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.

Yes, I loved that era of the web!

delicio.us was pretty great in it’s day

Yes! One of the other comments got to the crux of this: nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for this. I think it's a shame.

i don't think any of the things I've liked that found a sustainable business model remained the way I liked them either

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.

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.

I think it's great that there's no giant making money on top of this concept. It lets people do whatever they want to store and share links :)

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?

I’m very close to having an old Delicious style site ready. Do you think people would pay $1 a month?

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.

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.

How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/ mo)?

Beyond some differing features and interface, there wouldn't be much difference.

They pay pinboard enough for idlewords (HN user) to live off it, and buy Delicious when they went broke.

Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for 35k.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102

Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running costs in 2017.

There are some detailed blog posts from the time about running costs somewhere.

I already do: raindrop.io

so they need a different model for funding

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.

Pinterest?

I don't think so? But Pinterest makes no sense to me so maybe it is this and I just don't get it?

Isn’t that Reddit ?

Nope.

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.

Yep. I was there for and loved all that era. But nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for it. Pity.

I know it's not exactly what you're describing but a somewhat comparable option is https://www.are.na