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Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

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Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#11

Post by serf »

simonw wrote: post #9
zagrebian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base What is that? Do I need it?

Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…

i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life.

otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time.

that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good.

Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#12

Post by segphault »

Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces for their respective purposes. Pocket isn’t really trying to be both things, and it seems odd to fault it for not being good at what it isn’t designed to do.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#13

Post by tacoman »

My use case for Pocket is completely different from the author’s.

I use it every day to get web content onto a Kobo ereader. It strips ads and often gets stuff behind paywalls.

My family shares the same pocket account and we often end up discussing things that get synced to all the kobos in the house.

This functionality is so useful and seems like a well kept secret. If it went away I’d really be upset.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#14

Post by SanjayMehta »

Re: tags

> It takes me 45 seconds just to scroll from the top of the list to the end on the Android app.

There's the problem with over classification. Having had the same problem, I've reduced the tags to around 10 which is also a bit too much. Sometimes I think 3 should be enough: low, medium and high priority.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#16

Post by LegitShady »

simonw wrote: post #9
zagrebian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base What is that? Do I need it?

Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…

I just use OneNote.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#17

Post by cocodill »

segphault wrote: post #12

Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces…

by saving things for later you mean that a site copy is stored somewhere, so you could find it again years later?

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#18

Post by balder1991 »

cocodill wrote: post #17
segphault wrote: post #12

Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces…

by saving things for later you mean that a site copy is stored somewhere, so you could find it again years later?

The paid version does this. It keeps the text even if the original article was removed.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#19

Post by mintplant »

cocodill wrote: post #17
segphault wrote: post #12

Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces…

by saving things for later you mean that a site copy is stored somewhere, so you could find it again years later?

More like: this looks a good article, but I'd rather read it over morning tea, so I'll save it to Pocket for later (on the order of days to weeks).

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#20

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

serf wrote: post #11
simonw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…

i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life. otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time. that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced…

The only revenue stream that isn’t user-hostile is subscriptions. And people generally hate that: imo, the web ended up ad-supported because users did not want to pay every website they used directly and it remains ad-supported because users continue to reject the viable alternatives (subscriptions, services like Blendle, some micropayment scheme).
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