I do something similar, and in my case it is apparently a result of ADHD/ASD, but that's not why I'm here. I installed the OneTab browser plugin fairly recently because I tended to keep open "too many" tabs across multiple devices for various reasons. And I'd use it, and all my tabs are "closed and bookmarked and filed away", and then a short while later I've got dozens of tabs open again. In most cases, I've actually read these and I'm expecting to continue using the content in some manner.
So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.
That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital and physical books I do read).
I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,
I don't know if you use firefox and tree-style tabs (unlikely, but far more likely here than anywhere else.) If you do, there's an extension for tree-style tabs (an extension for the extension) called "Fade Old Tabs." It allows you to color tabs based on how long it's been since they were accessed. You do this by setting a age range for tabs to be painted gray. Tabs not accessed since the beginning of that range are panted dark gray, and tabs accessed after the range are not colored at all.
So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a month, you'll see them and it might make a difference in your habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs.
Thank you for sharing "Fade Old Tabs". I have the same problem with OP and have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox windows. That is after a big purge I did earlier this year where it was 2000+. Tree Style Tabs crashed a lot before but it has been quite good in recent memory.
I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in itself to fix.
Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working on improving and refining the way I think and approach this.
does research get you to have so many open? How do you manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open.
I fall into this trap as well. My solution to mitigate my tab hoarding has been to set up a blank GitHub repo and use the discussions/issues to just continually post links, descriptions, and notes in a thread format.
Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with GitHub it’s all markdown-based so I can throw images, files and whatever else I need in a session in there to keep it all encompassing.
Doesn't work for me, Firefox restores tabs from before restart. I could turn it off, but it invariably comes helpful for when Firefox (or the PC) crashes.
My current solution is that, through a stroke of luck and a lot of pent up frustration, I've managed to habituate the following behavior:
WHEN I notice I've been procrastinating for too long, OR I'm getting anxious about so many "open loops" in the browser, OR I lose track of specific tabs I know are open and spend more than two seconds looking for it, THEN I find the last Actually Important tab (usually somewhere between the third and the tenth from the left), right-click on it, select "close tabs to the right", and confirm the closure of 100-200 tabs.
I do this a few times on a typical week; because its habituated, I do it fast enough that the FOMO of "but I actually wanted to read that, and that, and that" doesn't have time to kick in.
I have a Python script which I can use to kill all chrome.exe so that next time the machine boots, chrome offers me to restore the tabs which where open before the crash.
I only use this when I know that the tabs are really important and I need to continue using them the next day. Else Chrome starts with a single custom startpage which contains links and as well as views to Jira projects (like a to-do list via the Jira API). And during the day I bookmark all tabs I find important and clean up. But it's usually around 4 windows with each around 10 - 20 tabs which accumulate during the day, in addition to dedicated browser profiles which serve specific purposes, like email or developer consoles.
I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront. It's simple but something I use many times every day.
I end up not managing it at all and it becomes a second brain. Links also rot when revisiting to recall info which is another problem. I use % in the address bar to find the tab what I'm looking for.
I like exhaustive deep dives so will explore as many sources as I can find, until my attention wanes, or I find a solution.
Have signed up for Readwise beta which will hopefully help me to add a layer to store/consume information before it info gets committed to Obsidian. Other link/article aggregators have not been successful for me as it just becomes another repository to manage.
Will have to look into sidebery, haven't seen that before!
People have hundreds of tabs open at the same time?? I get anxiety if it goes above 12 or 15... The times when I just close them all and start opening firefox with no previous tabs are so relieving to me.
I have started opening new windows based on tasks; everything related to that task is on that window. Once the task is done, I close the window so all the tabs go with it. Quite satisfying to close a window with 30-40 tabs. Chrome also allows naming windows so I name each window according to the task.
Those of you trying to curate large amounts of link should get together and create a public index of all that content. You could call the site yoohoo or something ;-)
Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article again based on what I remember from it.
This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.
Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the content of the article you can't find, although you're sure you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...
In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search".
Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".
It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".
--
[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.
It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history?
I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.
Install a web proxy (is Squid a thing anymore? It used to be the proxy server), configure your web browser(s) to use it, and have the proxy save all its content so you know where to search for a "known item search."
The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens.
OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.
Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.
I unironically think social bookmarking is a missing product. Not because it doesn't exist, but because nothing has gained enough mindshare and momentum to be dominant and widely used.
Del.icio.us was a big deal ~15 years ago. I made a Mac client for it (Pukka) that sold pretty well and the service was much talked-about in tech circles, not just for researchers. This was in the early era of social networking as a whole ("Web 2.0") as well as this idea of "wisdom of crowds" for emergent context to bubble up from public tagging.
Folksonomies was one of the terms used back in the day when delicio.us was one of the current hotnesses. I still use pinboard and it's handy. But, like RSS, this sort of thing mostly appeals to researchers/analysts/journalists/etc. The average person mostly doesn't care about saving and even loosely organizing a lot of information.
The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no money to be made in this type of website. These sites come and go, it is very difficult to monetize them.
Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and positive sum, I think.
And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are there any other examples at all?
Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose (cached version of content, super smart search function not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy, bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr. ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links, etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like for bitwarden.
Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against the growth of that network.
Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, tagging and the ability to search for links by page description, tags and user. The subscription fee would mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't be interested in selling ads based on user base size.
I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.
Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked - if you get enough network effects, there must be some way to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that this is not the case.
StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love to have it back, particularly if the contents could be curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month")
If somebody can figure out a note/link app that becomes as easy to manage when you're adding your first note as when you're adding your thousandth note then such services will stop dying out.
Hoarding data does not have to be a negative thing necessarily. Might I suggest checking out https://archive.org/about/. Create an account and install the browser extension.
There is likely no single good answer. Personally I break the issue into the long and short term. Long term (100s 1000s of years) the answer seems somewhat obvious. Preservation of information can be useful to future generations. Short term our societies are experiencing rapid change. Many things are built and soon discarded based on factors other than utility. So preserving the knowledge is useful for the minority of people that found those things useful. Also there is intentional mass truth distortion amplified by technology occurring. Preservation of the original sources of information is the first line of defense against it.
700 open tabs... Try 7000.... I have tabs all the way back from 2014 open right now on one of my firefox instances (probably have ~15 Firefox windows open across devices rn) which I have migrated between multiple machines along with my user profile, and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now.
> and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now
I feel this deeply
The compromise I found was just to dump them into my bookmarking service. If I really really need to find that thing again, it's saved somewhere. 99% of the time it's just digital ephemera and I try to let it go and close the tab.
I think the zero inbox folks would have a heart attack. Impressive you can maintain the tab state that long!
I usually have max 100 open, but I reboot all the time (for power mgmt reasons) and use OneTab so that seems to solve my hoarding tendencies. That and keeping searchable local notes / using history / bookmarking the really good ones that I'll also never read.
I keep zero inbox at work as much as I can and have a couple of hundred tabs open on various desktops (91 tabs on this mobile alone; far more on desktop).
To me they're just different organisational methods that work well in different contexts.
I think it could be solved better browsers history. One idea - star pages - not adding to favorites, just marking them so that you could browse history of those separately. It could also show list of the latest stars in the new tab window for example.
Currently bookmarks, in firefox at least, as far as I can tell, cannot be even browsed by date.
I have 272x tabs open, 170x in my main window. I have been using Tab Session Manager to save and then close windows. Try it, you can always restore the window later.
(the x in the numbers is because the display overflows haha)
Tab Session Manager is essential, as all of us Firefox users know how bad Firefox is at randomly trashing your tab sessions. I've nearly given myself a heart attack a few times over the years.
Please export the tabs, before one tab crashes on you. I’m amazed you made it till 24k without it crashing, low-k tabs are enough on my laptop to crash it. (Though my laptop is from 2015 so that might also factor in.)
i'd be interested in how many are dead links now. i'm nowhere near (hovering around 500 at the moment) and when i frequently do a healthcheck i see that most are already dead. are you archiving (using archive's wayback machine or something?) to ensure they're alive when you need them? for some definition of need lol
What ends up there is what I know isn't important enough to bookmark, but I kinda feel like I should read. Having OneTab makes me feel like it's ok to close the tabs, knowing full well I'll never, ever look for most of them again...
It's an comfort blanket.
I know I'm fooling myself, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
My hope at this point is for some AI to analyze my 75.000+ links and tell me what I may have forgotten which I should really be aware of, and give me a summary of it. Possibly even let me know if new discussions on certain technologies have been trending currently on topics which I Ve dealt with.
Interesting idea.... I have been idly working on an web crawler / indexing / organizing system that uses NLP etc to sort of solve the OP's problem(s) - if you don't mind, could you send me an email about your needs? See my HN account for contact info.
> it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing ... while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
This really spoke to me - I find it to be a really positive way of framing the frustration I often feel with myself when I just can't get focused on work. Because at the end of the day, the clicking through links or reading up on something tangential to the result I want is driven by the same things that make me want to be creative in the first place.
I recently read The Millionaire Fastlane - which is a book I have seriously mixed feelings about - but one of the things that I thought was good in it was the advice to focus on being a producer rather than a consumer. I like this framing of the dichotomy, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Being productive is important, though. The Billionaire Fastlane, however, will tell you that you need a broader view to come up with a great idea.
After all the (healthy) idea behind learning and information aggregation in the first place would be that you learn all that stuff to be better prepared towards taking the right (intelligent and educated) actions.
So there might be an individual balance that you have to find/develop and keep up. The trivial solutions at the edges never seem to satisfy.
That's a good point! I didn't mean to imply that the book says that dedication to learning or producing is enough in and of itself. Just to say that one of the things I agreed with in the book is that it's better to be a producer than a consumer.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, and thought some of the advice in there was really good. One thing I thought was valuable was something I think you're getting at in your post - which is that ideas that have the potential to make big money quickly have a combination of scale and reach and magnitude.
As a younger guy, I thought that the way people got rich was to get a good job and save lots of money (think doctor, lawyer, engineer). But as I entered the workforce I started to understand that actual rich people I encountered almost exclusively got wealthy through owning or being pretty high up in a business.
One thing that reading Millionaire Fastlane helped me crystallize is that serious wealth creation isn't an inherent property of all businesses, and that plenty of self owned businesses don't pay as well as a regular job, and even create more work for their owners than a job would. And that businesses that can create real wealth (read: "can make someone rich") have to have that scale and reach.
Overall I felt the read was worth my time, even if there are some things about it that I didn't love.
Fellow ADHDr here, also living the many tabs life.
I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be safely forgotten.
In case anyone else is looking into browser options, I can't recommend https://arc.net/ more highly. I never thought I'd move away from Chrome, but then again, I never considered that they'd gather so much users that they can't make fundamental UX improvements any more without massive friction.
Arc is just better for me in terms of staying organized. Everyone seems to have their own favorite feature, but "Spaces" are the killer feature for me.
Am I seeing this correctly that arc.net doesn't provide any information about this supposed super browser at all and instead just links to a sign-up form where I need to provide my email address? Yeah, no, not doing that.
It hasn't been released officially yet, only as an invite-only preview so I don't think they mind if they turn away users at this point that don't know what they're getting into (an alpha). There are plenty of youtube videos if you're curious about the actual features.
Arc definitely has some features that I really like. Wish they would've released it on other platforms too as I'm not always using my Mac for everything that I do day-to-day.
to help manage this i created a "speed dial" extension and use it basically as a visual bookmark manager. the advantage to tabs in a list is that they are easy to reference visually, and like any bookmark can be sorted and arranged into folders. for example i have one for technical references, various research topics, etc that i plan to come back to. and its easy to pop one off the list to maintain them. check it out if youre curious, its open source!
The benefit is this: every job has it’s own window.
Note that still it is 100% the case that when not in “production/building” mode the default is consuming. This setup merely helps heighten awareness to the fact.
I do the same, but right now I just keep tabmanager.io on my right screen to show a grid of all my windows. Some which I save for later, e.g. switching between projects.
I'm regularly starting a custom firefox extension to manage them ~700..800 tabs (my average) but then I choke and the cycle repeat :)
Happy to know other have this problem.
ps: to Mozilla Firefox team, kudos on handling that much .. I've used firefox with 1200 open tabs (all kinds of complexity) and it still work ok on my old machine. That said one can notice a clear change in lag after 300-400 but well I won't complain :)
I got over tab hoarding by adding a shortcut to onetab to archive the current tab. Now I freely archive the tabs knowing it’s recoverable, problem solved for me.
I've used OneTab (and then switched to BetterOneTab). Been using it for about 5 years or so. I have dozens of exported "backup" files, because after a certain amount of saved tabs, the extension stops working. You can't save any new ones. I've lost maybe 100 tabs so far by adding them to OneTab only to discover I was at my limit and nothing got saved. It then stops allowing deletions (they come back after refreshing the extension page). So I have to export my hundreds or even thousands of tabs, uninstall the extension, and then reinstall it. And then I keep hoarding.
I have a real bad case of digital tsundoku. Even as I type this, I have roughly 80 links from HN opened, two dozen or so Twitter tabs, probably 30 YouTube tabs, and then a healthy heap of other miscellaneous sites. I know I will never get through this infinite backlog. Even if I were to squirrel myself away and do nothing but open each tab, digest its contents, and move on to the next, it would probably take me years. And I would be so burnt out I wouldn't be digesting well enough. Plus, most of that information is probably, at least slightly, outdated.
...Oh well, time to open up another dozen 3-hour long YouTube "mini" docs about niche subjects I have no engagement in.
Guilty as charged, closed 2022 w/ 6k+ on 2 [onetab]s. Jon Blow said "often if you just keep observing the pattern, it will naturally give you the ability to break out of it" so let's find out. Good case study though.
FOMO is a sign of the vice of curiosity[0] and pride[1]. The rosier side of what you're doing is that you seem to have a means of at least managing the impulse. Still unfocused, still not perfect, but better than pointless chasing after information.
Perhaps a way to break the habit is a kind of fasting and interruption: when you come across the temptation to indulge a distraction or archive that link, cut yourself off and remind yourself that all you're doing is dissipating your energies and working against your own good and understanding. Instead of nourishing your mind through sustained commitment, you are choosing to wallow in the shallows of the shoreline. To enter the depths, you must let go the shore. That's the decision you face here, and decisions are always a sacrificial act. You give up one thing for another.
[0] Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of that stuff and most of it is of little value to you.
[1] Pride because there's now way you can know everything, not in this life.
I think there's a whole lot of truth in this, but I'd also like to try to provide a complementary position, for the balance.
There is a kind of depth can come from focus, but this is a narrow kind of depth, one that can't question its own premises. It's directly analogous to the depth of a depth-first search, and has the same upsides and downsides. It's really handy when you know your target, and when you think your heuristics for having chosen that target are pretty good.
Meanwhile, I think you can look at this kind of broad-spectrum curiosity as a kind of breadth-first search, again, with the same strengths and weaknesses. It definitely takes longer, and it definitely can end up amounting to not much more than wallowing. But it can also serve very well when you're not sure what the target is, or if there even is one.
Furthermore, it can give access to more possible models, more analogies, more metaphor, more understanding-by-comparison, which in turn grants a depth of its own kind, especially in conjunction with true narrow depth of exploration. Since all models are wrong, and each model explores different facets of an idea, having more models gives you a broader set of tools for taking a given concept and applying it to specific areas. They may not be useful in the given moment, but they may lead to unpredictable and insightful connections later on.
But of course, to your point, that all comes at the risk of never getting far enough along to apply anything in the first place. But I do believe there is a place for each. Feynman spinning plates in the cafeteria and all that.
This comment pulled me in and I've reread it several times. Tere is a lot of truth here. I appreciate how information hoarding can be a sign of status seeking. More knowledge, more skill, more times being the person who just knows the answer. Fear (of missing out) is a classic symptom of status seeking.
The problem is that some degree of information hoarding has paid off for me. It sometimes really does improve your skill and impress your peers. Aside from fasting type interventions, what I think is needed in addition to this is some form of wisdom relating to knowing what is valuable to hoard, read, or study. It's like drinking alcohol. If you are getting drunk all the time it is probably a good idea to stop completely. But there are real benefits of social drinking.
This makes me convinced I need more skill in establishing and recognizing priorities when it comes to information gathering.
Whether you fill hard drives or book shelves, your collection will perish with you unless you transfer it to someone younger _and teach them to value it_ before you pass.
Several of my aging friends have thousands of books they've read and shelved up. In a few years their children will think nothing of depositing them all in the landfill because the books lack both market value and sentimental value. The books simply aren't worth the hassle of sorting through. Old hard drives filled with niche data won't fare any better.
Unless the ongoing existence of your collection benefits you or a protege directly, you yourself are already effectively disposing of it.
For those new to the Summa, generally speaking, it is good to read an article starting with the On the Contrary and the I Answer That, and then proceed on to the Objections and Replies
> Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of that stuff and most of it is of little value to you.
Ow. I'm in this picture and don't like it. But that is a wonderful phrase, thank you for introducing it to me.
Is a paraphrase from a john chrysostom sermon? It sounds so familiar but from a completely different context and I can't quite place it. It definitely stuck with me the first time I heard it too, and grappling with the negative side of curiosity has been valuable for me.
There is a ton of practical stuff written in this general area if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links below).
The biggest thing I've taken away from all of my reading and experimentation in this (and being a bit of an information hoarder myself) is that the link itself, or the article itself, is not information, it's "data."
There is value to the data, and if you want to record it that's fine. I use tags (hashtags in Logseq) to classify data so at least it's in some type of taxonomy, but Logseq full-text search is also pretty good so as long as you have words around the URLs that you'd be likely to search for you're good.
Information is what you derive from the data. It's your summary, or paraphrasing of the core point(s), or connections you make between a thing and some other thing you previously recorded.
Tools like Logseq and Obsidian exist to allow you to easily create those connections, and that's very much based on the zettelkasten method, though amplified by what the technology now allows, which is more complex and nuanced.
Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, what you think is important about them, what you saw that related to another thing you saw. That is information.
Came to say this as a light user of Obsidian. I don't think "hoarding" information is a bad habit. These are potentially bad habits:
A) Allowing yourself to be distracted by useless information
B) Under-organizing (or over-organizing) the information you collect
The OP may over-collect pieces of information that aren't important (URLs of random things that are novel) and may not spend enough time adding context to what he collects (e.g. via notes in a tool like Obsidian).
I find the ideas behind zettelkasten very useful. Our brains are not able to remember everything of value, therefore it is worthwhile to invest a little energy in an external or "second brain" where information is stored with some degree of organization for future retrieval.
I have a cache of notes on all manner of subjects going back about a decade. I only recently discovered Obsidian and have been gradually linking those notes together, adding context etc. This has had a real impact on my understanding of certain topics because I've re-discovered insights and knowledge of many things I had simply forgotten.
> so as long as you have words around the URLs that you'd be likely to search for you're good.
This is key.
If you didn't choose the right words, it could be lost forever.
I gave lots of tools a go. Really really tried. Logseq was one of them. Eventually, it had too many features I didn't need, and needed me to be too careful about how I input text.
I've settled on using about 200 plain text notes based on different subjects. And I use my bookmarks as a knowledge graph.
What I am waiting for is a killer-app bookmark manager with very powerful search, and tagging. Maybe some way to import into a tool like Logseq. FLOSS of course.
> There is a ton of practical stuff written in this general area if you search for "mind mapping" or "zettelkasten" (links below).
I think sometimes we can overweight the impact of tools and systems for retaining knowledge. These tools can be useful (I'm working on my own home grown versions of them) and I am getting better with the systems as I get more practice. But, still, this is a race you can never win. As you digest more information, you consume more.
Eventually you've got to get out there and be a maker.
In the last few years I came to understand that the main difference between "hoarding" and "collecting" is "having stories attached" (though my context for that was retrocomputing hardware in particular.) Just in the last week I went through about 300 tabs and either discarded them or put them in logseq, with notes about why I care (or at least grouped with others, so I can go back to a topic and find them specifically. chrome tab-groups had not been helpful for this.) It took a bit to realize that I was applying the same principle...
Don't hoard URLs and headlines. Hoard your thoughts about them, what you think is important about them, what you saw that related to another thing you saw. That is information.
That's different from how I understood his comment!
There is no point in hoarding links; this is just "information." Information by itself is not useful; we need "data" instead.
To turn this information into data, you could use something like Zettelkasten. Instead of hoarding links to articles, hoard notes about these articles and link them together.
Basically, stop hoarding links due to your FOMO. Actually read articles that interest you and learn from them by writing your thoughts.
> I like seeing what people are working on, but there’s too much information and I have a small problem with that.. While it’s manageable to read through a smaller batch of 30-40 links, it’s time-consuming and overwhelming when the number grows to 80+ in a single week.
The author writes his problem very clearly: he doesn't have time to go through the links.
Suggesting that he not only goes through the links but also writes a Zettelkasten note about it is simply ridiculous.
I'm not saying that the original comment is wrong, just that it's completely off topic and presents something as a solution when it's actually just a bigger problem.
The autor mentions that they are spending a huge amount of time on hoarding links. This is a waste of time. They should stop doing this, instead spend that time on reading a few articles and writing notes.
Why should they start spending time on writing notes on links, even if it requires looking at less links to make the time for it? It's really not obvious that writing notes habitually is good advice or a healthier use of time
Yo, be kinder. Don't accuse people of x, y or z. It's unnecessary. Chill out, and if you're in a bad mood, don't post inflammatory comments on the internet. Peace.
I do the same kind of thing, and apparently, many others here do too!
Frankly, I'm not surprised. This is not an illness, it's a common trait of polymaths and intelligent people to be curious about everything, even things that appear to be irrelevant to their daily life.
There's a great story about how Bill Gates asked his secretary to buy random magazines and journals, and he'd flip through one every day. Print-era Reddit, as it were. He read one about sowing machines and realised the software for the newfangled computer-controlled ones was terrible, and for many years basically all sowing machines ended up with Windows as their OS!
Another similar story is how Apple devices have nice typography because Steve Jobs randomly took a calligraphy class.
I shock people at work semi regularly by pulling random little things out of the back of my brain where I filed them away "just in case". Sometimes, the "in case" turns up!
Something I've noticed about IT these days is that it's becoming less about having some sort of raw talent, and more about simply knowing what tools, SDKs, and APIs are out there, written by other people with talent. In the past, you had to be wizard, now you just have to know about wizards.
^^^THIS. I've always felt that my greatest superpower was the gift to search/find information fast. This allows me to both discover a wide range of info and also go hunting for targetted info when the situation dictates a more narrow scope. Pre-fetch provides the quickest time-to-value. With a near infinite cache to fill, it only makes sense to continually feed a steady diet of information to satisfy relentless curiosity. Bookmarking, re-reading/re-visiting past info, writing and sharing info tidbits of random info, etc ... all help to lock-in what I'm aware of and also provide confidence to go hunting and rediscover a known nugget when a particular situation/conversation could benefit.
TL;DR: Awareness comes in two forms: quick immediate recall and fuzzy vague confidence of related material. To expand breadth and depth of both forms, it's beneficial to hunt information efficiently.
FWIW. You'll likely never stop doing this, so the best thing is to think about modifying your process and goals. Things I've discovered about this that work for me.
- Broadly, try to enjoy deleting things; take some pride and pleasure in the fact that you're "cleaning," and have faith that if it's important, it'll stick around or come back.
- Folders/Hierarchies mostly suck. Tags are also overrated. Lists and links are mostly the way to go. The hyperlink is probably the most underrated advancement in our lifetime.
- If you must do folders, go by form, NOT topic or area, you'll get bogged down in "which bucket does this go in."
- Consider the end goal, which is something easy and elegant and enjoyable to peruse again. One way to look at it might be, if I got bonked on the head, or if a stranger looked at this, would they find it useful?
I have a gazillion tabs open, and I try to work through my tabs once a day to see what I can delete without losing information I want to keep and what I think is valuable enough to add to my notes in some way.
I'll look for a note that already covers the idea and add the URL and a quick summary. If a note doesn't exist, I'll add the core idea that interested me about it as a new note with the idea(s) summarized in my own words (maybe 1-3 sentences), then a reference in that note to the URL. I also try to summarize the link from memory instead of reading through it again. I'll only check the link's contents if I'm having trouble writing anything. If I'm feeling particularly productive, I might add any quotes or particular passages I remember as well (paraphrased, of course, I don't have an eidetic memory).
I've made a huge dent in my open tabs so far and I'm fairly happy with my progress in the past week.
edit: I briefly saw another comment about using OneTab (sorry, I haven't had the time to read any of the other comments yet) and my current attempt is partly based on how unhappy I am with OneTab. The addon itself is brilliant, but I've realized that I'll just save all the open tabs and then ... well, that's it. They're basically bookmarks again and it's like an information blackhole for me.
edit2: I'm currently using Obsidian.md. Not bothering with directories at the moment, because I haven't yet decided how to organize my notes.
Thanks for linking Featherwiki. I've used Tiddlywiki, and it's good to see other entries in this space (wikis as a single HTML file).
Featherwiki's 55KB size is quite small compared to Tiddlywiki's 2MB. That said, the size difference alone may not be sufficient reason to switch away from Tiddlywiki.
To solve this problem, I have developed a local-first read-it-later software specifically for this purpose.
I used the singlefile plugin to save thousands of articles in my bookmarks as offline html and then imported them into hamsterbase. Now I only have Twitter, HN, GitHub and other popular sites in my bookmarks.
Because the data is all local, I will have the feeling that I really own them. I don't think I'll have time to read them in the future, so maybe I can get chatgpt to do it for me.
The software is currently completely free and all data is local, so if you are interested, give it a try.
I have saved all the articles I am interested in so that I can search for them in full when I need them. I don't have to worry about losing the site because the data is local.
Here's how I use it
1. when I come across an article of interest, I take a quick look at it and save it as mhtml in cmd + s. hamsterbase will automatically import and index it.
2. I've designed the unread list to only show articles added within 14 days, so I don't have to worry about piling up thousands of unread articles, I'll read through them when I can and highlight them as I read them.
3. I can quickly find the previously saved pages because of the support by domain, date added, whether they have comments or not, and whether they are liked or not.
4. I've deployed a copy on my Synology and am running the desktop side on my mac and pc (not released yet, still eating enough food for myself). Peer-to-peer sync between the three devices
5. Since I don't have the energy to develop the mobile side at the moment (this is a side project), I have developed an RSS interface to output the saved pages as rss so that I can read them on my iPhone with my favourite rss reader.
I am quite interested in this. I take a similar approach using SingleFile and then a watchdog script to watch for SingleFile downloads. But mine doesn't look as mature as yours.
If I have a large collection of SingleFile bookmarks can I upload them to hamsterbase?
Another goal of mine is to make conversions to epub easy so I can read on my Kindle.
I would be interested when you deploy the desktop app. I wonder if something like a browser extension would be a good fit here to offload the manual file download step.
I've been collecting nerdy tech information on and off for 30 years. I say "on and off" because it seems to come in waves. It happens between spans of time when I'm building something important or profitable (not necessarily related).
Examples:
In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP in an attempt to build my way out of the information problem. I learned that tools do not help with this problem, but it did lead to a good software development job where I was able to put what I learned to use.
In 2006 - 2007 I went down a deep rabbit hole with the possibility of server side JavaScript. That led to participating in the development of the Node.js runtime, CommonJS and Promise specifications, and a career doing some pretty cool stuff with JavaScript.
In 2014 - 2016 I went down a rabbit hole on video streaming which led me through a startup (which failed) and then a job at a major consumer streaming platform (which has been wildly successful). I got to build some state of the art technology because I had remembered and acted on some of that information I was hoarding.
Now I feel like I've missed out on information hoarding while I've been building cool stuff in my dream job. I don't regret my time away from the information hurricane, but I am having fun getting back into it to see what comes up next (it is NOT AI or Web3 ;-) )
> In 2004 I built my own web crawler and RSS feed reader in PHP in an attempt to build my way out of the information problem.
I've built and actively maintained a Django- and Solr-based personal project to store all my info about the DVDs that I was hording around 2007-2010, it also involved crawling IMDB. Did the same with the anime shows I was also hording, in this instance I was crawling animenewsnetwork.com.
After a very long hiatus I feel that I should do the same with the physical books hording that has gotten over me since the pandemic started (this time using Elasticsearch instead of Solr), after all categorising books is from where facet-search libraries like Solr first got their hints.
Reddit and Twitter are mostly for tech-focused nerds? Hahahaha, ah. Thanks for the laugh. Reddit and Twitter are outrage machines. I'm sure there are some good subreddits out there but all of the ones I used to be a part of got taken over by mods who care far too much about the Current Thing To Get Upset About (take your pick). If there are any recommendations for good subs I'm all ears. Can't convince me about Twitter though, it's an absolute cesspit and it has been for a long time.
I think your take on Reddit is maybe misplaced. "Outrage machines" stem from algorithmic feeds that push that. Reddit pushes your own subreddits, and the popular ones are quite heavily moderated. Though I would agree that constant memes aren't terribly useful.
On the other hand, Twitter push tweets for users I don't follow, never engaged with, and tweet content I am not remotely interested in. Generally I find Twitter promotes personal attacks in a whole different way from Reddit, because you follow people, not topics.
> I'm sure there are some good subreddits out there but all of the ones I used to be a part of got taken over by mods who care far too much about the Current Thing To Get Upset About (take your pick). If there are any recommendations for good subs I'm all ears.
It's not misplaced, it's my personal experience. It might differ from your own, but it doesn't make it wrong.
Got any recommendations? /r/$language isn't as good as the $language IRC channels. The rest of the popular "tech" ones (space, futurism, tech) have exactly the issue I outlined above (calling those subreddits 'outrage machines' is a reach, but they _are_ shit, and not really for 'tech' people. Probably because they're popular, maybe because I'm too elitest?).
This article hits close to home, but there is one crucial component missing; free time. For the most part, I'm at my laptop or mobile about half of my primary work day, and take regular breaks from actual work to check out HN or any other gathering of techheads I follow. Here's where the data collection happens, mostly, as another commenter mentioned, projects I was to try or have been inspired by, skills to brush up on, etc.
There's this odd notion of "saving for someday" that kindles hope of some rainy weekend where I suddenly have 48 hours all to myself, and to focus on making again. That's what drives the data collection.
Yes, I resonate with this a lot. It’s one thing to have time to capture information but a whole other thing to have the time to extract the essence out of it. I still haven’t figured out an answer yet though.
We're in the age of what I call "information obesity". We have devices in our hands that gives us access to all sorts of information, and we have little will power to moderate ourselves. It's like taking the fridge with you everywhere and opening it every few moments to eat whatever is inside, except this fridge is small enough to put in your pocket, and there's a constant supply of food in it. The natural result is information obesity.
I don't have a solution for this problem. When it's that easy to consume, will power alone is not sufficient. And unlike physical obesity, information obesity is not visible; it's in the brain. So it's hard to detect, let alone fix.
I hoard data. I've been using the Johnny Decimal system with the Dewey Decimal classes for the most part (100'000+ books and documents selectively saved on all subjects). I also have a more dynamic sections with articles, medias, and projects. These don't include libgen or similar collections. I use Recoll to index and search (https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...).
A few things I've noticed over the years:
1. I obviously don't read all of that stuff, but it's very satisfying to find useful information from an obscure book when looking for something.
2. I cannot find anymore online some of the documents and videos I've saved. So I think that's a win to have them locally, as long as what I'm keeping is potentially useful.
3. To find info, nothing works perfectly. That's why I'm making an effort to use descriptive and structured folders, good filenames (often followed by the original filename), and sometimes an additional text file as meta for context. Still, my bookmarks are a mess.
This resonates. I've managed to control this behaviour a bit (or at least lessen the impact on my life) by just reconciling that there are link dumps for each specific purpose:
- Link to an interesting software project? Star it on GitHub then delete the link. If I am so inclined in the future, I can just trawl through my starred repos.
- Low-value article which is too long to read right now? Add to Pocket, then periodically read-and-purge. The hard part is giving myself permission to delete articles which seem "timeless", but I don't stress over it - it's not like Pocket is going anywhere (and if it does, problem solved!)
- Genuinely useful information? Add to Obsidian - either with links to other key information I already have in there, or as the root of a new bundle of nodes.
The main blocker to keeping on top of these organization schemes is the fact that I often discover the links while on my phone. The only solution I've found is a weekly purge of Firefox tabs onto a laptop, where the links can be sorted properly.
Goodreads and its “Want to read” shelf is good for this approach with books. I just add any book I see someone recommending to that list then when I need a new book to read I can pick from there. The ratings on there are handy for sanity checking if a book is worth your time. I’ve found anything with a score of 4.0 or above is usually worth a read.
Writing things down to remember them, you feel like you've dealt with it. Which can be a great help since you can empty your brain of distractions that pop up and do so in a way you feel you've not just forgotten something. And reread later you'll realise how little was really important outside the moment it came up.
But if you place an artificial burden on yourself to follow up on everything that might be interesting, then that's probably overwhelming and shows a lack of prioritisation. That might be due to a lack of a system to prioritise, or it might be a lack of goals. Asking why you do it might feel you work backwards towards the goal - is it an ambiguous sense of professional development, or is it simply an enjoyment of pursuing novelty that means you keep turning up things that you feel you should come back to, but because novelty is the goal you never do. These might miss the mark with you, but they explain for me a lot about why I do the same things.
If you don't enjoy it, seek solutions. I wrote this as a secondary alternative because your article is not seeking any solution but rather stating a fact and asking the resolution on why you may be doing this. Then it goes circular.
I have developed some solutions, personal traits to deal with this in my own personal life.
Learn to ignore useless facts, information and opinion pieces.
Learn to ignore other people's pet peeves. Let them handle it.
Learn to prioritise the information you can act upon.
Learn to stop it all and put the information to action.
I had this when I was a kid. I broke out of it as a teen thanks to taking spaced repetition systems seriously.
For one unfortunate semester in college almost a decade ago I tried to put _everything_ I found interesting into SuperMemo. I got good with all of its advanced features - adding web pages directly, incremental reading, the works. After a few weeks I was spending more time reading my SM queue than actually adding new things to it. After about 2 months I dropped out because I was spending too much time and mental energy using SuperMemo to do, you know, _work_.
I have never, ever given myself a hard time for being forgetful since. 99.999% of the information that flows through my eyes and into my brain vanishes into pleasant unintelligible neural noise and I would add more 9s to that if I could. Because the 0.001% of genuinely insightful, evergreen, _resonant_ ideas that stick around and elaborate my worldview is beautiful beyond to me.
Two big lessons of GTD (and majorly influencing many many other systems like basb, ztd, etc):
- DO NOT read/peruse/etc on first inspection! Just add it to a list.
- Collecting these items is not processing them which is not organization!
Stop beating yourself up, and start running a system. You must set aside the time for the following:
- Collect everything into some list. Links on the web you'd like to read is great for this - just get the title and the link.
- Process that list into what it means to you! Is it a project? A task? A piece of reference material? Just fun stuff to read later that you don't want to commit to? etc
- Organize those now processed items to where things belong. Projects/tasks, into your task manager. Reference material, into your reference filings. Fun stuff to read later? Just throw it on a "hey, read this when you're bored later" list using something like Instapaper, or evernote, or even a text file of links.
Now you're cooking with gas. You get to peruse all these links that make you feel up to date, but you're spending maybe 5 mins just collecting them into a list to read whenever you have time later. "Do it tomorrow" is my mantra, and I can only be honest about that if I keep lists.
My list is excessively long, and normally I try to comment/read comment threads the day after the post is made. However I had to comment that the emotions around these desires can be inspected, introspected, dissected, etc... or you can change the basic behavior into what you'd like - and skip some of the emotions all together.
One of the most powerful things I learned with meditation: going through the "noticing and labeling" process, eventually leading to just noticing and labeling everything as "desires", and watching them float through the sky. Notice, label, and it'll slowly go away.
It's not a bad habit, you just haven't discovered a way to integrate the information in a way that produces good output for you. E.g. something like a Zettlekasten.
Also, its not ADHD, its preparedness. There is a fundamental tension between discovery and requirement. You're going through your garage and you find a cool or unusual thing. You feel inspired, excited you own this treasure, and dreaming of things to do with it. That is discovery. Requirement is when you want to build something specific, and now you need to gather tools and supplies to fit the need. This is a significantly less enjoyable process for most people, especially since for most projects it's usually the first (and last) time you'll execute a project like that (its a power law thing). It's not all bad - its because 'requirement' is so much less exciting that people pay good money to entice people to do that work for them.
One way to cope with this asymmetry, have your cake and eat it too, is to constantly discover things (which is its own reward), but you can squirrel the discoveries away so that when requirement comes you'll be ready for it. By its nature, this strategy means you'll never use 95% of your information, but you'll never know which 95%.
So, don't be so hard on yourself and horde away, I say!
Not sure why you got downvoted, this comment is amazing way to frame this and its almost 100% how I think about it and why I personally hord bunch of stuff.
However, there are other forms of hording that don't fit this - why do I hord and organize full flac albums (adding each in the musicbrainz), ebooks (calibre), resources (audio/video samples).
And also, why do I hord this stuff: all hardware I buy, all medical diagnostics and lab results, personal metrics (bp, weight, etc.)...
Maybe its all preperedness, in fact, for future potential situation. This sounds a lot like FOMO. But what is the difference between FOMO and preperedness?
I am quite certain that I dont have ADHD, maybe a bit of OCD.
That is exactly what I would also like to do. The HN comments are usually as interesting as the the link in the post. For example people point out other resources or the author of the linked post comments with more details.
I still have no clear solution to this, I currently use org mode but 1) it does not work well on mobile and 2) even on the desktop I should find the time to automate it more (with automatic archiving, better templates captures, etc). While 2) can be solved, 1) is still a problem.
Sometimes I think somebody should set up an IHA (Information Hoarders Anonymous)
I have a large 'archive' hard drive on my computer which is 'write once, keep forever'. Periodically, as that hard drive gets filled, I replace it with one at least twice as large.
I have music on there that I have never listened to. I have browser-bookmark lists that contain links that are probably non-existent in today's World Wide Web that I never visit.
I have program files that I wrote 40-odd years ago. I have program files from my first computer that I assembled back in 1978 from a huge box of components and which were written by a 'Home Computer' manufacturer that has disappeared 40-odd years ago from the face of the Earth.
I have books that have hung around on my bookshelves for decades before computers were a glint in my eye.
I have audio files which were transcribed from analog audio cassettes, LPs and 45s. Ditto for thousands of photos.
And that hard drive gets redundantly backed-up every day, "just in case".
Why do we do this? I have no explanation, apart from the standard FOMO that I will no longer be able to listen to, read, see, or run something which might no longer exist in my world.
I user bookmarks feature in my browser and that is it. If you are adding too many items on todo list or too many tabs open. There is no productivity app that will help you than working on your discipline. Software assists when you do your part. You really need to step up you game and start cleaning up.
How do you clean up?
Step 1: Stop adding to the list. 1200 tabs open? Stop adding the 1201th one. This is something you can do NOW. Without the overhead of the rest of the 1200 tabs. Do this.
Step 2: Plan up. What do you want? What do you want to discard? Think this through.
Step 3: Start cleaning up from one end. Lil by little. We will have the urge to do a single sit clean up. Stop that. Do 5 mins of it. I cleaned up ~10-15k emails across 3 email accounts over the period of 3 months. Thorough sweep of deleting emails by reading em. Then deleting accounts to all those old websites you were using a decade ago. It was not overwhelming because I was doing it lil by lil. Ofcourse, persistence is necessary.
This helps. This works. Productivity apps doesn't make us disciplined. It assist us when we have our stuff together.
I resonate with the article as well.
There seems to be too many interesting things for the curious minds. Perhaps, it has always been like this.
Nothing bad with curiosity - I think it's quite the opposite, it's a great thing. I found that for me though, it needs to be balanced, and I learned to not feel bad if I can't check or read everything I want.
Information hoarding was my big problem as well. To fight it, a few years ago, I stopped using any bookmark services, and I started to keep a list of links in a markdown text file with a limited number of tags. I split the links by month and often add a short description and a tag to a saved link. All IT tags are textual, but I use emojis for other link categories, such as music or books. Example content:
And so on. I know it's simplistic, but it helped me a lot to keep the number of links under a reasonable limit, and it is effortless to search through.
This is funny, I went the other way. I used to keep text files of links quite similar to this, but then after several years I realized I rarely (perhaps a handful of times over years) went back to them. So I started using bookmarks with tags because it was much faster. I still rarely go back to bookmarks, but when I do, I find there is much less friction compared to scanning a text file.
I've blocked most news websites, in the last decades the only "Big World" news that I really needed were communicated to me by others almost immediately (9/11, oncoming catastrophic storm, lock-downs).
When my current endeavor needs tune-in to a particular news cycle, I've set up simple scraping of top headlines only. These are usually demarked via keywords, headers or other metadata. Sure, there are some services and RSS readers that facilitate the functionality and ease of use. Except I need less user-friendliness, not more.
Having to spend a minute more per news source, as opposed to some copy-pastes or clicks, keeps the need to over-subscribe down. The interests of the media in representing information do not match my own. I have not been able to find analyst materials that do not suffer from politically and emotionally manipulative agendas.
Not letting noise in from the start is the best policy for me.
I think I do something similar, though on reflection I read things almost as a distraction. Like, I should be working on something useful, and instead I'm reading about the internals of a change to a language I don't even use. It's _interesting_, but usually not _useful_. It's just information porn - to me anyway, it's probably very useful to some other people.
I partially alleviated this by requiring myself to summarize the useful bits from any article I read into a note. The point being that if there's not enough value in the article to make that worthwhile, then there's no point even reading it and I'm just wasting time. And if there is value in it, then forcing myself to summarize that is going to make it more likely that I'll remember it.
I'm not 100% consistent on doing this, but it does help break me out of "information grazing".
The fact that the info is tech or science related thus relatively serious, is less important than the fact that it feeds into the same type of cycle as reading tabloids, collecting skins and gems in mobile games or following a sports team. It may be useful in the future, or being remembered and used at some point, but the main purpose is producing a rush and it too is a form of escapism (maybe from doing actual projects).
> “I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.”
Curious. Why is this a ‘bad thing’? People waste hours on video games. People plant things in the ground in spring only to dig them up in fall. What else would you be doing with _your free time_ that's a better use?
I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks. Many of the sites weren't there anymore, many of them were things I thought 'would be a good read at some point' or things I thought 'were a good read'. A couple of them I read during the cleanse, most were impractically out of date or just not worth it/interesting anymore (life changes!). From that point I made a note to only bookmark sites I'm likely to actually need/use again, and they go into category folders (which makes me think twice about bookmarking as opposed to just pressing the star blindly).
Anything else I want to read I'll open in a new tab and suspend if I'm not reading straight away. I go through the tabs fairly regularly in a relatively brutal "am I actually going to read this" way and close them if not.
I've tried many, many ways of 'storing' things for recall ("those 10 rules for life were fantastic!") but the reality of it is I never revisit 99% of those things and for the 1% I can usually google it (or find a more up to date substitute). Code snippets are ever so slightly different (but not much!). There's probably something much better to store visual things (like screenshots of great websites etc.) - I'm just not sure I want to start doing this.
Long and short I'm trying to take the same approach to information as I do to my wardrobe - if I'm not wearing it, why's it in there?
Task for a future-tech AI; feed the AI all the articles/books/bookmarks/ideas you would like to have read or 'should' read, and then see what kind of a person it becomes after ingesting them.
> I recently cleared through thousands of bookmarks
Wow that’s some dedication. For me bookmarking doesn’t work, still I do it. My bad habit I guess ;-)
I never revisit that stuff, because there is always so much new and more exciting stuff coming in all the time that the old stuff seems almost irrelevant.
Yeah, that was me exactly! I just couldn't face that massive long list anymore - it had been ported from computer to computer for years and was the digital equivalent of clearing out the garage (and it felt great afterwards)! It was amazing how useless half of them now were.
Not disagreeing with the OP but "Hoarding information" is more commonly used to describe a much more insidious problem than just collecting so much information that it's a problem to keep track of it.
"Information hoarding" is a problem when the hoarder keeps the information from other people. It happens a lot in dysfunctional work environments where "information is power" and where hoarders just keep important details to themselves, leaving others out of the loop to fend for themselves.
This is why I journal computer ideas out in the open on GitHub. There is plenty of inspiration in blog posts and Quora and Hacker News and Reddit. It is useful to aggregate thinking and extrapolate thinking by writing. Writing is thinking.
Every interesting idea or thought or inspiration goes in my journal.
Someone is writing about a problem or difficulty, I think and write how I would fix it.
I have over 700 entries in my journal from 2013. If you want more things to read, check out my profile. Start with "ideas" or "ideas4"
After taking my memory for granted for so long, after a head injury back a bit over 20 years ago I was consumed by keeping a record of interesting site links I had read and found the information valuable, figuring it would come in handy in later discussions or projects. I for a while used a crude html page to manually edit in links and notes. I probably stopped doing that iirc 2003 at the height of google's IMO golden era, where if I could recall four or five of what made what I was looking for unique, the exact link I needed was posted generally in the top 20 (real) results. By 2005 the search for it game was slipping and I then relied heavily on bookmarks, usually every month or so I'd waste half a day sorting them and recategorising them and exporting to a html file to refer to when using other OSes. Present day I still bookmark, usually more to indicate the topic was interesting and the link may or may not be in fact dead, though for a while I used to curate the dead links into their own pile, but I now recognise or accept up to 25% of what I link to is more than likely dead after a few years, either the entire site, or it's been pruned ... occasionally there's a similar link at the site dealing with the same topic.
I'm the same! I had long work commutes on public transit, so I used my passive time to read and learn everyday to try and grow 1% each day.
I used GMail drafts body to save links and the subject as searchable tags. I saved thousands of entries this way before I noticed two things: 1.) I'm actually interested in only a few parts of each link and want an easy way to return to them in the future, and 2.) I wish I could see the parts of links other dedicated readers found useful which would both help discover quality resources and save time with highlights acting as a preview or summary. So I actually built a social annotation web overlay that saves to a web app that's both an aggregator and social network: https://www.kontxt.io/.
Hacker News is one of my seed sites I visit multiple times a day, so I created a group for myself and other HN readers to see people's highlights of links on HN: https://www.kontxt.io/groups/23423/documents. Feel free to join and share your highlights, or just quickly view all the best parts of the links on HN highlighted by others.
It would bring me no greater joy than to see the hundreds of thousands of lines of code I've developed over six years be used to unite avid readers on HN and fellow information addicts to learn and grow together as a community. Stay curious--and keep reading!
I absolutely love reading articles and I spend hours clicking HN links or reading things shared by people I follow on Twitter. But I have zero FOMO. I don’t download and organize music and video out of fear they will disappear from a steaming video. I don’t collect “read later” bookmarks (in fact I don’t use bookmarks for anything, ever). I don’t have a system for writing down notes or thoughts.
So if I have an idea I either act on it now, or remember later, or forget. And that’s fine.
To miss a great article, fail to realize a great idea, forget that great song that disappeared forever on Spotify is fine.
And I’m so thankful for feeling this. I think it’s basically another side of my laziness/ tendency for procrastination that helps me. But I like it. I’ll never be a person with an org mode full of random thoughts, a list of ideas for projects or blog posts, or a library of videos for watching later (or even more pathologically, or things I already watched).
I struggle with this tendency as well. Was reviewing links archived from my browser tabs one day and it hit me: I'm living in a just-in-case mode when I can afford to be more just-in-time.
The past two years I've started toying with that lens of "Just in Case" vs "Just in" Time". Found it to be super helpful to manage some sanity and a balance of doing intellectual masturbation - impactful output. Thought out loud here [1]
Info (or technically: data) hoarding is me trying to seek control and reduce uncertainty, I devour and gather just in case I need it. It's just a security blanket. I'm just armoring up and ammo-ing up. While I can actually afford to be more JIT in the state of the internet and all the infocomm technology now. As long as I know what is possible and a rough sense of where to find it, I'll be fine. But of course this goes against the way human is wired.
Now I try to train myself to do a quick mental check for random pieces of information I come across: Do I need this now? When do I need this? Why am I interested in knowing this? Do I not know it already?
I try to recognise when something is already giving me a diminishing returns. I think a good heuristic is: when you can give a 10 minute talk about a topic to a uninitiated person, then you’ll be fine not reading this article.
My current layperson’s take is that JIC largely plays in the acquisition of Explicit Knowledge: data and information. While JIT is the process where we (are forced to) transform these into Tacit Knowledge by applying the Explicit Knowledge we have acquired.
It led me to obsess over this question: how can we enable more tools and affordances to understand our contexts to surface the right information at the right time and free our cognition from having to carry and store less relevant details?
It's not so much about hoarding as much as it is about a broader range of content. The internet can only be focused on discussing so many things in a day. I find that not saving news articles and current events really helps in this regards to maintain a useful list of things to read through that might be worth learning about more or exploring.
I tend to associate the information I hoard with knowledge, which I equate to fuel to develop my efficiency. It’s actually the opposite. I rarely lack the extra bit of information and more often loose track of what really matters. I resonate with this article.
I don't know about you, but my mobile browser hasn't display the number of open tabs in years because it displays :D (a smiley) if you exceed 99 tabs.
Half of these tabs are work-related, often to-do items, and the other half is things I have yet to read or that I don't want to forget about but was too lazy to create a bookmark. (FWIW, there is no way to store all tabs as bookmarks, unlike in the desktop version of the browser.)
One time, after a crash or accidentally closing all tabs and then restoring them, a toast message showed the tab count and it was around 750 back then. That was 2-3 years ago and I have left more tabs open since then than closed. I'm definitely a hoarder.
Not keeping a browser history forces you to at least file them into bookmarks before you close a window. Which forces you to judge what is worth bookmarking and what isnt.
I sometimes check and close dozens of the old tabs because it turns out that my interests have shifted or that they lost their relevance otherwise. So it wouldn't be much of a loss. Most of the information I could still find again, given that I remember the right keywords.
I grew up with an OS clipboard that can hold exactly one item and can perfectly live without a clipboard manager. I guess it's mostly habits?
Set time aside when you are allowed to do it. In other times block the offending sites completely.
Ask yourself a question - is what I am doing right not benefitting me in a way a walk/exercise/spending time with family/doing practical coding/starting a business/insert your favourite would? If now, stop and move on.
Why it's not easy? Because it's a habit which has its own trigger (sitting at a computer). Unfortunately as a developer you cannot get rid of the trigger. From own perspective - rearranging the work space or changing helps for a while and then slowly you fall back to old habits, so I wouldn't say it's a permanent solution.
Of course the first step is admitting you have a problem. A problem many other people share these days...
Ideas: perhaps keep a daily written log and make a written summary of what you have learned at the end of each day. And, make written goals regarding the process, to guide it. I like exporting interesting web pages as a .pdf into a single unsorted directory, for possible use and organization at some future time, for things that aren't directly related to primary tasks.
Best idea is probably to solicit ideas and try out the most promising until you find a good solution, but in an organized way, with periodic evaluation and written reports.
> I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
Same here. I have a huge and every expanding list of lists of things I want to play with, and little projects (that might turn into larger projects) which I have yet to really start, and (because this has been going on so long) a list of skills I need to bring up-to-date because they have atrophied significantly while I've been reading and not doing (this is part of the procrastination on starting many of those projects).
Bookmarks, open tabs, screen shots. I hear you. For me, I think it's that I insanely overestimate my free time, always thinking "there's something I'd like to get back to". And about once a month I have to close over 100 tabs that will never find the time to get back to.
There's a never ending stream of Other Stuff that consumes my time instead. Dishes, laundry, yard work, work-work, walking the dog, you name it. I envy the dog; she at least has the sense not to bookmark things she's never going to look at again.
I’ve always wondered “what if I simply just read them and took a note / maybe linked them to a word or Google doc or something?”
I had a friend who did a similar activity with books. Read a book, took notes on the ‘highest learnings’ and saved each book he finished.
He went back and found an old book with all of his ‘wisdom’ and realized he had totally change since he wrote those things. He didn’t really care about them like he thought his future self might.
This depends on the books that you're getting the 'highest learnings' from. If you're reading a bunch of biographies and self-help, you'll end up with notes that are simultaneously less interesting and more grandiose than if you do the same thing while reading math, science or real (non-biography/non-inspirational) history and anthropology books.
Another approach that does not show up in comments here is to use a reference manager, such as Zotero. It integrates nicely with browsers, so that saving webpages or pdfs is only one click away. Data is stored locally, so if a resource goes offline, you will still have access to it. And it has full-text indexing and search, so you can lookup terms from pages that you previously stored, even if you don't remember the metadata.
Lol, You should clear all your collections. Don't hesitate.
Last week, I clear all my collections from all platforms used. I save 2500+ unread articles in my pocket. It's meaningless to save without time to read. And read later app I will never use again.
You should bear in mind that the energy of the human is limited.
I am from China. There is a traditional Chinese culture sentence for you.
吾生也有涯，而知也无涯。以有涯随无涯，殆已！
The problem with a lot of these tools is there is no incremental escape hatch. I had 25,000 tabs last year which I saved as a line delimited text file.
Then every day I automate opening 7 tabs and I force myself to get through them. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes it ends with me adding 50 more links to the text file. Sometimes the tabs are garbage but often they are worthwhile.
It's good to clean some content of your collections regularly. But I think tab zero is impossible. As you said that "Sometimes it ends with me adding 50 more links to the text file.", I have this experience too. For me, I just give it up as my limited energy. The endless urls on the Internet shouldn't be a burden for my life.
If my energy only supports me one hour every day on the Internet. I won't browser the Internet more than one hour. Reading some content over my limited energy is tired.
You are not alone, Currently have 250,000 bookmarks in Pinboard, might probably be their largest hoarder :-). When i see an interesting in tech, my hand automatically will press Ctrl+D. I know, A lifetime wont be enough to go through them all. But i cant stop it , newer AI/ML Summarizer is getting so much better where my only hope is someday i can summarize them all order them all by some sort of ranking and glance it.
I think you if you have a particular goal with using the computer it gets easier to avoid hoarding. I'm trying to get better at writing code that's easy to read and change, which is admittedly too vague but it can still help me be real with myself and close tabs that don't have anything to do with it.
So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem cleverly. That second one makes some nice points about how code doesn't necessarily capture your intent or the reasons you wrote what you did. So if I had both of those open in my browser or in some queue for unread links, and I wanted to cut down, I'd delete the first one.
I also find it helpful to ask if a link has any information that isn't already covered by some other resource in more depth. So if my goal was to learn more about compilers I might be tempted to save the blog post OP links to about writing a brainfuck compiler in Go with LLVM but there's already resources like Crafting Interpreters out there, so I'd probably only give that blog post a skim and not bother saving the link. (But if it was my goal to specifically write a brainfuck compiler, or write a compiler in Go, or write a compiler that uses LLVM, or some combination, I'd be more likely to save that particular post.)
> So that first one is about solving an advent of code problem cleverly.
Ah but it's not just about that, it's also about figuring out what problems can be fit into bit twiddling, knowledge about bitwise operation (especially that xor is self-reversing so it handles set/unset as well as pairs), and the ability to reduce effective complexity.
I agree it's not useful if you're currently on a quest
> to get better at writing code that's easy to read and change
but thinking of it as "solving an advent of code problem cleverly" misses most of the information.
From time to time (months to years) I go back to those links (usually saved in my rss reader), or at least some of the newest, and try to turn some of those links into knowledge. Some may not work anymore, the remaining I try to put in categories/bookmarks, or give me time to read and then decide what to do with them. Sometimes that read implies more work, like taking notes, learning more about some discussed topics, link them somewhat with other pieces of saved content.
The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat available when I need them, at least for a lot of places/software/etc.
In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how to recover something interesting you found about a particular topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present context. But either on time or volume you must put some restrictions.
I read HN almost exclusively. Unfortunately HN is the most powerful interesting info firehose in the web. A nightmare for digital hoarders. My take to stay sane:
- If it's interesting I upvote.
- If it's really really interesting I bookmark on the browser. This still means 2 or 3 links daily.
- Once a week I copy/paste browser bookmarks to my markdown file[0]
- At least once a month I tree shake them. Time passes and some stuff are not so relevant/interesting anymore. Eventually some move to my notebook[1] or to my news aggregator[2]. All my github projects are somehow a tool to deal with digital obesity.
OP's condition is likely very common among hn readership. Looked at positively, it is indicative of a desire to remain abreast of the very fast moving technology curve on various fronts. The issue is, in part, our bandwidth limitation.
Tools may help to some extent and the heavy lifting bits are already done by others (e.g. https://typeset.io/). A simple browser extension could use such services and provide a more compact information package to consume. And a bit later down the line, we'll likely can train AI to learn our informational preferences (and/or goals) and further package and curate 'what you need to read', etc.
-
a p.s.
After playing with GPT-3, diving a bit into the LLMs (to understand the magic), the thought occurred that if a primitive information processing network -- primitive compared to the one we have in our cranium -- can do this, and this magic is mainly and principally due to massive data consumption, then 'read everything you can get your hands on' is a sensible imperative.
I use exchange and email myself the articles, usually over iphone share.
That means i can go to my folder that i have dedicated "from me to me" and in there i can use full text search to satisfy the "damn, where have i read that again?"
It's incomplete because stuff goes down all the time, but usually ill read the headline and be on my way to the original vendor docs anyway =)
This is interesting. I don’t do this anymore, but maybe I should.
Usually I just trust that when I need something I’ll be able to find it. But nowadays Google (and searching in general) is so bad that maybe I should not trust that I’ll be able to find it again when I need it. Maybe today it’s more worth while to build a library of interesting stuff, than it was a couple of years ago.
Ah this is a big part of my hoarding problem - I find something useful today, tomorrow I need it and it's gone. Of course this happens to 0.01% of things I find... but I don't know which 0.01% it will be.
In the book "non-things" by "Byung-Chul Han" the author talks about this feeling, the never ending information bombing (a society problem in his opinion)
Han suggests that this overload of information has led to a kind of "information fatigue," where people are unable to process or make sense of all the data and information that they are exposed to on a daily basis. This can lead to a feeling of disconnection and alienation, as people struggle to navigate the constant influx of information and find meaning in their lives.
the author suggest this also has personal/society consequences, tho I don't agree on that 100%, but his argument is that this information bombing is making us forget about other "important things on life". first chapter of the book I think will help you understand your feelings better and maybe understand that this is a more modern problem, the old philosophers didn't manage to describe the "phone-sapiens" .
For me, it's that my ambition far exceed my talent.
How do I deal with this? I try to stop and anchor myself in proven technologies that align with _ME_ not _YOU_ or what _YOU_ blogged about or find interesting. This takes courage as sometimes you'll find yourself off the beaten path. I see entry level folks switching text editors, programming languages, tech stacks, etc. They're enduring through the same thing. It's not your IDE, it's not your color theme, or your background image. It's not an article that you have FOMO over, or some library that you haven't yet discovered. None of these will solve your problems. You have to do real work. You have to anchor yourself in the technology that you want to conquer and stop relying on folks to hold your hand through it.
Stop hoarding information and start building. You may find yourself off the beaten path and you may too discover that your ambition far exceed your talent.
This is the result of the prescription amphetamines.
When people stop taking amphetamines, perspective returns and you realize there's a lot of noise that you don't actually care about. When you're overloading your dopamine receptors with amphetamine, you see potential in everything.
Thats an obvious oversimplification. If it was the result you would only have people people on amphetamines doing this. Pls dont extrapolate on such topics.
That's funny, I just saved this link on my website that's serving the unique purpose to store (and maybe share? that makes it two purposes?) links I find interesting: https://links.l3m.in/en/link/2840/
I developed this thing myself after I grew too tired of my 800+ bookmarks, and also after I grew too tired of my Shaarli instance too. It's still in development & it's open source, you can find a link on the footer.
One feature of this thing I use daily is that I've set the "new page" url of my browser to the random url you can find in the menu of the website. That way I am greeted by a cool article/product/thing every time I open my browser :)
I do the same, but set aside 2 hours every weekend to go back and review all the links I saved that week. Important ones, I do a write up summary of the content and it goes in my notes for future reference. Non-important ones get archived. For archived, links I'll go back once a month and read again. By the third time I've read something, I can normally remember it. It's in long term memory, and I can refer to it.
I've been using Obsidian lately to track my notes after migrating all my old Markdown notes to there, and it's fantastic. I can search by tags (I tag my notes meticulously) and come up with heaps of information on one subject or another. It's a second brain at this point - both a hobby, and a tool for when it comes to writing or building.
to offer an opposing view: libraries are cool. i frequently reference and revisit links i have saved, and on a rainy day a quick browse of them often inspires a new project or advances some existing work. i don't know what i would gain by blowing that all away. naturally links that are infrequently used settle to the bottom of the list and die anyway.
i do manage my bookmarks visually, which i have found tremendously helpful since i first saw this functionality in opera years ago. its sort of like having album art.
so here is a shameless plug for my open source and cross browser implementation, yet another speed dial:
I think I just have poor intuitions about when to share and when I’m over sharing. Not about personal stuff. Just tech and work stuff.
Have you ever had someone join your team and immediately start lecturing you about this best practice and that design pattern and how the current codebase falls so far short of them? I don’t want to be that guy.
But that makes me hesitant to talk about whatever cool new thing(TM) I’ve just stumbled upon. If I mention pyo3 offhandedly (I.e. “I thought this was cool what do you think?”) will people think that _I think_ that we should rewrite everything in rust (and then port it back to Python…)? That’s a sort of paranoid thought pattern but - unfortunately- it is one that I observe myself falling into.
I've gotten past this by using this app the records your screen (and audio) and indexes all the words that show up. Data is stored locally. Check it out: https://www.rewind.ai/
I wonder if you could feed the contents of your bookmarks into chatgpt or another AI system and then interogate it about what might be interesting, duplicates, or even have it suggest random articles (perhaps related to browsing? Done as a browser extension maybe?)
I have this same issue, chasing solutions slowly, its a bit better this year than last. I have a lot of tabs open - i use workona to manage my tabs. i don't lose so many and it makes it easy to search thru the open tabs, thru the "new tab" display. Being in mainframe it, i have lots of ppts, pdfs,excel files etc to search thru, I use copernic to be able to search them. i am trying out raindrop.io to manage bookmarks, (and looking at mymind.com for this). Sorry my suggestions may just add a few more tabs to your browser. Hope that helps someone. I am thinking i will use chagpt to summarise articles and put them in obsidian or something.
Getting chatgpt to suggest tags to simplify linking articles is a good first step too. chatgpt" - "please provide tags to simplfy searching for this article - 'some article content'". Response - motivation, productivity, time management, cognitive biases, urgency, deadlines, Pomodoro Technique. Nice.
Think of it like this: There's millions of gems out there, and no matter how many you find, you'll never find enough. Most of them are better than the ones you'll ever find anyway. You'll never find the best gem. Not even for your situation.
If you take a gem and do something with it, that's now more valuable than all the gems you would have found and stashed away. The gems are only valuable when you use them. Not when you drop them halfway through to snag another gem.
Just find a good gem, and run with it. Make something out of it. It'll become more valuable as you go, and eventually that gem will become more valuable than you'll ever need.
>Why do I find myself in this situation? Is it FOMO driving me to want to keep track of everything? Perhaps it’s some form of perfectionism or even an addiction.
My preferred explanation is Repetition compulsion [1].
>Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
Do those notes have to be read again by the one who creates them? Connecting information and publishing that on social media allows others to do the next steps.
The opposite of information hoarding is not unexciting, mind-numbing work. The opposite of information hoarding is doing what you want to do.
If somebody can do something nice, and still does information hoarding, things become interesting.
That's why it's more than a habit:
>Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances
Information hoarding is the perfect repeatable event. There is an almost infinite supply of rewarding ideas and there is no physical obstacle building up that triggers invention from somebody else.
With those conditions, any traumatic event, any drama, can be projected onto these situations until the lesson is learned.
The cruel paradox of the information hoarder community is that they haven't managed to create a list of information that helps to resolves their unfortunate condition.
I installed a personal search engine (HistoryHound for macOS) and integrate it with all kind of sources (several Browser histories and bookmarks, as well as my GitHub stars and an Pinboard account) and let automatically close tabs after 48 hours. Most of the time I’m able to recall topic of a keyword of a link and a time span. That’s usually enough to find it via HistoryHound, when I need it.
In the future I want to write a small service which mails me random links from these sources, especially those which I’ve saved/opened several times but not very recently. So I’m not missing out on URLs I do not recall directly.
I have been collecting bookmarks for some time now as well - all unsorted... Doing it manually would be a nightmare so I have been thinking about making a SaaS - webcrawler + AI (NLP + clustering)
It would at least accomplish a preliminary sort/grouping; manual cleanup or fine tuning would always be needed, I think, but at least the bulk of the work could be done in an automated fashion to give the user a head start.
Would anyone else want such a SaaS? I thought about how to charge for it, but ideally it is a one-time operation, so charging anything more than $1 to $5 doesn't seem reasonable. And the privacy issues ... bunch of practical problems, so I may just write some OSS.
It can easily be just a habit. I had the same habit as OP before, at some point I used to collect tabs stopped at 500 or so. Then I began collecting links and info in markdown. Many people go even further, they set up automation on top of notion, twitter bots and what not.
Now I just browse, collect only as much tabs I can read in 1-2 days. Hoarding hasn't done me any good. So I just don't do it anymore.
But why do I browse so much of twitter, HN. I think it is FOMO, but also a bit of a lack of purpose which I think I have atleast partially solved for now.
Or maybe its just curious minds can't stop when there is more information out there as said by one of the comments.
> Whatever the cause, the end result is the same: I spend a huge amount of time collecting a never-ending stream of links, notes, and thoughts, only to never actually go back and read them again.
The solution is to save everything unorganised and retrieve with a search engine, preferably hacked into your main search UI, so you always get them on top. Don't make a separate search UI, you won't use it. It has to be hacked into the main UI, probably Google.
I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing history.
> I'm wondering why Google, who is a search company and also a browser maker doesn't implement full text search on the browsing history.
They do. The search history shows up in the address bar as you type. But sometimes it’s annoying and maybe a privacy issue especially when you are screen sharing with someone.
I think the other solutions out there focus too much on note taking, and manually organising stuff, hopefully I can create something more compelling for the rest of us!
I like to read a lot of links, tweets, articles, product documentation, etc and tend to build up a backlog as well.
The way I solve this is twofold:
1) Leaving shit and forgetting about it. If I can't make time to read it, I don't care enough about it. Very effective.
2) Aggressively pruning tabs. If I want to clear out my backlog, I ask myself "how much do I actually want to read about this?" and close the tab unless I really want to read it.
In the rare case I want to keep things around for a while and haven't forgotten about them, I generally put them into a new window then minimize it.
I've been using the PARA system from Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte for all of my new notes and interest hoarding. After I've read a link, I'll quickly file it away into an inbox with some useful snippets on the page. When I'm bored, or have additional free time, I'll summarize the highlighted points and then move it into either a Project, Area, or Resource.
Sometimes I just read stuff and don't bother with the notes. As long as I have an inkling of what the thing was, I'll be able to find it later.
This was the only reply from top down to this deep that suggested only saving a subset of those things that one actually read.
Everything before this was saving for later, read later, etc., which is the way to get buried and stay buried.
Instead, make a call at the time, only read things you have time for, and only save those that, after reading, you are certain you'd want to use as a reference later.
// I save pages worth referencing as Markdown, and let search find them if I need them.
I have a similar issue with watching TV and movies and any form of media consumption. I stopped rewatching stuff. (for the most part) And now when I save stuff for later, I ask myself, "Is this something that I find truly compelling?" And if the answer is no, I don't save it. I appreciate that I could have liked it and allow the possibility that I might run into it later and in that moment, consume it, but I don't clog up my already sizable JustWatch list with more stuff. (~300 entries)
You're not alone. I have a daily routine of hitting several websites with news and RSS feeds. Saved to bookmarks stored in browsers, saved to Pocket, downloaded and printed to read later, etc. I literally have hundreds, probably thousands of new "information" coming in and while I never expect to read it all, it comes in handy. As a distraction, a nurturer of endless curiosity, a trick to cope with the fact that I know a very very small fraction about anything.
I’m finishing https://sendmyreads.com to help me tackle just that. I figured if I get all the information I gather pulled at me at a convenient time I’d be more likely to actually consume it. It’s been working well, but I’m afraid I’m now biased towards reading it (because I built the thing) so I want to give it more time to see how it goes.
If OP or anyone else is interested let me know and I’ll let you know once it’s ready.
I do similar to this when I am learning something new. Case in point, I'm learning Go. Instead of writing ugly code and learning from that, I read and read and read trying to absorb how to write "idiomatic" Go.
Eventually, I stop. So, with Go, I'll eventually stop, write bad, non-idiomatic code while I'm learning, then I'll eventually write better code.
Not sure why I do this, nobody is going to see the crappy learner projects. I don't put that on github or anything.
I used to collect links and abstracts of things that were of interest to me on a customized WordPress install, visible to the public.
And I did such a good job that my "site" was very rich. The problem was not storage, so to speak, the problem was, and still is, recollection.
I had no need or I didn't remember >95% of the things I stored, and for that 5% that I needed or remember, I could just as easily find them using google.
So I abandoned the practice and now google is my new bookmark site.
Not alone!
I do this too. I have a mediawiki instance I use to keep notes on things I learn. I try to keep a rough heirarchy (ex. Editors), and I use it’s “what links here” to navigate from a related page (ex. Vim) to get back to that list of related pages.
It’s consistent enough that if I want to start learning something, I’ll usually try to create that page only to find it exists, and then I can start with the links (or purge them if they were not useful after all).
I do this too (although I think of it as a "backlog" rather than "hoarding" but it's not important.)
Two things seem to help:
1) Filter by "actionable"-ness: I ask myself, "Am I ever going to do something with this piece of information?"
2) Jotting down a sentence or two per item that captures why I find it interesting. Even that much work can change a list of tabs/URLs into something more like a useful directory of information.
Same with me. I even go ahead and save articles as PDF and come back to about 1% of these PDFs when I read later. The other 99% are never touched.
Pretty sure this is related to ADHD. Its as if collecting information creates the big picture view the mind finds it hard to develop reading just one source.
I actually plan to take a week off and do nothing but quick read PDFs related to each relevant topic every year. That's my resolution for 2023.
There are costs to excessive time spent on it of course, but there are more interesting things to check out than there's time to go through with, and many of them you'd never locate again in reasonable effort with just faded memories and a search engine. Cheerfully keep jotting things down for when circumstances show you really should take the time to look into it, as far as I'm concern.
Sounds like you are maintaining and extending your own frame of reference. I feel like a note that is never read again is not necessarily a wasted effort.
I email links to myself for topics that I am actively working on or researching (or planning on researching). Most languish unread in my inbox but every once in awhile I search for that article I saw a couple of month ago about, eg, building your own C compiler…
I wouldn’t mind if DDG/Google/et al. showed search results from my curated list of articles I’ve archived in this manner!
I also hoard information. Keeping a stream of links where I go back to a small percentage. But I find that it is a good habit for me. The links are a slice of the pages that I actually care about.
Though, I wish for a way to index and search specifically within my stream of links. So that I can better recall content that I have glanced at in the past.
Being curious isn't a bad thing. The more important question is why do you think it's a negative? Who cares if you skimmed it, nodded along, and moved on? It's OK to never revisit them. Getting exposure to what's possible and what others are doing is in itself helpful. No need for any other value extraction.
Me too. I organize them by length. I have a folder for under 30 minutes, 30 minutes to an hour, and over an hour. Lots of good stuff in there that I always plan to get to, but generally I add new ones faster than I watch old ones.
I once went on an organizing spree and categorized the videos by topic, but never did that again, so the 1800 videos are now the uncategorized videos that are not in one of those more specific folders which I never visit either.
I am rarely in a mood to watch YouTube videos longer than 5-10 minutes for some reason. Shorter ones I often watch right away, but all the others get filed away for a rainy day.
I built a notes app specifically for capturing my HN links. It organises them both by date and topic so I can browse them by topic but also find “that one link from last week”.
I do this to, but I export all my tabs to a JSON file every week with the SessionBuddy extension. I plan to use this dataset along with my browser history to train an AI that will learn to find and filter useful information for me.
I hoard the information I have actually read (sometimes even stuff I did not read thoroughly) into my own, personal, searchable version of the internet, so that I can easily refer back to it, retrieve an old article and share it.
My desk (and monitor) are covered with post-it notes and notepads where I jot down things I mean to go back to (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't). I also have tabs and files where I cut and paste links into for future reference.
I have the same problem. I think it helps to slot in a dedicated amount of time, on a weekly basis or something, to catch up and aggregate. On the other 6 days of the week, I’m trying to use that same time slot to actually read and consume what I’ve set aside.
using taggers helps. reading abstract and having tag #have_read_abstract for example. so you should not read whole. close.
there are taggers for time and files too.
do more p2p and crowd hoarding, dozens of p2p softwares for haording. it helps in some way.
sure mentioned, anki, and foam. so learn hotkeys and multiline editing.
there are other ways, so not sure if these easy to use right away. measuring economic valuation of opening any link or reading works. check some authority, credibility and quality. retreats and no tech for a while help to reset measuring gadgets in brain.
many things are zombies, dead in arrival, lack structure. do not spend on these.
my recent example, thousand yoga people there. and few which give you structure. example, yoga plus anatomy course.
My inbox is my todo list. When I find something interesting I email it to myself. Within 24h I will inevitably see that link I sent myself and it will be easy to skim through or just trash it.
I run an instance of yacy on my desktop and pump all the interesting sites into that.
That way, 2 years from now I can remember that there was a website about undulating crystal sheep enhancers and search it up in my archive. It’s really handy.
I use pocket for this & spend considerable time tagging each new entry. My link library is approaching 10k articles, and is slowly becoming my go-to when referencing a favorite subject.
I wrote a ruby script that kills all chrome processes that take more than x
amount of memory, so my browser tabs and windows become placeholders for the links without taking huge amounts of memory..
Considering how many hoarders are out here, I would think it wouldn't be too hard to manually tag and summarize every single article that is posted on HN.
If I like something online, or potentially might like it, I will tend towards saving it if possible, because it might disappear. It's that simple for me.
I dont call it FOMO or ADHD. Have you tried sitting in a quiet room? It's very unsettling, the need for information is universal, and probably 'settling'. That s why (social) media are so addictive.
I believe most people are not hoarding information however, but they are looking into the information for the next thing to do.
AI will change that, it will tell us directly what to do. I can't wait
TL;DR: it doesn't matter how many tabs you have or how you close them, the value I get out of them comes down to intellectually engaging with them fully, which is exhausting and rewarding. The most valuable practice I found is "generating" out of tabs, and for that, sometimes just the tab title is enough. No tool is going to save you.
I have a few modes of "consuming" these tab piles.
1. doing in-depth studying
This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book. It's sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it. It's slow af, but it's very rewarding, and of course I learn things. Over the long term, the value of that learning diminishes, sometimes very rapidly, depending on what I focused on. I learned awk and R repeatedly, at times over months, and it's all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the "it takes a full day to close a single tab" mode.
Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3 semesters to work through, so there's a wide range in what "in-depth" itself means.
2. reading and annotating
This is where I sit down with an article (for example using Reader) and read it with the intent of really engaging with it. I don't just highlight interesting passages, I put myself in the mindset of having a conversation with the author, of putting my own ideas against theirs. This is pretty high-intensity too, and when I do this over the weekend, I would put it in the "it takes an hour to close a single tab" mode.
This is what I actually find has the most "return on time reading". I have a fairly productive Zettelkasten thing going on, and filing thoughts that come out of articles, along with notes, is very productive, often leads to blog posts, and I have found how to make highlights and quotes and crosslinking work for me.
The downside is that usually, for every tab closed, 80 more get opened. I can reasonably process about 5-6 tabs this way during a work week, maybe 10 if I'm pushing it. On holidays I would average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you go.
3. just reading
This would be just reading a tab for fun. Personally, this happens if I just opened a tab. I rarely go back to an old tab and then just read it for fun, usually it's just more dopamine-rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast, and usually pretty transient in terms of "return on investment". Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider it entertainment (which is great!).
4. filing links
This is something I need to get better at. I think there is a lot of value of just looking at the title of a tab, quickly scrolling through it, and then discarding it, or keeping a reference to it along with a small paragraph. I never file a link without a small paragraph about why I think it is important to keep it, which in a way is a quick way to generate a thought, like in 2. Just the fact of writing that paragraph means I probably get more "value" (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future) than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually "created" something myself.
If that little paragraph is stored in a relevant location, it means that the next time I want to study that topic or look something up, I will find it, along with its link, and immediately get context. That is actually extremely valuable. This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and definitely want to work on more.
A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming language](https://fennel-lang.org). Incredibly interesting to me, but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a year of attention to "really" get it. I can file it away under Lisp / Lua / Programming Languages and my daily log in my obsidian vault, maybe skim the website and make a little bullet point list of points I find interesting, link a HN discussion. This takes about 2-5 minutes per tab. It is also exhausting work, if I do this for two hours, I'll be ready to just plop down in front of Netflix.
So, is any of these better? I like all of them, and I definitely had to build workflows for 1, 2, 4. I am content now knowing that there is no solution, and feeling like you can process 800 links a day is impossible. Instead I focus on time-boxing "quality time", and just close all the tabs once I'm done, there'll be plenty of high-value quality time the next day.
I also found that I mentioned Fennel Lisp back in june, so I linked that in too. If you step through the vault, you can see how I slowly moved from:
- pile of links
to
- pile of links with a single sentence per link
to
- full paragraph with a lot more thinking of how I relate to the link.
The latter is really where it's at. Write down why you think the link is interesting, how you found it, what made you decide to write something about it, other links it evokes in you. The context in which you found the link interesting is what you want to capture, and what will help you get value out of it in the future. The information itself is transient.
There's an easy solution to this - it's called the information:action ratio. Actions include reading deeply, writing, coding, etc. For every piece of information you consume, you in general, want to produce twice that.
So, anyway, counting what's open right now and what I've filed away, I'm at nearly 700 tabs. Some of them will be reused but the vast majority of essentially junk food for the brain.
That doesn't include the untracked but presumably insane number of things I actually did read but didn't keep open in a tab or file for later (just as it ignores the several hundred unread books on my Kindle while not counting the vast number of digital and physical books I do read).
I could handwave and spout unfounded theories about dopamine or "conditions" or anything you like, but ultimately, after decades of this, in my case it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing (ex: when I'm not engaged in something like a zettelkasten process), while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.
In short, you've got to manage that stuff. Or, at least, I do,