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Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

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Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#91

Post by mekoka »

ahelwer wrote: post #10

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.

That's certainly a take on living in the now. Consume it now, or don't. Don't save it, don't delay it. If you want it, find it and read it. Now. All of it.

I think not. Bookmark.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#92

Post by Froedlich »

falcolas wrote: post #20

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.)

I go through my bookmarks every five or six years, weeding out the dead links.

Surprisingly, many of them go back to the 20th century, and a few even to 1995, when I was running Mosaic on SCO Unix.

Now that disk space is so cheap I've been archiving many of the old links to local storage. A really nice bookmark function would do that automatically, but most modern browser interfaces seem to be following Chrome's lead and shuffling bookmarks off into a submenu ghetto as everything turns into a kiosk-style UI.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#93

Post by mikewarot »

crazygringo wrote: post #54

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…

Del.icio.us was awesome, then they changed the way it worked, which killed it.

Much the same was true of Napster.

Both were amazing ways to discover new things based on shared curation, which got wiped out when commercial interests took over.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#94

Post by hyencomper »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #78
kolinko wrote: post #77

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.

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

Chrome history has a Journeys tab which groups links together based on the same principle.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#95

Post by marginalia_nu »

krapp wrote: post #48

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.

They've got awful UX in modern browsers though. You need to click 3-4 times for everything, and the tools for organizing them are incredibly unwieldy. Used to be you could open a sidebar and have your bookmarks there.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#97

Post by NaOH »

viburnum wrote: post #52

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.

I do similar for certain types of information I want to save. My add-on approach is that the Save As PDF dialog includes a Keyword field which I use judiciously. The result is that all the PDFs are in one location but a Spotlight search for Keyword:[term(s)] allows me to create Smart Search Folders so organization/categorization is auto-generated.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#98

Post by Tagbert »

PaulHoule wrote: post #69
LunarAurora wrote: post #65

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.

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.

The Firefox bookmark sidebar has a search box at the top. I tend to save bookmarks to a big bucket and then search for them. It is smaller search space than full web or browser history.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#100

Post by sdwr »

Centigonal wrote: post #24

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/extension…

I think there's a fertile middle ground in the triangle between wikipedia, reddit and pinboard.
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