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by stared 3635 days ago
I am a very happy user of Pinboard. And thanks for posting stats! One things which looks worrying is the stagnation of the number of users. By a common social media wisdom, it's a very bad sign... but some time ago I did analyze MathOverflow community (a research-level mathematics Stack Overflow) and they saturated in the first months (sic!) http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2182/is-mathoverflow-..., yet it is a vibrant community.

Also, idlewords, as you are here: any plan to make search listing more items (50? 100?). It's a function I use a lot and sometimes this pagination makes it slower to find an old link.

3 comments

I feel like search should follow the other per-page options (which go up to 160, I think?). So someday I'll fix that.

The number of daily signups and so on has been steady for years, I'm glad someone else is worried about it, so I don't have to be.

Ad 1. It's only 20 (as in: https://pinboard.in/search/u:pmigdal?query=nlp).

Ad 2. Glad I can help!

Social media also relies on social graphs to provide value. But a bookmarking service like Pinboard, while having social components, derives most of its value simply from the service it provides to the user on its own without any social connections. Someone who uses Pinboard without knowing anyone else on the service still gets 99% of the functionality that someone who has friends on the service gets. So it makes sense that a site like Pinboard can eventually plateau on the number of users and still remain successful (assuming users are paying a subscription).
I suspect built in browser based bookmark sync is removing a lot of motivation to use it, at least for the pay once tier which didn't do any archiving.