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Del.icio.us

del.icio.us

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Re: Del.icio.us

#321

Post by danmg »

crazygringo wrote: post #258

Not to rain on the parade, but serious question: are bookmarks actually useful anymore? It's funny, I'm trying to remember when I simply stopped using bookmarks. 5 years ago, maybe? 10? I'm not entirely sure. I used to have elaborate folder hierachies of bookmarks in my browser. But at some point, I realized anytime I needed something, it was faster to just type a keyword or two in the address bar. Either it was ther…

If you find yourself binging it more than once a week, bookmark it? Crtl-B brings up Firefox's bookmark sidebar and you can just search it there as immediately.

Re: Del.icio.us

#322

Post by vidarh »

nikhizzle wrote: post #121
glenstein wrote: post #54

Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service,…

Ex-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy which killed us. Here are an example of each: 1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings. 2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo…

I led the European billing engineering team[1] at Yahoo 2003-2005. We processed millions of dollars worth of payments for European premium services every year, so we had a very clear idea of our value to the business, and I had to deal with that exact same thing when we needed a server upgrade once in that three year period that cost a fraction of what I got approved in bonuses for my team every year.

Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server.

[1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.

Re: Del.icio.us

#323

Post by mostlysimilar »

oblio wrote: post #58
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #44

Hmm next what, people will abandon Facebook and flock back to thematic PHPBB forums? (I honestly can't wait!)

The all-mighty account creation hurdle will kill all such initiatives. And to fix this, you'd need buy-in from major tech companies. All of which don't want to solve this problem.

> The all-mighty account creation hurdle will kill all such initiatives.

I don't understand why people consider this to be such a barrier. In an era where we have browsers that suggest secure passwords, store and fill credentials, and sync credentials between devices... why do we still think of registration as an impossible ask for the average user?

Re: Del.icio.us

#324

Post by jacobsenscott »

gonational wrote: post #246
cced wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone have any idea what he’s referring to when he brings up his use of tools?

Probably WRT opensource tools (machine learning, databases, frameworks, etc.) that are now 80%[1] as good as what the biggest firms have access to. 1. entirely made-up number

It has been a while since I worked at a big firm, but my experience has always been that open source tools are always far superior.

Re: Del.icio.us

#325

Post by vidarh »

nikhizzle wrote: post #233
organsnyder wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run. Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.

The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was just not showing up. This happened with many employees all the time.

Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when I worked there.

Re: Del.icio.us

#326

Post by joshu »

crazygringo wrote: post #315
joshu wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone has felt the need to ask this exact question every time delicious came up since the first time i showed it to anyone in 2003

But the popularity of Delicious then was proof that it was useful. It was a major internet destination. Today there's no similarly popular equivalent. Sure general-purpose social URL bookmarking sites still exist but they're niche, not mainstream. So thanks for trying to invalidate my question, but it's not that simple.

there's a huge proliferation of memory tools: notion, pinterest, and so on. so, yes, your question is bad: you're assuming what works for you is right for everybody.

Re: Del.icio.us

#327

Post by dangus »

nikhizzle wrote: post #121
glenstein wrote: post #54

Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service,…

Ex-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy which killed us. Here are an example of each: 1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings. 2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo…

That “niceness” is a textbook example of “ruinous empathy.”

https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...

Re: Del.icio.us

#328

Post by deckard1 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #139
wombatmobile wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising. Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut. The rise of advertising everywhere, and the los…

I don't know how Yahoo spied on their users, privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s. But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads. What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Ti…

> privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s.

I mean, it was. But encryption was a joke (and still is, to great degree) and we all just lived with plaintext over TCP everywhere. IRC, email, web, etc. In fact, during '93-97 the thing I remember most about the internet was just how paranoid everyone really was at the time. It was still a mostly technical user base and there was this general intuition that the potential for this to all go sideways is right there. But we were all on local BBSes and local ISPs and looking at personal web pages and logging on our friend's IRC server. It was sharing bootlegs with Grateful Dead fans, with a cautious eye towards the Feds and the AT&T and IBMs of the world. After 2003 or so, this world ceased to exist. Tracking, spam, privacy invasion became normalized.

> Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff

I remember people on Slashdot begging Google to not clutter their front page. There were a few times that I believe Google introduced new features and there was a serious backlash. I want to say Google was paying attention (Slashdot was huge at the time), but who knows.

> while you may want 1999 Google back

What strikes me nowadays is just how much Google has always sucked. I don't mean the company (they suck too). I mean PageRank. The thing we always held in unquestioned high regard. This thing we used to think is really clever turns out to just be a thing people could game to improve their visibility. Then Google realized this and now it's a tool Google uses to control the internet. I've spent a good portion of my career on this cargo cult nonsense we call "Search Engine Optimization." The rules change all the time, and only Google knows what those changes are. The biases are ever-shifting, in order to keep people on their toes and to reinforce Google's control.

But the part of PageRank that sucks is that if you do any sort of search that isn't a Wikipedia page, a Stackoverflow or Quora question, or a Pinterest image, you will quickly land into the mire of shady Russian Twitter/Instagram rehosting sites and scam pages. And this is all within the first page or at best the 2nd page of results. That is godawful results if you really stop to think about it. Google can't tell you anything that Wikipedia doesn't already know.

Re: Del.icio.us

#329

Post by Multicomp »

myself248 wrote: post #300
dhosek wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That customizability on MySpace was a security nightmare. My wife was the head of the security team back in the day and a lot of what they did to secure the site was duct tape and baling wire. It was kind of entertaining to log onto the hacker forums and see commentary on my wife's work for the day.

I would read that memoir!

Seconded. I bet if we could get a pipe between someone using nuance dragon and an Amazon print as you go book service, we could sell a lot more of these extremely niche books / memoirs.

Re: Del.icio.us

#330

Post by mostlysimilar »

Grumbledour wrote: post #190
mercer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to (usually) personalize your comments I think also played a huge role in fostering community: avatars, taglines, signatures, etc. I wrote my own tagging system for HN and it's hard to describe how much it changed the experience for me. only usernames feels a bit like being in a community where everyone wears the same clothes, uses a vocoder, and covers up their faces. if you squint you might be able to ma…

This sound interesting. Do you have some more details or maybe even some code somewhere? I would love to find ways to more easily identify users on here. The username, despite my best efforts, I mostly overlook or can't remember. On Forums, with Avatar images, this used to be so much simpler.

I love to think back on the early social web and consider how much we got right, particularly with forums. Presence and personality via avatars went a long way to feeling like a community in an era when the masses were still figuring out how to do that via technology.

I still find chronologically ordered, flat discussion threads to be far superior to nested and vote ordered discussions.

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