Ask HN: Delicious is falling apart – alternatives?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265293

by macmac • 10 years ago

19 23 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have 14.000+ links in delicious and have always liked the service but it is falling into serious disrepair (Chrome plugin has become very slow and inefficient, api is broken, tag renaming doesn't work etc.) and I feel I have to find an alternative. I am looking for a service I can migrate my existing collection to including tags and which let's me add new links/tags from Chrome in a very fast way(e.g. via shortcut, focused on tag field with autocomplete etc.). Any suggestions?

floatingatoll• 10 years ago

Pinboard maintains the same value that Delicious originally provided, without any of the successive improvements that we've come to associate with Delicious today.

Huhty• 10 years ago

Try http://snapzu.com. It's more similar to Reddit though, but has most of the features Delicious has.

HoopleHead• 10 years ago

Another vote for http://pinboard.in I imported all my Delicious bookmarks into it a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. I also availed of a lifetime subscription for about $11 at the time —although I think the pricing model has changed now.

ChrisDutrow• 10 years ago

Looks like its $11 a year now. Seems super reasonable for something you get a lot of use out of.

chanux• 10 years ago

Check historio.us I use the free tier and fine with it so far (I don't bookmark a lot).

re_todd• 10 years ago

historio.us is my favourite at the moment, but all that red can be annoying at times.

benjamincharity2• 10 years ago

Pinboard.in hands down. I've tried so many services but this one wins for me. Nice API too.

benjamincharity2• 10 years ago

pinboard.in hands down. I've tried so many different services but Pinboard is the best mix of minimalism and features. (Design isn't great but you can find style overrides on userstyles.org for Stylish)

Good API too.

murrayb• 10 years ago

I moved all mine from Delicious to Evernote around the time of the Yahoo purchase and haven't regretted it once. Bookmarks (and I now generally bookmark whole pages) which are searchable along side all my other notes.

austinjp• 10 years ago

I moved to diigo.com at the time Yahoo purchased Delicious. No problems since. Basic bookmarking service, bookmarklet available, private bookmarks, simple and functional.

rawfan• 10 years ago

Wow, they just updated the site. Looks like crap now and half of it is not working. I actually liked what the last owner did to Delicious but this is just ridiculous. I'm signing up with pinboard.in I guess.

knightmare• 10 years ago

Help me understand the difference between Pocket and these services? I've recently upgraded to Pocket Pro and am loving it...

vladsanchez• 10 years ago

I thought Delicious was dead! They lost all my links the last time they went away/we're acquired. After that Delicious debacle, I've used Google Bookmarks, InstaPaper and ReadItLater. I recently bought a Pocket Pro license and I'll never use anything else. In fact, I'm working on how to merge them all into Pocket. Any references are appreciated.

LorenzoLlamas• 10 years ago

I almost want to answer this as a more broad approach: X is falling apart - alternatives? And the answer is: If X is free, expect it to fall apart. Why would anyone host your content for free forever? What did you really expect? Eventually X could equal Twitter, Facebook, and even Hacker News. If you don't pay to play, you will go away. Or it will go away.

I routinely fail to understand how anyone can form a community of "links". It has no staying power in and of itself. Even Facebook and Google+ and Twitter are largely nothing more than a giant collection of links, albeit with comments. Curation is one thing. Following a group on Google+ or an account on Twitter is akin to saying, "show me more links on subject X". Fine and dandy.

But how much is that worth to you?

Of course, you could just post and host your own link-base on your own blog/website but you'd have to (likely) pay for hosting. Even GitHub will one day have to charge for hosting. If 1 billion people open up accounts on Github for free GitHub Pages hosting, they will have to charge. Even probably if 10 million people did it and, assuming those pages were reasonably popular and trafficked, they couldn't sustain a zero-advertising model and a zero-free model. Can't be done.

So, why not own your own data and post them on your own site? Simple: Either the information really isn't worth $10/year for you to "share" with others (and let's face it: if you had true stats on how often anyone was actually viewing your 14,000 links, you'd never pay for it, since that number probably comes awfully close to zero), OR you are challenged with how to format/share the data en masse such that others can do more than simply visit a single link, but see and share the whole sub-collection of links you have on any given topic. XML feeds aside, there really isn't a good easy way to do that. You could have pages within pages on your site of the links (and your comments, thumbnails if necessary, and so forth) and then at the bottom of the page a handy "Capture all links to your own Favorites folder" - maybe some kind of javascript bookmarklet. Or a file standard if one exists (outside of HTML itself).

So we join these feigned "communities" and "contribute" our time - only to have them repeatedly fail over and over. Delicious itself is a poster child for the service that not enough people want (to pay for) but has a vampire like quality that won't let it die. Delicious is the Undead of the Internet. And yet, just about as isolated as Bram Stoker's Dracula, too.

One guy (1!) runs Pinboard. Just one. As soon as he (choose one), (a) dies, (b) gets sick of it, (c) discovers a better place to live than SF and moves to Uruguay, (d) has his site hacked/destroyed, (e) gets Alzheimers, (f) or sells it to some clown/company who will stop developing it... it's all over. You'll get maybe 3 months notice if lucky and then a bunch of people will complain.

But a 1,000 voices screaming out will be "suddenly silenced" even faster than millions on Alderaan. Because on the internet, thousands of users are, in effect, no users at all. If Facebook can alter TOS at will under the protest of millions, along with Twitter, G+, and dozens of other massive sites, do you think any screaming user will cause Pinboard to stay up?

Look at it now... it almost makes Craigslist look modern. Pinboard mentions alternatives - some of which aren't even around still - so it's questionable if anyone is even actively working on Pinboard.

But even if they were working on Pinboard, it's still a free service and one that stands no chance of continuing forever. I doubt it will be here five years from now. It has almost zero chance of being around ten years from now.

So, save your own bookmarks and stop posting 14,000 websites for free on the internet. Nobody cares. It's just a bunch of noise. Just like Twitter. It's all over; the asteroid of internet-doom just hasn't hit us yet, but it's shadow is... right... there.

If you want/must publish them (ego?), then do it at your cost and pony up some hosting fees.

I could say (since this is HN) that you should develop your own paid solution, but (a) that isn't innovation at all, but merely repeating something that has been done a hundred times and we, the world, need innovation, not repeats of past mud, and (b) clearly no one will ever pay you for such a service such that you'll break even, much less make $100/year.

So, can we all just move on?

jamesbritt• 10 years ago

But even if they were working on Pinboard, it's still a free service

https://pinboard.in/faq/

    What does it cost?

    Pinboard costs $11/year.

    Archiving accounts cost $25/year.

Happy paying user.

bomberstudios• 10 years ago

clearly no one will ever pay you for such a service such that you'll break even, much less make $100/year.

"revenue is hard to predict but I expect around $200k for the year"

Source: the one guy that runs Pinboard https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/653322650677153792

tmaly• 10 years ago

I moved all my links out of delicious back when it fell apart the first time. I went to google bookmarks, it is always up, but finding the links is like searching for a needle in haystack.

macmac• 10 years ago

I went with Pinboard. I don't have a particular need to share my links but don't mind it either. Pinboard imported my links incl tags flawlessly and from what I have seen so far it looks exactly like the lean efficient replacement I have been looking for.

usermac• 10 years ago

As much as I admire piboard.in, the getpocket UI seems to be everywhere; I see it in iOS I see it in Mozilla developer edition. It is so smooth and so amazing I really really like it.

hotcool• 10 years ago

Been using Dragdis lately: http://dragdis.com

davidp670• 10 years ago

I recently discovered BookmarkOS and love it! It's an desktop environment in the browser that lets you easily keep your bookmarks organized with drag and drop, list view, and sorting. https://bookmarkos.com

bayouborne2• 10 years ago

Hopefully the market identifies and votes for ($6/yr or something) a superior alternative to Delicious - it's not desirable to have people migrate their data sets into various other leaky buckets available here and there, because when that happens we lose the power of (I don't really know the correct term, 'affinity' maybe?) the power of collective association - in addition to me, keeping track of my own shit, what I'm really interested in, is who are the other mono-maniacal souls who've bookmarked that same crazy page that details [insert the most wonderful thing you've ever found on the web, here] - ok, and now that you know who these other kindred spirits are, what other great stuff have they found while you've been sleeping? Wasn't that the promise of this whole web endeavor?

The above can't happen if we're all in balkanized silos scattered across the landscape. Don't say 'API' - not going there..

bayouborne2• 10 years ago

... and it should be fast fast fast and not 'flowery' - grow the HN interface a bit and I'd be really happy w/it.

Ask HN: Delicious is falling apart – alternatives?

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