
Pinboard Turns Seven - mindprince
https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/
======
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.

~~~
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.

------
koevet
I have been using Pinboard for some years now. Great, rock solid service. I
currently keep ~2K bookmarks on Pinboard
([http://pinboard.in/u:koevet](http://pinboard.in/u:koevet)) but I wonder if
my usage pattern makes actual sense for me to keep on using it.

I mainly use Pinboard as a kitchen sink for articles and completely random
stuff I stumble across. You can actually tell from my totally schizophrenic
tag cloud. At some point I was using a custom made script that bookmarks
Hacker News story I'd +. So now I have hundreds of "hackernews" tagged
bookmarks which I NEVER access.

I rarely go to Pinboard to retrieve a bookmark, maybe 10 times a year. It's
faster to Google and for the stuff I really need to go back to I have local
bookmarks.

I'm also a heavy RSS consumer: for sites for which I like to be updated of new
content, I use my self-hosted RSS reader, no need to use bookmarks.

I guess I will keep on storing away links, the service is cheap anyway.

~~~
toyg
Indeed I wish there was a way for Pinboard to actually nudge me into looking
at old links. Maybe a daily reminder like "hey, you pinned this some time ago
and never looked at it since! Maybe you should give it a chance!".

~~~
chiborg
I've written something like this. It's not a general service (since it would
have to constantly pull stuff from pinboard), but you can run it on your own
server [https://github.com/gbirke/pin-this-
day/](https://github.com/gbirke/pin-this-day/)

------
tptacek
A quick reminder for those of you who read a lot of papers: if you have an
archival account, Pinboard will index PDFs. This is way more useful than it
sounds: as you bookmark papers, Pinboard gradually transforms into a mini
search engine for the research you care about.

Someone asked me yesterday how it was I read so many crypto papers, after
citing Bos and Costello in crypto dork Slack. I forgot to tell them my trick:
I don't! I just follow citations and bookmark the hell out of things.

~~~
jesserosenthal
I just wish there were some way for it to deal with paywalls -- since most of
the pdfs I need are behind JSTOR or Muse. I realize this would be a technical
and/or legal hassle (things from behind a paywall would have to be private by
default, I guess) so I'm not holding my breath. But for use in the humanities
and social sciences, it would make it a lot more useful.

I keep meaning to write some script that downloads jstor PDFS that I want to
pin, uploads them to my server, and bookmarks them as private there. But
trying to figure out whether I'd need to add a robots.txt and the like has
kept me from making it happen.

------
jalami
Pinboard is a great service. I like the paid, ad-free model with a nice open
API. I haven't had my Pinboard for long, but already think I'm going to keep
it going for a long time. It's one of the few cloud services I don't fear
being locked into as I can just pull all my data whenever.

Self-hosted alternatives usually require some kind of interactive website
front-end being set up or have some jenky browser extension support. Pinboard
has pretty solid browser support so I can add to it wherever I am.

I use hugo to generate a links page from pinboard's RSS on my website. Every
time I build the site, it pulls the RSS feed and formats it all pretty like.
It's not extremely interesting or anything, but here it is in case you're
curious[0]. Pinboard user pages aren't all that pretty, but it's really just a
container for your data.

[0] [https://www.alami.io/links/](https://www.alami.io/links/)

~~~
aerique
There are apparently some issues with the data export that require help from
the owner: "When I quit Pinboard, he had to make a special dump to actually
give me all my hosted data. If you still use pinboard, verify your exports."

From
[https://mobile.twitter.com/xach/status/751518747941363712](https://mobile.twitter.com/xach/status/751518747941363712)

~~~
idlewords
I believe the issue was exporting the full content of notes and tweets. I'll
make a special dump for anyone.

------
code_research
Self hosting alternatives:

[https://github.com/bookieio/Bookie](https://github.com/bookieio/Bookie)

[https://github.com/plainmade/unmark](https://github.com/plainmade/unmark)

Especially Bookie looks good and would be a preferred candidate to transition
to if you are still using the very old 'Sitebar', 'Scuttle' or the interesting
'Semantic Scuttle'.

~~~
stevekemp
A simpler alternative, for technical users, might be to store your bookmarks
as a plaintext file under revision control.

You can then present them via javascript to allow filtering, searching, and
tags.

[https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public](https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public)

~~~
drdaeman
Well, a note-taking solution (be it a plaintext file or a simple database) can
perfectly handle the task of keeping URLs, but I think the point of
bookmarking _service_ are social aspects and/or content archival and indexing.
Otherwise there's no reason to just not stick to what browsers have built-in
for ages.

------
stared
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-...](http://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/2182/is-mathoverflow-
saturated), 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.

~~~
idlewords
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.

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

Ad 2. Glad I can help!

------
scotu
I subscribed to Pinboard recently, when I lost any unreasonable hope I still
had for delicious.

I knew 100% this was a low maintainance business, but I admit reading "the
first wave of subscription renewals came due" and "I did almost nothing on the
site this year except keep it running" almost in the same phrase hit me like a
punch in the stomach; envy for his business acumen/talent I suppose :)

~~~
genmon
I think idlewords saying he did nothing is a little tongue-in-cheek
disingenuous... shooting his mouth off on Twitter is super effective
marketing, and absolutely vital the first year of subscription renewals.

------
l0b0
Pinboard user since 2012 here, after importing about 12k bookmarks from
Delicious (17k now). It's the best kind of low tech service: It's all about
bookmarking, not ads or gimmicks. The UI loading time seems O(1) rather than
Delicious' O(n).

The only problem now is that there doesn't seem to be a working add-on for
Firefox on Android. Does anyone know of one?

~~~
edp
I'm using firefox on android too but I use PinDroid to create new bookmarks
and access existing ones. It's well integrated in firefox and can be used with
any other application through the android "share" function.

~~~
jalami
Wow neat, thanks for this. I was just looking for extensions for some reason.
It's on F-droid as well if that's preferred. Pretty slick.

Source:
[https://github.com/maxpower47/PinDroid](https://github.com/maxpower47/PinDroid)

------
winteriscoming
I haven't hosted/run a site like this before. So I'm curious whether 17K a
year to run a product like this is normal. If the author is willing to divulge
the details, would love to know what takes the major chunk of that 17K.

~~~
polpo
He is certainly willing to divulge the details. He's posted his expenses
yearly. Here are 2015's:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15RdDg3XyOGzW1T0Wjw9M...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15RdDg3XyOGzW1T0Wjw9Mm7naQxdHvKggwcUtkThG5LA/edit#gid=0)

~~~
buro9
Mine looks much the same, I pay GBP 6,900 per year to run 300 forums serving
200k users per month and over 8m page views per month.

Also in my costs are email (transactional via Mailgun, marketing via MailJet),
DMARCian, AWS S3 for avatars and attachments, SSL (still paying for a
wildcard, perhaps let's encrypt next time round), Google Apps for email to run
the business.

It's realistic to spend around USD 10k per year running a moderately
successful medium sized web business.

~~~
deftnerd
If you're looking to lower your S3 costs, there are some S3 compatible
services now that are far cheaper.

Found this list: [http://www.s3-client.com/s3-storage-
providers.html](http://www.s3-client.com/s3-storage-providers.html)

~~~
buro9
That's the tiniest cost I have.

S3 is all about controlling transfer costs, so I placed an Nginx file cache in
front of my attachments and avatars and it obliterated my transfer costs.

------
preordained
It's a rock-solid service, with no nonsense or wonky stuff. Integral part of
my everyday work/life.

------
danso
OT, but as an iOS user, I found my Pinboard usage went way up after buying the
4.99 Pinner app...I've always had a bit of trouble with bookmarklets...being
able to add things via iOS actions ended up being a huge convenience for me
but YMMV. [http://pinnerapp.net/](http://pinnerapp.net/)

Main complaint is that it's not from Maciej but the author seems committed to
keeping it stable with improvements.

~~~
luckman212
Another excellent iOS client is Pushpin (Lionheart Software) :
[https://appsto.re/us/U5PQG.i](https://appsto.re/us/U5PQG.i)

I have Pinner too, but I prefer Pushpin's UX, just feels smoother and more
responsive.

------
mrbill
I signed up back in the $9 days, and currently have ~7k bookmarks on onboard
(flawless import of my delicious data, too).

It's one of my everyday tools, and would pay a monthly fee if it ever gets to
that.

A perfect example of "do one thing, and do it well".

------
havella
Perhaps more relevant to me than the product itself, is the business model,
the concept of running your own show, optimizing processes to maximize income
and minimizing time spent working.

------
ronnybrendel2
I switched to pinboard back when it was a one-time sign-up fee of 9$. I
believe the fee increased for each new sign-up by 1 cent or so.

Del.icio.us was very good, but at some point it went to shit. Maybe it was
when it was acquired by Yahoo? I remember trying to contact support about the
broken Firefox plugin. They didn't fix it for over 6months.

~~~
eridius
Heh, I just checked and it looks like I paid $2.91 when I signed up. It costs
more now to buy a pinboard client for iOS than it did for me to sign up for
the service!

------
jwarren
As a member since July 14, 2009, I have nothing but praise for Pinboard. It
does exactly what I'd like it to do and gets out of my way doing it. I've
received tremendous value for money for my tiny fee.

------
the_common_man
Is there an opensource pinboard alternative? I am kind of surprised with all
this love on HN give it's love for opensource... (maybe because he is a
popular and funny commenter).

~~~
idlewords
You're welcome to my DB schema.
[https://static.pinboard.in/schema.htm](https://static.pinboard.in/schema.htm)

There seem to be a gazillion open source bookmarking projects out there. It's
hard to go wrong if you're the only user and willing to host it for yourself.

~~~
anc84
I saw "(snapshots are directories created by wget)" and felt compelled to
suggest using the WARC format. Recent wget supports it and there are great
projects like [https://webrecorder.io/](https://webrecorder.io/) ,
[https://github.com/ikreymer/pywb](https://github.com/ikreymer/pywb) ,
warcprox etc

------
SonicSoul
congrats on year 7!

I signed up years ago when delicious decided to completely redesign their
service for no apparent reason and broke backwards compatibility with all
plugins and made the main site less usable.

I am very happy that none of that asshattery is happening at pinboard and the
site remains the boring plain ugly link collector that it is.

I do find myself using pocket more and more however and would be curious if
Maciej has any thoughts on that service. seems like so far the've done
everything right. Although they are aggressive with new features which to me
is a little worrisome because sooner or later some executive will try to be
brave and fuck it up with useless redesign.

~~~
idlewords
I haven't looked at Pocket for a long time, so I don't have a meaningful
opinion to share. The scenario you lay out is exactly the kind of thing I wait
for. It takes superhuman effort (or laziness) not to make gratuitous changes.

~~~
SonicSoul
that's one competitor i'd keep my eyes on. so far their implementation is
pretty flawless.. let's hope they get lazy

~~~
idlewords
Lazy is what I'm afraid of. Let's hope they get active!

------
amix
As a long term Pinboard customer I dislike this "I am doing nothing and I am
proud of it" mentality and I will unsubscribe.

Pinboard has been the same for years and I feel little attachment to the
product.

I am unsure what to switch to, but Pinterest looks like an interesing and
innovative solution.

~~~
samastur
I feel like I am missing something. You were fine with service and value that
it provided until you found out that Maciej is not busy enough running it?

Why would you care if you get more value than you pay. Or alternatively, why
would you pay for it if it didn't?

Are you switching only because of the above reason or is there something
missing that you'd like to find elsewhere?

I am, too, a long term Pinboard customer. I don't care if Maciej does no work
whatsoever in an average year as long as Pinboard works or is fixed quickly
when it doesn't. I may be biased, because my wife and I both enjoy his writing
and talks a lot so it "feels" like we are to an extent sponsoring that too.

~~~
amix
If you pay for a product on a recurring basis you expect improvements and not
only support of the status quo.

~~~
shadowspar
I keep paying my electricity bill every month, but those a-holes at the
utility company never make my electricity any better either!

------
a3n
Thanks, Pinboard.

------
firebones
Pathetic. Only 46% YoY revenue growth. No wireless. In theory as much space as
a bunch of Nomads in the cloud. Lame.

~~~
octref
I'm glad there are people who don't care anything you mentioned while offering
something users enjoy using.

~~~
striking
It's a joke. [https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-
releases-i...](https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-
ipod)

I'm glad there are people who tell jokes, honestly.

~~~
exolymph
I must admit, it was totally non-obvious to me that this was a joke.

~~~
striking
The part about "no wireless" and "Nomads" didn't clue you in? Not even a
raised eyebrow?

~~~
exolymph
People say utterly ridiculous things with utmost sincerity on Hacker News all
the time.

------
hobo_mark
It seems nobody mentioned it yet, but what happened to the Apply HN "winners"?
Did anything come out of it?

~~~
maxerickson
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647165)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12049410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12049410)

Not sure if the other 2 winners have posted anything new or not.

------
anonymous344
I code same kind of php for myself and my brother to use in 2007 but never got
to publish it for anybody else to use. Still use it, but not so frequent
anymore. These days it's not so useful anymore, you can privately share and
store links with so many alternatives like trello.com with mobile also.

But you should really make a video how it works and what are the benefits,
that would make it easier to really understand.

~~~
exolymph
Wrong topic, maybe?

