I have no specific knowledge here. But I've been a del.icio.us user since I think 2005.
In general, despite great promise and utility (IMHO), curated bookmarking of this sort never really took off. It's always been around, and still is. Why? some guesses:
Not that many people are data-oriented enough to want to use such a service. Same reason RSS is relatively unpopular.
Delicious and related services never generated the sort of social proof / payoff that drove other services. E.g. desire for friends / followers / karma were essential to FB / twitter / HN (since we are here!). Delicious was high on the personal utility, low on the social reward.
I'm not sure this is that related to Delicious' functionality, but might just be a cultural / community function, that never really developed in this case. It's not tech that makes HN awesome, it's people. But given that Digg / Slashdot faded, this may not be as popular a category. Reddit is huge now... but it's more of a forum vs. link sharing.
And these services are so easy to create, who would pay for them? In the absences of hype / popularity, not much of a business there. I switched to raindrop, which is great. But others were close.
It's very sad to me. I think that the ability to socially curate the web, and to vote up/down on such resources, is actually really valuable to the long-term health of the internet.
This is not a good take. Both RSS and Delicious were immensely popular in 2004-5, and the sites that cloned Delicious (Digg and Reddit) went on to great success. There was a very active and interesting community around Delicious in the early days.
Yahoo ended up smothering Delicious because the people who oversaw it had no idea what it was for, just like they smothered Upcoming, Flickr and other acquisitions that could have grown into something remarkable.
* Reddit is a cesspit waiting to fail that encourages abuse as a platform. I am waiting for what replaces them as there is a lot of information people are looking to share without the torrent of garbage that comes with it currently.
* Slashdot faded because new buyers came in who didn't understand the product.
* RSS still exists and is going strong. It just does the job without the flash, the reason content producers don't like it is that you can't monetize it in the same way as email. I personally use TheOldReader for curating this.
* I'm going to add Sourceforge as a site that shot themselves in the face. It seems like it's newest owners have done a lot to try and repair the damage.
Raindrop looks fantastic, I'm glad you brought it up. I'm guessing we few are the kind of people keeping this type of service alive.
> Reddit is a cesspit waiting to fail that encourages abuse as a platform.
People mistake reddit for a single bulletin board, because it allows you to aggregate multiple subreddits, and criticize it like it's a single place. In reality it's just a free hosted bulletin board service. As such, it's just a cross-section of the internet, and to criticize reddit is to criticize the abstract concept of internet fora. There are serious places like /AskHistorians in there, along with many others. There are bad neighborhoods/poorly moderated fora in there, but that doesn't make reddit itself a cesspool any more than the existence of Skid Row makes Los Angeles County a cesspool.
del.icio.us (original) was very awesome and revolutionary (these are my thoughts about it in 2007 http://www.michaelhoover.org/mike/2007/08/delicious-is-th.ht...).
the subsequent idiotic decisions by buyers yahoo, avos et al were not only abject incompetence, but typical for most acquisitions - both then and now. the original site didn't fail in the least; however, every iteration thereafter were just attempts to create "affiliate marketing" and seo link farms of spammy garbage.
i'm still pissed that the youtube clowns at avos deleted my account along with years of curated links. yeah i have multiple exports - thx to joshua :) - but annoying nonetheless.
I think this is a great answer, and I agree. I'd also add it just seems like I use the web completely differently now than I did a decade ago. I don't feel the need to save sites or links or anything now. I'm not quite sure why that is. I assume I won't need them again? I assume they're just one of many and if I can't find them again I'll find another?
I just don't feel the need to curate the web now. I'm not sure all the crappy redesigns would matter at this point, I wouldn't be using it now anyways.
I still remember this big change, really drove me crazy at the time:
I was an early del.icio.us user and initially thought it was pretty cool but after a while stopped using it. Google has made most hand indexing of web content irrelevant because you can generally find things again if you vaguely remember where you saw them the first time.
In a way it's analogous to the schema on write vs. schema on read approaches to data analysis. If you don't know the end use of data, schema on read is usually a lot more efficient.
Yes absolutely, and they're great. But if your understanding of RSS is clicking on an RSS button and getting junk code on your screen, that's the end of the line for most people.
Completely different to a 'like' button experience.
Pretty much everyone I know who uses RSS/bookmarking services/etc. is some variant on blogger/writer/analyst/journalist. It's worthwhile for us to save links that might be useful for future reference and/or to link to in a piece. To be fair, between Google search and social media generally these types of services are less important to me than they once were but I still use them.
In general, despite great promise and utility (IMHO), curated bookmarking of this sort never really took off. It's always been around, and still is. Why? some guesses:
Not that many people are data-oriented enough to want to use such a service. Same reason RSS is relatively unpopular.
Delicious and related services never generated the sort of social proof / payoff that drove other services. E.g. desire for friends / followers / karma were essential to FB / twitter / HN (since we are here!). Delicious was high on the personal utility, low on the social reward.
I'm not sure this is that related to Delicious' functionality, but might just be a cultural / community function, that never really developed in this case. It's not tech that makes HN awesome, it's people. But given that Digg / Slashdot faded, this may not be as popular a category. Reddit is huge now... but it's more of a forum vs. link sharing.
And these services are so easy to create, who would pay for them? In the absences of hype / popularity, not much of a business there. I switched to raindrop, which is great. But others were close.
It's very sad to me. I think that the ability to socially curate the web, and to vote up/down on such resources, is actually really valuable to the long-term health of the internet.
Maybe we're just not ready yet...