[Jerry2]

I switched to Pinboard few months ago when Delicious committed seppuku and made their site completely unusable. First, Delicious just shut down their site for something like a week, then they resurrected some ancient version of their site that looks & behaves like it's from 2007. Then they switched to an old domain (del.icio.us) and broke every bookmarklet and plugin that used their API. (I'm guessing they're planning on selling delicious.com domain name, which is worth a lot of money, so they made the switch.)

But the worst part is that you can't even save a link with all these changes they’ve made! I was getting errors 90% of the time (maybe even 98% but who's counting) so it was pointless to even try to save (I gave up after 4 days).

Whoever's managing Delicious is probably the most incompetent person in tech. Their communication with usersbase has been atrocious. They made only one or two blogposts and remained completely silent on social media (Twitter) during all these disastrous changes. People were unable to get their links and the company remained mum. Number of "F Delicious" posts on Twitter was very high few months back. Their site still doesn't work and you can't save links (just tried).

Anyway, I found Pinboard and have been happy since. RIP Delicious.

[idlewords]

I talked at length with Tony Aly, who is the new Delicious owner. He is not incompetent and I believe he is making a good-faith effort to get the site back to life. But it's a difficult migration to make. The site was hemmorhaging money on AWS, which made it imperative to try to move it to dedicated hosting. The code base and data store has all kinds of issues stemming from the fact that it's been rewritten so many times, and designed to work at a much larger scale than it needs to right now.

I've told Tony several times I'm eager to discuss buying the site once it finally finishes crushing what remains of his spirit, so it can begin crushing the remains of mine.

With regard to the domain name, Science Inc. explicitly declined to sell delicious.com along with the site, so they could perform some kind of SEO asshattery with that domain in the future.

[Jerry2]

Thank you for this post! I find it bewildering that I got to know the truth from you and not from Delicious management. Why they couldn't keep everyone in the loop is beyond me. A single tweet along the lines "we're working on it, stay tuned" would have gone a long way. Instead we got radio silence. I lost a lot of my research time when I couldn't get to my links and notes. I'm sure others experienced the same anguish.

[morgante]

Thanks for posting the background info.

As a loyal user of Delicious, I hope Tony is able to turn it around. It's really depressing to see thousands of my bookmarks become unusable. The site doesn't even support https.

Respectfully, I hope you don't buy it though. I want me bookmarks provider to be free of politics.

[SonicSoul]

I want me bookmarks provider to be free of politics

care to provide a reference? Missed this.

[tedunangst]

Pin board on Twitter is far from politically neutral.

[VRtual]

Similar to the band Cake. Nobody cares what they have to say about politics; we just follow them for one purpose.

[joshmn]

> so they could perform some kind of SEO asshattery with that domain in the future.

Sounds about right.

[Arcsech]

Pinboard has apparently been involved in at least semi-serious talks to buy Delicious, according to the @Pinboard twitter. I believe he'd do it, too.

[onion2k]

Surely that would just take time and energy away from more important things like the burrito tunnel project.

[zackelan]

> the burrito tunnel project

For anyone unfamiliar with one of the most important engineering/infrastructure projects ever built:

http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_t...

[Esau]

That doesn't make sense. I can't see anything Delicious could offer Pinboard, aside from the domain name.

I really hope that doesn't happen. Pinboard is perfect.

[maxerickson]

It's a bunch of users.

[idlewords]

It's a bunch of bots.

[SonicSoul]

i believe delicious is free so you'd still need to convince those users to switch to a paying model.

[firebones]

Nah, the transfer would generate a bunch of headlines, which in turn would translate into a bunch of new signups. I suspect Pinboard's signup spike graph is like a seismograph of Big Bookmarking's asshattery moments.

[wyclif]

Pinboard buys Delicious, reverts to del.icio.us culture, hires @joshu

[jlarocco]

> I switched to Pinboard few months ago when Delicious committed seppuku and made their site completely unusable.

Funny to see people saying this in 2016.

I switched to Pinboard in early 2011, after rumors of Yahoo "sunsetting" Delicious. A few months later, Delicious was sold off, and it wasn't long before they made the site "completely unusable" for the first time. I didn't realize it was still around, TBH.

[rsoto]

I agree. I'm on the same boat, and despite what idlewords is saying, I can't understand not making even the most basic changes, like when you click the title, it goes to the link, not to something else that never works (like the permalink on delicious), and adding bookmarks.

I think delicious really shined when their focus was on making adding bookmarks easy. It had a Firefox add-on in which you just had to CTRL+D to save that bookmark. Now, you need a bookmarklet (what is this, 2006?) since the extension has been removed a long time ago. I wished pinboard's focus was on it, it's not that hard. Currently I'm using an extension which has no keyboard shortcut, and after saving a bookmark, it's unclear whether you saved it or not, since it's showing a blank page.

[toyg]

I exchanged tweets with Maciej about this; the main issue is that extensions are a constant moving target -- which is sadly true, it takes a lot of work to keep an extension working these days, especially on Firefox.

[tomaskafka]

For bookmarking? Srsly? It must be like 2 days per year and browser max :rollseyes (yes, I've built several browser extensions) ...

[idlewords]

So that's like a week of my year gone! No thanks.

[steve19]

A week your paying users (myself included) would greatly appreciate.

[lackbeard]

Heh, I only ever used del.icio.us to access the site... I think it may have redirected to delicious.com for a while which is how I ever noticed that became a thing.

It's crazy how many different incarnations the site has had.

[jccalhoun]

I'm in the same boat. Used delicious for years but switched when it went down for a week without any explanation or assurance that it was coming back