have to bookmark - that why do our own browsers not simply record every site we visits (and even cache the text for alter searching).

Its technically trivial. But we all have this blind spot - that it is perfectly reasonable for massive corporations to collect where we visit, but no-one, even in free browsers, thinks to record it for our own use later on.

I wish I could show you the link. But i cannot search my history and i did not bookmark it. :-(