
Ask HN: Why did delicious.com fail? - bookbinder
One day it was popular and then it started going through redesigns and relaunches. For a while, I used it to see what was trending, but then they hid that info from the home page and then brought it back until finally the site appeared to be a broken ghost town.<p>I&#x27;m just trying to construct a narrative to satisfy my curiosity. What exactly happened? Was it death by a thousand cuts (if so, where did it get cut?) or was there one fatal mistake (like Digg).<p>Discuss. (And feel free to share any links to stories&#x2F;articles on Delicious&#x27; demise.)<p>EDIT: Typo. I meant &quot;Digg&quot;, not &quot;Reddit.&quot;
======
joshu
Acquired in 2005 with 300k users. Had 4m users and maybe 1m MAU in early 2007
before the transition to the v2 site.

Yahoo management did a huge amount of work to kill momentum.

1) We were forced to migrate to PHP. We were not allowed to have ops support
until this was complete.

2) We inherited the Yahoo Photos team that brought a backend that they had
written for that platform. They estimated it would take six months to migrate
delicious to that new platform. It took 2+ years.

3) We were denied having actual access to VESPA and had to reuse MyWeb's
backend instead, which was designed for a different feature set.

4) Almost all the staff were placed on Yahoo Answers anyway, which ended up
dying of its own accord anyway.

~~~
gmiller123456
That's not likely what caused its decline. I used Delicious for quite a while,
and my reduction in use had nothing to do with what it used on the backend. I
think it served its purpose as a social bookmarking site pretty well for the
time it lasted. But it finally started its decline likely due to old fashioned
competition. Google pretty much made the need for personal bookmarks obsolete,
and sites like Digg and Reddit were a much better method of sharing links with
curated lists and discussions.

~~~
joshu
It lost momentum - no features or anything added for three years.

A large number of people use computers as memory tools. Trello, Evernote,
Pinterest, etc. - Google doesn't seem to be particularly relevant. Perhaps you
mistake your usage pattern for everyone's?

Neither Digg nor Reddit made a way to share curated lists, so no clue what you
are talking about there.

------
marojejian
I have no specific knowledge here. But I've been a del.icio.us user since I
think 2005.

In general, despite great promise and utility (IMHO), curated bookmarking of
this sort never really took off. It's always been around, and still is. Why?
some guesses:

Not that many people are data-oriented enough to want to use such a service.
Same reason RSS is relatively unpopular.

Delicious and related services never generated the sort of social proof /
payoff that drove other services. E.g. desire for friends / followers / karma
were essential to FB / twitter / HN (since we are here!). Delicious was high
on the personal utility, low on the social reward.

I'm not sure this is that related to Delicious' functionality, but might just
be a cultural / community function, that never really developed in this case.
It's not tech that makes HN awesome, it's people. But given that Digg /
Slashdot faded, this may not be as popular a category. Reddit is huge now...
but it's more of a forum vs. link sharing.

And these services are so easy to create, who would pay for them? In the
absences of hype / popularity, not much of a business there. I switched to
raindrop, which is great. But others were close.

It's very sad to me. I think that the ability to socially curate the web, and
to vote up/down on such resources, is actually really valuable to the long-
term health of the internet.

Maybe we're just not ready yet...

~~~
cannonedhamster
* Reddit is a cesspit waiting to fail that encourages abuse as a platform. I am waiting for what replaces them as there is a lot of information people are looking to share without the torrent of garbage that comes with it currently.

* Slashdot faded because new buyers came in who didn't understand the product.

* RSS still exists and is going strong. It just does the job without the flash, the reason content producers don't like it is that you can't monetize it in the same way as email. I personally use TheOldReader for curating this.

* I'm going to add Sourceforge as a site that shot themselves in the face. It seems like it's newest owners have done a lot to try and repair the damage.

Raindrop looks fantastic, I'm glad you brought it up. I'm guessing we few are
the kind of people keeping this type of service alive.

~~~
mullingitover
> Reddit is a cesspit waiting to fail that encourages abuse as a platform.

People mistake reddit for a single bulletin board, because it allows you to
aggregate multiple subreddits, and criticize it like it's a single place. In
reality it's just a free hosted bulletin board service. As such, it's just a
cross-section of the internet, and to criticize reddit is to criticize the
abstract concept of internet fora. There are serious places like
/AskHistorians in there, along with many others. There are bad
neighborhoods/poorly moderated fora in there, but that doesn't make reddit
itself a cesspool any more than the existence of Skid Row makes Los Angeles
County a cesspool.

------
Apreche
Because it got bought by Yahoo. They didn't take care of it properly. Then it
got bought by Avos systems, who didn't take care of it properly. Then it got
bought again by people who didn't take care of it properly.

Now it is finally owned by Pinboard. But most of the users who abandoned
del.icio.us had already switched to Pinboard. Now all is well.

~~~
joezydeco
Some related discussion over at Metafilter during the Pinboard acquisition
timeframe:

[http://www.metafilter.com/167340/Pinboard-Acquires-
Delicious](http://www.metafilter.com/167340/Pinboard-Acquires-Delicious)

~~~
j_s
Pinboard Acquires Delicious |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14462384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14462384)
(Jun 2017, 227 comments)

------
chrisabrams
For a few years I was the Silicon Valley Necromancer, attempting to reenergize
failing businesses with new technology. I was on the Delicious team at AVOS
(2012-2013), whom acquired Delicious from Yahoo!. I probably know very little
of the whole story...but...I can at least share some of the technical
challenges that we faced.

I lead the team on the re-write that brought Delicious into the single page
app (SPA) world. Most people wondered why we built the app from scratch again.
The python codebase that the Yahoo! team managed, I am not sure if they
started their version of the app that way or if the inherited it, but we
concluded that it would be quicker to re-write the app as opposed to
dissecting the exiting application codebase. This is the primary reason why
stacks were canned, regardless of what others might have said. Many times
rewrites require reducing features in order to build a new foundation. This is
sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not.

A rewrite also gave us the opportunity to build the app as an SPA. While we
made an SPA, React, Redux, Webpack, Gulp, etc. did not exist, and we
definitely ended up spending more time than expected creating inferior
toolsets due to the lack of options at the time.

Another major challenge we faced was that the database was sharded in such a
way that if your username was "zebra" the backend would hit MySQL server 1,
then 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and finally 10 before returning results. If your
username was "apple" you'd get a response quite quickly. I am not sure if we
ever completed the migration into new shards/replicas.

There were also some random old API endpoints where we had to double encode
periods in the url or the API would throw an exception. Obviously there was no
documentation on for our treasure hunt to find which API endpoints had this
major issue.

We didn't get any notice at AVOS before the team was moved off of Delicious to
work on other projects. Perhaps we took too much time building the rewrite, or
perhaps we realized there was no business model worth the time.

AVOS would later make a unilateral decision to move all projects to Angular,
which was not a framework I believed would benefit my career development. I
left AVOS when StubmleUpon called me and said, "hey if you can make Delicious
a SPA, do you think you can make our app an SPA?"

Boy, I sure know how to pick 'em...

P.S. I will say that the Delicious team at AVOS was a very talented team and I
am thankful for each day I got to work with them.

[edit] for grammar [edit ii] Since it doesn't seem clear in the comments: I'd
build Delicious differently today.

~~~
idlewords
I am undoing literally all of your work right now. I curse you daily!

~~~
preek
OPs story sounded really dangerous - rewriting an existing app that is in
scale with unproven tech.

Care to share some fun facts on what you're doing right now? Please?(;

~~~
idlewords
I'm just moving it back to flat pages without the javascript cruft.

~~~
preek
Thx for sharing.

Writing a too complicated front-end is probably one of those situations that I
am getting into more often in the last years..

After some 15 years doing web dev, I'm starting to encourage SPAs more and
more sparingly - only where they _actually_ improve UX and it's worth the
extra work.

------
idlewords
Current owner of Delicious here.

Here's my understanding of the history (which I hope people like joshu correct
if I'm wrong):

The site was awesome and popular pre-Yahoo, but also pretty overwhelming to
run. Yahoo brought it with resources, scale, and sweet, sweet promises that
they understood Web 2.0. Instead, they quickly moved Joshua to a position
where he couldn't really steer the product, and got sidetracked into redesigns
and time sinks like integrating Yahoo ID as logins. The original, ambitious
plan (integrate Delicious as a signal into Yahoo search, and make it
unbeatable in real-time trending topics) was lost to management paralysis.

Yahoo disastrously announced it would 'sunset' the site before actually having
a plan for it, so in winter 2010 a large number of people jumped ship. Sites
like mine (Pinboard) benefitted a lot, Delicious was crippled.

The new owners at AVOS seem to have had a grandiose idea that they would
repeat their YouTube-scale success, and rewrote the site accordingly, to serve
billions. The handoff from Yahoo was one of data, not code (since things were
written to run on Yahoo's platform) and required users to opt in. This
hemmorhaged users further, while AVOS engineers wrote a bloated and ambitious
Delicious clone.

But the biggest mistake was when AVOS turned off some features beloved by a
core Delicious constituency, fanfic authors. In particular, they made it
impossible to search on the "/" character in tags, which instantly rendered a
lot of the elaborate fanfic tagging and classification scheme useless. In my
mind, that's when Delicious hit the point of no return.

AVOS failed through some combination of founder grandiosity and short
attention span. They managed to get the worst of all worlds—high spam, low
revenue, and a $40K a month AWS bill. They sold to Science Inc., a bunch of LA
tech bros who WROTE EMAIL IN ALL CAPS and owned a bizarre collection of other
online apps.

When they tired of it, they sold it to Tony Aly, an SEO specialist who wanted
to try his hand on a bigger project, but eventually found himself overwhelmed
by the support and operational burden. At that point, he sold it to me, and I
parked it on a couple of expensive servers and made it read-only.

To the question "what happened", I think the best answer is that Yahoo killed
the site by neglect. AVOS took it past the point of no return by making it
bloated, slow, and antagonizing the last remaining group of core users. None
of its acquirers ever understood what it was for.

Except me. I understand you, Delicious! But I also compete with you. No more
tears now, only dreams.

~~~
mceoin
Hello! Can I buy you a coffee in SF? I suppose we're building a competitor to
you, but generally think there's room enough for lots of solutions to this
space.

~~~
mceoin
Also, we are tiny, so 'competitor' is a laughable comparison.

~~~
monknomo
I mean, idlewords is just this guy...

~~~
wink
Well maybe mceoin is a smaller person?

------
metajack
My recollection is that it was acquired by Yahoo and promptly stopped
receiving any attention. At least one of the founders left Yahoo a few years
later. Not unlike what happened to Flickr, except Flickr had enough momentum
and traction to not completely die. It wasn't long after all that that Yahoo
Brickhouse closed up completely too. I don't think its fate was a result of
anything intrinsic, just a byproduct of Yahoo's decline.

~~~
idlewords
Flickr negotiated a separate HQ as part of its acquisition, which helped them
stay independent for a little while. Delicious had no chance under 39 layers
of Sunnyvale management.

------
jayflux
I may be in the minority here, but I used delicious as a "bookmarking in the
cloud" feature because it was around before synced bookmarks were a thing. I
was changing machines quite a lot and so didn't want to use the browser's
bookmarks.

Now Chrome does this feature pretty well native I don't really need delicious
anymore, i never used it much for its social aspect.

------
pronoiac
Yahoo bungled Flickr and Upcoming by neglect - limited resources and demanding
integration rather than features. I'd imagine Delicious was the same, but I
don't have a link handy.

For Flickr: [https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-
lost...](https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-
internet)

For Upcoming: [https://medium.com/message/diary-of-a-corporate-
sellout-5874...](https://medium.com/message/diary-of-a-corporate-
sellout-587479c215f4)

------
valbaca
I was an avid user of del.icio.us in its heyday but I remember these things
pushed me away:

* major redesigns (the current Hulu redesign is about as bad)

* competitors, there were a lot of good bookmarking services. I think I went with Evernote

The wikipedia page has a lot of what went wrong
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_\(website\))

------
majani
I think it died because bookmarking is a feature, not a company. As so many
syncing and social media services gained traction, a pure bookmarking service
was always gonna get lost in the noise. I was A Delicious user for a while,
but now I use Firefox sync and Evernote for bookmarks. As for exploring others
bookmarks, I use Facebook for that.

~~~
mceoin
Pinterest is visual bookmarking (though it may be phrased differencly), so a
small tweak to the model made all the difference.

~~~
wolco
It feels like Pinterest feels will start declining if they haven't already.
Being forced to sign in or download the app kills any openness.

~~~
sogen
They are hugely profitable

------
blablabla123
Delicious - like Mr Wong which I liked - was one of the these social but
anonymous services. Some people may have chosen their normal pseudonym of
choice and even shared it with friends, others may have not.

IMHO that's also the reason why Facebook was winning above all the other
Social Networks, it was "real" and not anonymous (or pseudonymous). Virtually
all popular social but (kind of) anonymous services of the past didn't survive
or at least not make it to today's mainstream: forums, MySpace, ICQ... Reddit
is kind of popular but almost exclusively used by techies or people
considering themselves nerdy.

I wonder if one could make a modern Delicious, with mandatory Facebook connect
or something. Not sure though if that would still work out of privacy
concerns. Actually one might consider Pinterest something quite close to it.

------
gojomo
Same as the reason for the failure of Upcoming (v1) and underperformance of
Flickr: Yahoo & its frothy brew of money plus strategic blindness.

You might also throw the fate of ~pg's Viaweb, once it became Yahoo Stores,
into that same class of fumbled opportunities. And so you can read Graham on
Yahoo & get a good idea of the issues:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html)

------
earlyriser
I loved Delicious and I really wanted to stay there, but at some point, the
Firefox plugin broke and it wasn't fixed for maybe months. I started using the
web interface to save my urls, but it was cumbersome. Then I started looking
for alternatives and I paid the lifetime subscription for Pinboard, $9 at the
time. Then I switched and I'm a happy Pinboard user since then.

------
dyeje
Not super familiar with Delicious, but from what I've seen most HN folk seem
to use Pinboard ( [http://pinboard.in/](http://pinboard.in/) ) as a
bookmarking tool.

------
irickt
If I remember correctly the terms of sale required that they get each user's
permission to use their links, so the site was vastly diminished.

Again if I remember correctly there was a decent API for del.ico.us but this
was not a priority for delicious.com.

The site was premised on the idea of "folksonomy" ie that structure would
emerge from the accumulated links. This hypothesis didn't bear out.

~~~
joshu
"folksonomy" was a word created after the fact to describe what I built.
Therefore not a premise.

Most users did have structure to their bookmarks. If I had been allowed
resources I think we would have built something that lined up similar
structures across users and groups of users.

I believe the hypothesis was robustly accurate, especially in the modern world
of machine learning.

------
rossdavidh
Totally rumor-mill, I had heard that it was, after being acquired by Yahoo,
rewritten entirely in PHP, because that's what Yahoo used, and as a result
lost all momentum for new features. However, as I said, t his is total rumor
mill, and I cannot claim to know if it's true.

~~~
idlewords
Delicious was written in Perl (Mason) and ported to PHP at Yahoo. The language
change had nothing to do with the horrible management and lack of product
vision at Yahoo, though.

~~~
joshu
This is actually pretty accurate. There was a backend written in Erlang and
some other bullshit that also delayed things by years.

~~~
lmorchard
Erlang makes me break out in facial twitches to this day.

------
chaoticmass
I stayed away from site for a long time because of the url, del.icio.us. I'm
probably just thick headed or something but my mind read that as three words,
"Del Icio US," and thought "wtf?"

------
achairapart
For me, it died the day its popular RSS feed stopped working.

------
whatyoucantsay
Acquisition by Yahoo! Flickr suffered the same fate.

------
MaggieL
I would still be on delicio.us except for the scare that Yahoo was going to
shut them down. I moved on to Diigo.com and never looked back.

------
michaelbuckbee
I think Delicious succeed at what it wanted to be (a nerdy bookmarking site
that people like myself loved).

What it failed at (under Yahoo) was navigating its product and audience around
to the point where it could have become a Pinterest like Behemoth.

Facebook for all it's flaws and my general concerns with them have proven
themselves the masters at incorporating and updating both acquisitions and
their core product to attract a general audience that they can make money off
of.

------
mceoin
I'm currently building a "social bookmarking" tool, so can't speak to first
hand evidence but have looked into this and spoken to people (2nd hand, not
1st hand sources).

[would love to chat over coffee or email with others passionate about this
space. @mceoin on twitter]

Why delicious died: \- Yahoo acquisition. Death by a thousand cuts from that
day forth. Some things here really pissed off core users include Yahoo sign in
and shuttering some core features that power users loved (see exodus to
Pinboard).

Landscape: \- The attention economy has definitely shifted. Perhaps delicious
could have evolved along with it (we'll never know), but now it is certainly
the case that it is more difficult to gain mass adoption for products that
will provide you with lists of information, since 'good enough' alternatives
exist (notably, these are typically feeds, not lists) \- the world has gone
mobile.

Who lives, who dies, who tells their story? \- Most died or were acquired (it
turns out if you develop a team of search and indexing experts, you're pretty
attractive to big companies). I counted 20+ here, about 50% acquired, the
rest: ?? \- Pinterest had the visual twist, and grew to 200m people \-
Pinboard generated revenue from Yr1, and has a small but profitable user base
(important, because "not dying" is a core piece of the puzzle). \- Kippt had a
great product but team was ultimately were acquired by Coinbase, so it would
be awesome to hear more about their experience. \- Pocket lives on through
Mozilla acquisition. In my experience they never cracked the social piece,
although definitely provided the individual utility to be a daily-active-
utility. Watch-this-space.

Why is this space difficult, generally? You would think that being able to
explore lists of what people find interesting is appealing, and it certainly
is (in theory). There's a hierarchy in information discovery for this space
where: personal saves > friend saves > followee saves > random people saves.
\- social products require high clustering coefficients ( _very important_ ).
This seems to be particularly difficult to obtain in social bookmarking space.
(I believe, but cannot confirm, that most products went too wide too early,
and failed to nail this experience. Facebook's control of launch from college
to college is a different but effective strategy that gave them saturation, so
I believe a restricted entry via referral is pragmatic approach here.) \- Low
virality. This is a hard one to prove since non-success doesn't mean no
potential for breakout success. \- Low target market. Same point as above.

Monetization (three options I see): \- advertising: requires mass scale, hence
most attempts here die. \- pay to play: Pinboard is doing this. (does this
preclude wider adoption? or are other factors at play?) A balance of paying
for privacy features might be an option here. \- crowdfunding/non-profit: e.g.
wikipedia model. Nobody has tried this yet. Would take a certain kind of team
and community, but might position itself well for being a long term human-
curated archive of the web.

I have some thoughts on how what this space lacks and what can be done
differently that I'm happy to share privately. Suffice to say that we want
this, and believe there's an opportunity to build a product that at least a
few people love.

Who is taking a crack at at "social bookmarking" today? \- Refind.com.
Notably, they're more "show me what my friends are reading right now" and feel
like a slimmer, more reading focused, twitter feed. Mobile app is best
consumption vehicle. \- Mix.com (from Garret Camp/Expa). Hasn't 'clicked' for
me personally, but if might for you. \- Us! We're not ready for a Show HN but
if you're in SF and love this space, please do hit me up on twitter for a
coffee: @mceoin.

~~~
sah2ed
> _Facebook 's control of launch from college to college is a different but
> effective strategy that gave them saturation, so I believe a restricted
> entry via referral is pragmatic approach here._

Off-topic: I wonder who made the call on the next college to move to when
Facebook expanded out of Harvard to other colleges.

Was it Zuckerberg? Would love to read about this aspect from Facebook's
history as whoever came up with the strategy had a clear understanding of the
Economics concept of _artificial scarcity_ [0] and its attendant effects; it
was incredibly effective at stirring up _sustained interest_ among college
students and the wider population about TheFacebook.com until it was their
turn to sign up for an account.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity)

~~~
mceoin
Not sure. I studied crowd behavior through sociology when at university and
remember looking into the pattern of streaking behavior in the 70s (? - might
have been 60s). Typically started at an elite university, then spread to all
the 'lower tier' universities in the same region. Wouldn't be surprised if FB
took same approach wrt signaling.

~~~
sah2ed
Not exactly [0] [1] [2].

They started at Harvard then spread to other elite universities (outside
Boston) before slowly opening up access to 'lower tier' universities in the
same region as Harvard like you said, then other regions.

[0] _Zuckerberg 's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until
Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of
roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia University, New York
University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown,
and Yale._ From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Facebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Facebook)

[1] _In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This
expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston-area schools.
It gradually reached most universities in the United States and Canada._ From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash)

[2] _Harvard students are no longer the only ones cyber-stalking their
classmates and professors on thefacebook.com. With the click of a keyboard and
squeak of a mouse, students at Columbia University and Stanford University can
now track down that hottie in section or get help with problem sets. Mark E.
Zuckerberg ’06, the website’s creator, opened his online networking service to
Columbia last Wednesday and to Stanford the day after._ From
[http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-
expands-...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-expands-
beyond-harvard-harvard-students/)

------
abhishekdesai
For me, it was always painfully slow to work with.

------
taw-an
del.icio.us ?

~~~
taw-an
Not sure why I got downvoted. I was the first comment and just trying to
clarify which site the submitter was talking about (since he said
"delicious.com").

~~~
joshuaheard
I upvoted you because I didn't know that delicious.com was del.icio.us.com
until I read the comments.

------
aelmeleegy
It tried to compete with Pinboard.

~~~
panglott
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...](https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/)

