Bookmarks are a dead feature and nobody wants to say it
Every browser still ships basically the same folder tree it shipped in the nineties. And everyone I know has hundreds of bookmarks, organized exactly once, opened never. Read-later apps aren't an improvement — they're just a nicer graveyard, and they keep dying and taking the graveyard with them.
My theory is that saving a link is emotionally a substitute for reading it. The save is the reward. Which means the tool works perfectly and the behaviour it enables is the actual failure. You can't design your way out of that with better folders.
The odd part is that search mostly replaced the retrieval half — if I half-remember a page I'll find it again faster by searching than by digging through my own taxonomy. So the bookmark bar survives as a filing cabinet for a filing problem that no longer exists.
Does anyone actually retrieve things from bookmarks? Not history, not a note — the real bookmark bar. Curious whether anyone has a system that survives contact with themselves.
0 replies