Ask HN: Delicious is falling apart – alternatives?
I almost want to answer this as a more broad approach: X is falling apart - alternatives? And the answer is: If X is free, expect it to fall apart. Why would anyone host your content for free forever? What did you really expect? Eventually X could equal Twitter, Facebook, and even Hacker News. If you don&#x27;t pay to play, you will go away. Or it will go away.<p>I routinely fail to understand how anyone can form a community of &quot;links&quot;. It has no staying power in and of itself. Even Facebook and Google+ and Twitter are largely nothing more than a giant collection of links, albeit with comments. Curation is one thing. Following a group on Google+ or an account on Twitter is akin to saying, &quot;show me more links on subject X&quot;. Fine and dandy.<p>But how much is that worth to you?<p>Of course, you could just post and host your own link-base on your own blog&#x2F;website but you&#x27;d have to (likely) pay for hosting. Even GitHub will one day <i>have</i> to charge for hosting. If 1 billion people open up accounts on Github for free GitHub Pages hosting, they will have to charge. Even probably if 10 million people did it and, assuming those pages were reasonably popular and trafficked, they couldn&#x27;t sustain a zero-advertising model and a zero-free model. Can&#x27;t be done.<p>So, why not own your own data and post them on your own site? Simple: Either the information really isn&#x27;t worth $10&#x2F;year for you to &quot;share&quot; with others (and let&#x27;s face it: if you had true stats on how often anyone was actually viewing your 14,000 links, you&#x27;d never pay for it, since that number probably comes awfully close to zero), OR you are challenged with how to format&#x2F;share the data en masse such that others can do more than simply visit a single link, but see and share the whole sub-collection of links you have on any given topic. XML feeds aside, there really isn&#x27;t a good easy way to do that. You could have pages within pages on your site of the links (and your comments, thumbnails if necessary, and so forth) and then at the bottom of the page a handy &quot;Capture all links to your own Favorites folder&quot; - maybe some kind of javascript bookmarklet. Or a file standard if one exists (outside of HTML itself).<p>So we join these feigned &quot;communities&quot; and &quot;contribute&quot; our time - only to have them repeatedly fail over and over. Delicious itself is a poster child for the service that not enough people want (to pay for) but has a vampire like quality that won&#x27;t let it die. Delicious is the Undead of the Internet. And yet, just about as isolated as Bram Stoker&#x27;s Dracula, too.<p>One guy (1!) runs Pinboard. Just one. As soon as he (choose one), (a) dies, (b) gets sick of it, (c) discovers a better place to live than SF and moves to Uruguay, (d) has his site hacked&#x2F;destroyed, (e) gets Alzheimers, (f) or sells it to some clown&#x2F;company who will stop developing it... it&#x27;s all over. You&#x27;ll get maybe 3 months notice if lucky and then a bunch of people will complain.<p>But a 1,000 voices screaming out will be &quot;suddenly silenced&quot; even faster than millions on Alderaan. Because on the internet, thousands of users are, in effect, no users at all. If Facebook can alter TOS at will under the protest of millions, along with Twitter, G+, and dozens of other massive sites, do you think any screaming user will cause Pinboard to stay up?<p>Look at it now... it almost makes Craigslist look modern. Pinboard mentions alternatives - some of which aren&#x27;t even around still - so it&#x27;s questionable if anyone is even actively working on Pinboard.<p>But even if they <i>were</i> working on Pinboard, it&#x27;s still a free service and one that stands no chance of continuing forever. I doubt it will be here five years from now. It has almost zero chance of being around ten years from now.<p>So, save your own bookmarks and stop posting 14,000 websites for free on the internet. Nobody cares. It&#x27;s just a bunch of noise. Just like Twitter. It&#x27;s all over; the asteroid of internet-doom just hasn&#x27;t hit us yet, but it&#x27;s shadow is... right... there.<p>If you want&#x2F;must publish them (ego?), then do it at your cost and pony up some hosting fees.<p>I could say (since this is HN) that you should develop your own paid solution, but (a) that isn&#x27;t innovation at all, but merely repeating something that has been done a hundred times and we, the world, need innovation, not repeats of past mud, and (b) clearly no one will ever pay you for such a service such that you&#x27;ll break even, much less make $100&#x2F;year.<p>So, can we all just move on?