[crossroadsguy]

Bookmarks are something I have grown tired of. From the days of del.icio.us, I started collecting bookmarks and it kind of trickled along almost until Pinboard went on life support (or something else if you'd prefer to call that).

The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to. I can remember once or twice and either I couldn't find anything among my bookmarks or the sites were long gone. I really don't think I personally had to consult my thousands of bookmarks (which I have now dutifully migrated to Raindrop of course, because why the hell not) in any useful sense ever. I paid for a couple of archiving services as well before realising "nah, I don't really need that, nor this recurring outgoing payment in my life".

So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things".

That reminds me of note-taking. There was a time when I used to do "note-taking exploration and research" and never really took any notes or, hell, even needed them. When I started note-taking, while I still keep an eye out for a decent app, I just pick a decent or half-decent note-taking app and I just take notes. Oh, backup and sync tools and services. Those too - there was "explore and research" and now there's "just use something damnit". "TODOing" to, yes! I am sure this tool (or philosophy? style? bookmarking architecture?) is very nice and novel.

This is not at all reflecting on why or why not one should do such "things", I absolutely believe this is good and sometimes in fact results in tools/services massively good, I am just talking about this out loud wondering whether it's just me or this kind of fatigue really sets in for other people as well.

[motorest]

> The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to.

You're not describing a bookmarks issue. You're describing a personal organization issue, which is reflected on how you manage bookmarks.

You're voicing the exact same sort of complains often directed at todo lists. In fact, from your description you're implicitly treating bookmarks as ad-hoc Todo lists, and you're complaining your To-do backlog is growing.

Like others, you can blame bookmarks and Todo lists for your growing backlog of things you want to do but never get around to doing. Those are not the problem though, and only reflect a symptom caused by the actual problem.

> So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things".

You're describing a symptom of your problem. The fact that it extends beyond bookmarks is a telltale sign.

> This is not at all reflecting on why or why not one should do such "things", I absolutely believe this is good and sometimes in fact results in tools/services massively good, I am just talking about this out loud wondering whether it's just me or this kind of fatigue really sets in for other people as well.

I believe you're expressing the same issues expressed by those who have trouble managing their task queue. Your problem reflects on bookmarks, on personal notes, on productivity software, etc. This means your problem is not bookmarks, or personal notes, or productivity software. It's something else that is reflected across tools and systems.

I have a huge bookmark collection, but I don't care if I saved a bookmark that I never opened. I configured my browsers to exclusively use bookmarks in recommendations, thus serving as an ad-hoc search engine of noteworthy links I visited or want to visit. If I don't visit any of the links, that's too bad. Why would it present a problem?

[esafak]

Because it represents wasted time and cognitive load. It's a vestigial habit from an era when search was bad. Between (AI) search and browser history, I don't see much need for bookmarks.

[justusthane]

I come across things via other channels than search (Hacker News, e.g.), which I have some vague memory of, but which I would never be able to find again via search. This is the role bookmarks fill for me.

[motorest]

> Because it represents wasted time and cognitive load.

No, not really. Either you use them because they are presented to you, or you don't and you are oblivious to their existence. There is zero cognitive load.

> It's a vestigial habit from an era when search was bad.

Nonsense. It's absurd to even suggest that it's reasonable to use a search engine to be able to open sites that matter to you personally.

[esafak]

If you're searching for something it matters to you. So you don't use search engines, eh? You do you.

[motorest]

> If you're searching for something it matters to you.

Yes, something I stumbled upon before and I bookmarked it because it matters to me. See how it works?

> So you don't use search engines, eh?

Do you actually know what a bookmark is?

[alisonatwork]

Bookmarks are useful for address bar autocomplete back to a site I know I visit semi-regularly, but for whatever reason disappeared out of my browser's autocomplete history. E.g. this might happen for social media sites that I only ever visit inside an incognito tab to try (probably in vain) to mitigate being tracked across visits. But also it can happen when I try a new browser or my phone resets itself or whatever. Then I just export the bookmarks.html from my laptop and import it on whatever other device.

I never bothered to look at the schema of the bookmarks.html, because feels like it's worked the same for 20+ years. I used to care a lot about housekeeping the structure, but it doesn't really matter, as long as they're in the bucket the browser will use them for autocomplete suggestions, so...

[II2II]

For some people, they have no need for bookmarks. For other people, bookmarks may be useful but the implementation is not.

Reading the author's description made me realize how unbookmark-like bookmarks actually are. The current implementations are somewhat akin to creating a list of books that you like at the library. It's not so much a pointer to the information you found useful, as it is a list of books you found useful. You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book. If the book is lost, you end up having a reference to something that you cannot obtain. And if you just add books to the end of your list, you still end up having to search through the list. The only way around that is to spend time organizing your list. It's no wonder why bookmarks are useless to so many people.

The author doesn't really solve the problem with bookmarks, except for one. The last one. By sticking a bookmarks file in a project directory, at least you're only searching through a list of bookmarks relevant to the project. If you are no longer interested in the project and delete it, you're also getting rid of bookmarks that you (hopefully) no longer need. It also addresses the portability of bookmarks. As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services. Look at moving bookmarks from one Firefox installation to another: you either use online sync, export to HTML to import from HTML, or import the database (which replaces your current bookmarks with the ones being imported).

[snackbroken]

> You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book.

There is widespread browser support for linking directly to text fragments[1] which makes it possible to link to arbitrary parts of documents even when the author hasn't marked up some nearby element with an id to target, like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572#:~:text=You%20...

Unfortunately, Firefox provides no convenient way of creating such links, but Chromium has a "Copy link to highlight" context menu entry when you have text highlighted. Neither Firefox nor Chromium provide a convenient way to create a bookmark to a text fragment.

> As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services.

Both Firefox and Chromium support importing/exporting bookmarks from/to "HTML" (really, Netscape bookmark file format[2]).

Both browsers also provide the means to organize bookmarks into folders, and Firefox lets you add arbitrary tags to them as well. Alas as you say, the only way is to spend time manually organizing them. Automatically suggesting folders/tags (preferring ones you already have created) seems like an ideal use case for LLMs or other NLP tools. Ideally browsers would offer an option to save a snapshot of the page together with the bookmark, that would guard against link rot and enable full text search. We have the technology, it's really only a matter of improving the UI and linking the two features together. Too bad hamstringing adblockers, gimping sites that rely on XSLT, and implementing WebBluetooth or whatever has higher priority.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

[cpmsmith]

Firefox's implementation of "Copy link to highlight" isn't enabled on stable yet, but can be enabled manually. The ticket to enable it is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948471

[crossroadsguy]

I see your point. Also, maybe to add to it, I should have been rather judicious in collecting bookmarks.

And — possibly to also literally keep them inside the browser’s default bookmarks/favourites whatever browser one uses. Not on some fancy service with AI and what not.

[j45]

This resonated because I realized my relationship to bookmarks was different - I don't save bookmarks, I save or want to remember sentences and saving a bookmark wasn't the best way to do that.

I try to read little I am not looking to apply, or be conscious it's for pleasure/interest

If I bookmark something, I consider it unread. If I read something, I make sure I bookmark and annotate it and tag it to make my mind more actively work with what I'm reading (and make it easer to find.)

The result? 10-15 years of every link I've ever saved, organized and annotated by me. Chronological, sorted, I can see what I was paying attention to chronologically, or by topic, and at any time search any of my highlights and notes.

This is the nice part because it isn't an AI tool, but maybe something that can feed into an AI tool quite nice. My curation, where relevant, as input.

Best of all, it just works. It's not heavy or tedious, anything that has my attention, gets my attention.

The one thing a text only approach will not solve is that URIs while universally defined will not perpetually stay online.

Diigo, and other tools like it allow you to save your own cache, or perhaps submit to a public cache that page so once it invariably goes offline, it doesn't.

There's lots of tools out there to help with this each person's way, I liked diigo.com, but lately think tools like logseq with a few basic plugins are offering a lot of promise to directly save a bookmark, whatever snippets are relevant, and they are always and instantly searchable.

[donkeybeer]

They have always been useful to me. Whenever I had problems, it turns out because I hadn't bookmarked enough. In general I bookmark for anything that I knew once and found difficult to search for the next time when I forgot about it.

[deafpolygon]

I bookmark things so I can look them up when I search in the addressbar. If it’s bookmarked, the result is higher than my search engine results— making them quicker to find again.

[lurk2]

The chief use case is saving the titles of YouTube videos so that you can reconstruct a playlist when the videos are removed.

[enos_feedler]

I spend most of my days wading through the web. When i come across something that excites me I share the link to apple Notes. I dont write anything. Its just a bookmark. In February I spent a week sorting 5000 links into folders. It was quite satisfying to guess why i saved things, find patterns, create an organizational structure etc. the activity yielded both motivation and direction for my personal projects.

[tugberkk]

you can write a program which randomly opens up a bookmark so you can get notified at least per some day/week.

[selectnull]

and then write a program which detects a randomly opened bookmark and closes it because i'm in the middle of something important and can't be bothered right now.

[t-3]

Not really the same, but I find bookmark folders to be pretty useful. I have a "daily", "weekly", "taxes", etc., and it's just one click to open them all up in one go. They could easily be converted into a cron job with a plaintext URL list like TFA.

[theshrike79]

For me bookmarks are this "I know I saw this somewhere..." thing. Sometimes searching All of Internet for that one specific source isn't efficient.

Which means that spending 10 seconds tagging and categorising a link before saving it becomes really useful.

If I suspect even a little that the site or content might disappear (completely or behind a paywall) later, I use Obsidian's Web Clipper to save the whole text locally.

[imiric]

> The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to.

Everyone's workflow is different, but I personally do this often. I bookmark something interesting or valuable precisely because I might want to come back to it at some point. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, and that's fine. But when I'm looking for good software that does X, a good place to stay in an interesting location, or a good product in a specific category, my bookmarks are the first place I check. It sure beats relying on web search results and having to navigate around ads, spam, scams, astroturfed forum discussions, morally bankrupt SEO-hacked listicle sites, social media garbage, and the modern web dumpster fire.

[kiicia]

having bookmark you don't use is one thing, but linkrot of that one bookmark you actually do need is much worse

[jcynix]

To combat link rot I use an applet which looks up a link at archive.org and when I visit an interesting site (of supposedly longer lasting value) I check if it's archived already. If not I ask the way back machine to store it.

[jp1016]

Totally agree with you I have had the same experience. Most of the bookmarks I saved over the years, I never went back to. These days I usually just copy content, run a quick summary through ChatGPT, and if its useful I keep it as a note. That way I dont have to keep deferring things in an endless bookmark pile.

Now I mostly keep two kinds of bookmarks: quick-access ones for work (like repos I contribute to or PR sections I need to check often), and then more organized notes for ideas, projects, or interests I want to revisit later. To make that easier, I use a little tool I put together (beavergrow.com) where I can group bookmarks into blocks and keep notes alongside them—it’s been handy for giving some structure without overcomplicating things.