"Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me.
Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary."
OMG. I think I stopped and laughed for a solid 30 seconds when I read this.
I don't think I've ever felt so "seen" in my whole 25 years as a programmer.
Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks.
But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut.
What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked.
I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.
I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.
Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari.
...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.
You're worrying about a business with a estimated minimum profit margin of 79%, using the most pessimistic assumptions I could think of. I wouldn't be worrying yet.
In 2017^: revenue was $259k, costs were estimated $17k, archives 31.8TBy, 126M URLs.
In 2020: revenue was $212k, costs were not specified, archives 82TBy, 192M URLs.
Archives are 2.58x higher, URLs are 1.52x higher. So taking the higher of the two multiples and pessimistically multiplying the 2017 costs of $17k (the cloud has gotten cheaper but let's ignore that), we get $44k in costs (this is probably too high by 2x), leaving a profit of $168k.
Users dropped from 29K to 19K, so you should start worrying when users reaches 5K, assuming that costs scale linearly with data (which they definitely do not).
In all likelihood, you probably don't need to worry until users reaches 2K. At current rate, that's probably about a decade, assuming ten more years of no changes to the site (such as mobile support) and etc.
> ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers
My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing, but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Yes, Microsoft is horrible, but they're also spectacularly wealthy. Ultimately I didn't subscribe.
Businesses need to ask from time to time if their business model is the right one for the current year. Expecting people that don't know you to give you $22 for a bookmarking service, without a trial period, might be wishful thinking in 2020.
> currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags
I'm at 17,614 bookmarks 2,530 tags. And it's incredibly valuable to be able to go back and find things, even things I bookmarked and categorized a long time ago.
> so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers.
I agree. In fact, that was the second thing I noticed, right after the declining revenue numbers. Earlier this year I went ahead and paid for 5 years of archiving service (my account predates the switch away from a one-time payment so basic bookmarking is free) partly because I trust maciej to still be around in 5 years but mostly because I wanted to be sure I'm supporting the site.
I STRONGLY want this to be profitable and successful because it is such a valuable service.
Member since 2012 (ah wut, I still have the activation email!), after migrating (easily) from a dying Delicious. Thank you so much for running this! As far as actually useful web services go (and holy crap is this useful!) it's by far the most stable I've ever used, and it never got bogged down in useless crap like 99% of other web services which constantly need to pivot while looking for a way to actually make money.
It's been a frickin' journey. ~2004, started using Delicious. ~2005, built my own search site because Delicious couldn't handle searching through a few thousand bookmarks with a few thousand tags! 2006, contacted by a researcher looking into tag clouds because mine had more unique tags than bookmarks. 2012, migrated to Pinboard for a fixed lifetime fee. Best money I ever spent! Today, heard about the bookmark archive functionality and signed up immediately.
Oh dear. I'm a positive newbie here! Found my original receipt; 1st Jan 2015 for the princely sum of $10,60 for lifetime membership. And I only have a measley 1680 links saved.
It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain.
I must admit my heart sank a bit when I read about the rewrite opening the door to new features. For my uses, Pinboard is pretty much perfect as is [and I've never noticed any problems using it on mobile]. I really hope the developer doesn't start adding loads of extra bells and whistles [read "bloat"] to try and attract new users. I just want my bookmarking service to be boring, reliable and so unintrusive that most of the time I forget it even exists... til I see an article like this on HN.
PS: Off-topic. But I really like the way "maciej" writes. He comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth, self-deprecating and funny guy. Such a refreshing change from all the 'trying-far-too-hard-to-be-hipster-cool' writing out there at the moment.
Having followed Maciej for a couple of years, I seriously doubt he'd ever fall into the trap of feature creep. He's one of the most pragmatic software engineers, if not people, I've ever encountered.
PPS: One of the other things I like about Pinboard [and one of the things that makes it so unobtrusive as to be forgettable --in a good way!] is that it doesn't feel the need to periodically expire my login session. I've probably had to re-log-in under a dozen times across all my various gadgets, over the more than five years I've been using it.
If only more websites were like that!
[Yes I'm looking at you eBay, Amazon et al... who greet me by name, show me what I've bought recently and then ask me to login!]
I think you can rest easy when it comes to new features. Pinboard has a pretty good track record of not changing what works well. The kind of stuff I want to add (ability to filter results by date, easier edit interface for tag gardening, API expansion) will not make the site any less boring.
Out of curiosity, what do you use to store and search bookmarks on mobile? Both the old (third-party) iOS app I used to use and the old macOS app I used to use have stopped working years ago due to neglect. So I use the service pretty sparingly on desktop and pretty much not at all on mobile.
That picture of past you... what is going on? On the table I see the following beverages: wine, liquor, coffee, water. There's also a cheese grater. And what looks to be a bottle of pills. Okay. Now on the window sill behind you is ... I don't even know, coffee, a cleaning product, some napkins maybe, another wine bottle and other sundry items.
This looks like maybe a table shoved into the corner of a tiny restaurant, away from the main area.
Apparently it's night time.
I guess it's as good a place to write code as any other. :-)
I don’t think there is any service I’ve been more happy with the last decade than this one. The (optional) PDF archival in particular is great. I also appreciate that since I pay for it and it’s not freemium or anything, it won’t go away in a attempt to please investors.
Pinboard is ok, but recently I found myself to either just webclip the article into evernote, or make a note about it in Roam Research. Somehow just having tagged links doesn't work for me anymore.
Can you all share your workflow/use cases with this and other bookmarking services?
I’m geniounly curious because the way I treat bookmarks is that they are temporary links I wanna go back to, so they all end up being deleted sooner rather than later. When I want to visit a website I just type in the website’s name in my browser and either let autocomplete do its magic, or just let it take me to Google where I tap on the first link. The idea of keeping bookmarks saved and organized/tagged is alien to me.
I use kind of like my own personal Stack Overflow. I tag stuff with several (hopefully memorable) tags, and when I can't remember how to (whatever), I search and usually find an article which I thought was helpful enough at the time. Yup, I could google it too, but as you know, sometimes info is out of date, wrong, etc. I keep the good ones.
I also bookmark stuff I want to get back to; for instance, I do eventually want to start an SaaS, so I've got a lot of 'business', 'marketing', etc. links.
At work once, someone mentioned some particular technology and I said, "I think I have some links for that!" His office-mate promptly said, "You have a link for everything!" :-)
I have two use cases. The first is to keep track of interesting articles I find and plausibly want to refer back to in the future. A 3rd party browser extension and mobile app make saving very easy, and then I tag each item with a high-level category. This is also pretty painless, and brings a lot of value (otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful). An example is my 'long reads' tag https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/. The 'unread' feature is also useful here - I've got >10 long reads banked for when I'm looking for things to do.
The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.
I don't treat bookmarks as a list of sites. I treat them as a list of jumping-off points for any kind of resource whatsoever.
Everything I come across that I might want to be able to find my way back to goes into Pinboard as a bookmark.
The full-text indexing feature means it's my own personal search engine of (most things) I've ever seen. I imported my previous bookmarks, which go back to 1994.
Everything I come across that I will likely want to go back to and digest later goes into Pinboard as a bookmark set to 'unread'.
When I have some time to relax, catch up, and read, I open my list of unread bookmarks and work backwards. Or I skip back a month, or a year, or several. It's amazing what I'm reminded of. Sometimes I decide I don't care any more and delete or just keep links as bookmarks, but more often than not I'll go and read whatever it was I'd left as a gift for future me.
I don't use Pinboard (yet) but I have my own system of many thousands of bookmarks, and the reason is that I can't always remember stuff.
So if I see, say, a good online tool for checking an email for spam-like features, I might bookmark that with tags of 'email', 'spam', etc. Then if in future I don't need to Google "email spam tool" and find 1001 irrelevant things, I can just search my bookmarks instead and find that it was https://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ (I just did this very search as I couldn't remember what that tool was called).
Pretty much every valuable tool or site I've ever seen is organized in such a way that I can bring it up on a second's notice.
I also can bring up things I once thought were neat and that I've totally forgotten about just by searching for a tag.
I'm not much into tags, but Pinboard has a paid archiving upgrade (https://pinboard.in/upgrade/) that allows you to search within the archived full-text versions of your bookmarks. That's how I roll mostly.
I use Pinboard in combination with a Raspberry Pi (running Calibre + Mozilla Readability) as my Read Later service. Once per day the Raspberry Pi fetches unread bookmarks from Pinboard and compiles an eBook that is then sent wirelessly to my Kindle. This has replaced Instapaper/Pocket for me. Thanks to Mozilla Readability the text/image extraction works in most cases better than other Read Later services + I like having all my bookmarks in one place (and one service less to pay money for!). I've written a blog post about it and open-sourced all my work: https://christianhans.info/12791/running-your-own-read-later...
Mostly I save ideas for projects or personal development things that I need to do a more "deep read" of (this also allows me to tag it for that purpose, and when I want to go back to something I've worked on I can find references I've used for specific projects that I may not have saved elsewhere), things I've read that I might want to reference later/thought was a good read or interesting and tag it with the relevant stuff. Mostly I just use it as an instapaper backup, where I have it automatically save my Archived stories and it tags it with a "tagme" tag that I go through once a week or so.
Very recently I deployed (in my personal VPS) espial (https://github.com/jonschoning/espial) which basically a self-hosted pinboard clone. I'm extremely happy with it.
I wish it had a browser plugin but besides that it is amazing
I like pinboard but when I had problems with my archival account a couple of years ago I didn't receive any response to emails even though I chased for months. No longer subscribe but would love to find a similar alternative. Maybe poor customer service is the reason for the number of active customers dropping off.
I know this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion, but I'm another happy user who loves the product and uses it daily. I feel like it gives me the superpower of being able to answer any question my teammates have with a dump of my favourite books / essays / papers on the subject.
If I have the time, I like to open up /recent[0] to see what's in there. /popular[1] is good too, but with /recent you usually find some obscure less popular (but still good) link that always surprises me. I am glad the Internet still has little rabbit-holes like this that you can get lost in.
I've signed up in September 2010 and been a loyal user ever since. Pinboard is pretty much my archive: cool things I've seen, project ideas, solutions, etc.
I imported my bookmarks into pinboard, but found it quite a chore to go through them and tag them properly, so I abandoned that. Firefox sync keeps my bookmarks available everywhere anyways.
Now I use pinboard for my youtube subscriptions, every time I subscribe to someone on youtube, I add it to pinboard and tag it.
Very useful when your subscriptions range from several different sports to tech or gaming.
Would do same for instagram but I have too many subscriptions and it's useless when someone changes their @account.
They could really do with a lists feature ala twitter.
Pinboard is an abandoned graveyard, I requested a download of my archived bookmarks, got it like 6 months later - not 'under an hour' as promised, better late than never I suppose. I wont be renewing.
[+] [-] danesparza|5 years ago|reply
Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary."
OMG. I think I stopped and laughed for a solid 30 seconds when I read this.
I don't think I've ever felt so "seen" in my whole 25 years as a programmer.
[+] [-] flobosg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|5 years ago|reply
But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut.
What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked.
I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.
[+] [-] idlewords|5 years ago|reply
I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.
[+] [-] ralphc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|5 years ago|reply
...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|5 years ago|reply
In 2017^: revenue was $259k, costs were estimated $17k, archives 31.8TBy, 126M URLs.
In 2020: revenue was $212k, costs were not specified, archives 82TBy, 192M URLs.
Archives are 2.58x higher, URLs are 1.52x higher. So taking the higher of the two multiples and pessimistically multiplying the 2017 costs of $17k (the cloud has gotten cheaper but let's ignore that), we get $44k in costs (this is probably too high by 2x), leaving a profit of $168k.
Users dropped from 29K to 19K, so you should start worrying when users reaches 5K, assuming that costs scale linearly with data (which they definitely do not).
In all likelihood, you probably don't need to worry until users reaches 2K. At current rate, that's probably about a decade, assuming ten more years of no changes to the site (such as mobile support) and etc.
^ https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/
[+] [-] bachmeier|5 years ago|reply
My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing, but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Yes, Microsoft is horrible, but they're also spectacularly wealthy. Ultimately I didn't subscribe.
Businesses need to ask from time to time if their business model is the right one for the current year. Expecting people that don't know you to give you $22 for a bookmarking service, without a trial period, might be wishful thinking in 2020.
[+] [-] mcherm|5 years ago|reply
I'm at 17,614 bookmarks 2,530 tags. And it's incredibly valuable to be able to go back and find things, even things I bookmarked and categorized a long time ago.
> so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers.
I agree. In fact, that was the second thing I noticed, right after the declining revenue numbers. Earlier this year I went ahead and paid for 5 years of archiving service (my account predates the switch away from a one-time payment so basic bookmarking is free) partly because I trust maciej to still be around in 5 years but mostly because I wanted to be sure I'm supporting the site.
I STRONGLY want this to be profitable and successful because it is such a valuable service.
[+] [-] zimpenfish|5 years ago|reply
Almost all of those are automatic, though, from Twitter/Instagram/Pocket/RSS favouriting thanks to their own account linking and IFTTT.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l0b0|5 years ago|reply
It's been a frickin' journey. ~2004, started using Delicious. ~2005, built my own search site because Delicious couldn't handle searching through a few thousand bookmarks with a few thousand tags! 2006, contacted by a researcher looking into tag clouds because mine had more unique tags than bookmarks. 2012, migrated to Pinboard for a fixed lifetime fee. Best money I ever spent! Today, heard about the bookmark archive functionality and signed up immediately.
[+] [-] Normille|5 years ago|reply
It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain.
I must admit my heart sank a bit when I read about the rewrite opening the door to new features. For my uses, Pinboard is pretty much perfect as is [and I've never noticed any problems using it on mobile]. I really hope the developer doesn't start adding loads of extra bells and whistles [read "bloat"] to try and attract new users. I just want my bookmarking service to be boring, reliable and so unintrusive that most of the time I forget it even exists... til I see an article like this on HN.
PS: Off-topic. But I really like the way "maciej" writes. He comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth, self-deprecating and funny guy. Such a refreshing change from all the 'trying-far-too-hard-to-be-hipster-cool' writing out there at the moment.
[+] [-] azeirah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Normille|5 years ago|reply
If only more websites were like that!
[Yes I'm looking at you eBay, Amazon et al... who greet me by name, show me what I've bought recently and then ask me to login!]
[+] [-] idlewords|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lilyball|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unlimit|5 years ago|reply
I need to get going.
[+] [-] js2|5 years ago|reply
This looks like maybe a table shoved into the corner of a tiny restaurant, away from the main area.
Apparently it's night time.
I guess it's as good a place to write code as any other. :-)
[+] [-] GuiA|5 years ago|reply
"I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania."
https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
I suspect that's the kitchen :) My own kitchen table during this confinement period isn't too dissimilar...
[+] [-] torb-xyz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greyman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] washicalendar|5 years ago|reply
I’m geniounly curious because the way I treat bookmarks is that they are temporary links I wanna go back to, so they all end up being deleted sooner rather than later. When I want to visit a website I just type in the website’s name in my browser and either let autocomplete do its magic, or just let it take me to Google where I tap on the first link. The idea of keeping bookmarks saved and organized/tagged is alien to me.
[+] [-] chris_st|5 years ago|reply
I also bookmark stuff I want to get back to; for instance, I do eventually want to start an SaaS, so I've got a lot of 'business', 'marketing', etc. links.
At work once, someone mentioned some particular technology and I said, "I think I have some links for that!" His office-mate promptly said, "You have a link for everything!" :-)
[+] [-] aglionby|5 years ago|reply
The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.
[+] [-] tokamak-teapot|5 years ago|reply
Everything I come across that I might want to be able to find my way back to goes into Pinboard as a bookmark.
The full-text indexing feature means it's my own personal search engine of (most things) I've ever seen. I imported my previous bookmarks, which go back to 1994.
Everything I come across that I will likely want to go back to and digest later goes into Pinboard as a bookmark set to 'unread'.
When I have some time to relax, catch up, and read, I open my list of unread bookmarks and work backwards. Or I skip back a month, or a year, or several. It's amazing what I'm reminded of. Sometimes I decide I don't care any more and delete or just keep links as bookmarks, but more often than not I'll go and read whatever it was I'd left as a gift for future me.
[+] [-] petercooper|5 years ago|reply
So if I see, say, a good online tool for checking an email for spam-like features, I might bookmark that with tags of 'email', 'spam', etc. Then if in future I don't need to Google "email spam tool" and find 1001 irrelevant things, I can just search my bookmarks instead and find that it was https://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ (I just did this very search as I couldn't remember what that tool was called).
Pretty much every valuable tool or site I've ever seen is organized in such a way that I can bring it up on a second's notice.
I also can bring up things I once thought were neat and that I've totally forgotten about just by searching for a tag.
[+] [-] flobosg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christian008|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wexxy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mogaal|5 years ago|reply
I wish it had a browser plugin but besides that it is amazing
[+] [-] c1c2c3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
I've had a similar experience. Last year the site just wasn't working when I needed it, so I did not renew and moved to Larder.
[+] [-] QuinnWilton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jermier|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://pinboard.in/recent/
[1] https://pinboard.in/popular/
[+] [-] zerfall|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] werid|5 years ago|reply
Now I use pinboard for my youtube subscriptions, every time I subscribe to someone on youtube, I add it to pinboard and tag it.
Very useful when your subscriptions range from several different sports to tech or gaming.
Would do same for instagram but I have too many subscriptions and it's useless when someone changes their @account.
They could really do with a lists feature ala twitter.
[+] [-] stevewilhelm|5 years ago|reply
It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.
[+] [-] teejmya|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bantunes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diroussel|5 years ago|reply
So many the technology refresh did break something! ;-)
Disclaimer: I'm a customer.
[+] [-] kome|5 years ago|reply
Best $6,28 I ever spent...
[+] [-] yinka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|5 years ago|reply