Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Prevalence of Bookmarking

  • Many commenters still bookmark heavily, some with thousands of saved links.
  • Others rarely bookmark and rely on history/autocomplete or just keep large numbers of tabs open.
  • Several say bookmarks are essential for work, especially for hard-to-find internal tools and documentation.

Native Browser vs External Tools

  • A large group uses only built-in browser bookmarks (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Brave), often synced across devices and organized with folders or tags.
  • Others augment native bookmarks with search add-ons or extensions for better findability.
  • Some explicitly avoid cloud-based bookmarking services and keep everything local.

Syncing, Backup, and Privacy

  • Sync across devices is both a key benefit and a pain point: works well within one browser, but poorly across different browsers/platforms.
  • Solutions include Floccus + Nextcloud, xBrowserSync, self-hosted tools (Linkding, Wallabag, Shaarli, Karakeep), and regular exports to files, git, or Syncthing.
  • Several are moving off hosted services like Raindrop or Pinboard due to privacy concerns or perceived abandonment.

Read-It-Later and the “Graveyard” Problem

  • Many use (or used) Instapaper, Pocket, Raindrop, Safari Reading List, or mobile tabs as “read later,” but admit they almost never go back.
  • Some liken these queues to /dev/null or hoarding; a few periodically purge them and feel “free” afterward.
  • A minority actively curate and process read-later queues, sometimes with AI summaries to clear backlogs.

Alternative Workflows

  • Common alternatives: plain text or HTML files, Obsidian, Emacs/org-roam, DEVONthink, custom homepages, Discord/WhatsApp dumps, or proxy logs as a universal URL history.
  • HN favorites/submissions are used as a crude bookmarking system by some.

Desired Features and Pain Points

  • Needs mentioned: powerful search (full-text and semantic), tagging instead of deep folders, snapshots to fight link rot, offline copies, better mobile UX, and cross-browser sync.
  • Some want an AI/LLM-powered “memex” indexing all visited pages; others just want a simple, durable, private, link-only database.
  • There is frustration that many modern tools chase complex feature sets instead of solving the basic “simple private sync + good search” problem.