"Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me.<p>Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary."<p>OMG. I think I stopped and laughed for a solid 30 seconds when I read this.<p>I don't think I've ever felt so "seen" in my whole 25 years as a programmer.
Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks.<p>But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut.<p>What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked.<p>I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.
Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari.<p>...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.
Member since 2012 (ah wut, I still have the activation email!), after migrating (easily) from a dying Delicious. Thank you so much for running this! As far as actually useful web services go (and holy crap is this useful!) it's by far the most stable I've ever used, and it never got bogged down in useless crap like 99% of other web services which constantly need to pivot while looking for a way to actually make money.<p>It's been a frickin' journey. ~2004, started using Delicious. ~2005, built my own search site because Delicious couldn't handle searching through a few thousand bookmarks with a few thousand tags! 2006, contacted by a researcher looking into tag clouds because mine had more unique tags than bookmarks. 2012, migrated to Pinboard for a fixed lifetime fee. Best money I ever spent! Today, heard about the bookmark archive functionality and signed up immediately.
Oh dear. I'm a positive newbie here! Found my original receipt; 1st Jan 2015 for the princely sum of $10,60 for lifetime membership. And I only have a measley 1680 links saved.<p>It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain.<p>I must admit my heart sank a bit when I read about the rewrite opening the door to new features. For my uses, Pinboard is pretty much perfect as is [and I've never noticed any problems using it on mobile]. I really hope the developer doesn't start adding loads of extra bells and whistles [read "bloat"] to try and attract new users. I just want my bookmarking service to be boring, reliable and so unintrusive that most of the time I forget it even exists... til I see an article like this on HN.<p>PS: Off-topic. But I really like the way "maciej" writes. He comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth, self-deprecating and funny guy. Such a refreshing change from all the 'trying-far-too-hard-to-be-hipster-cool' writing out there at the moment.
11 years? Wow. And here I am, ever since I saw this project I have been wanting to start something and its 11 years of just thinking.<p>I need to get going.
That picture of past you... what is going on? On the table I see the following beverages: wine, liquor, coffee, water. There's also a cheese grater. And what looks to be a bottle of pills. Okay. Now on the window sill behind you is ... I don't even know, coffee, a cleaning product, some napkins maybe, another wine bottle and other sundry items.<p>This looks like maybe a table shoved into the corner of a tiny restaurant, away from the main area.<p>Apparently it's night time.<p>I guess it's as good a place to write code as any other. :-)
I don’t think there is any service I’ve been more happy with the last decade than this one. The (optional) PDF archival in particular is great. I also appreciate that since I pay for it and it’s not freemium or anything, it won’t go away in a attempt to please investors.
Pinboard is ok, but recently I found myself to either just webclip the article into evernote, or make a note about it in Roam Research. Somehow just having tagged links doesn't work for me anymore.
Can you all share your workflow/use cases with this and other bookmarking services?<p>I’m geniounly curious because the way I treat bookmarks is that they are temporary links I wanna go back to, so they all end up being deleted sooner rather than later. When I want to visit a website I just type in the website’s name in my browser and either let autocomplete do its magic, or just let it take me to Google where I tap on the first link. The idea of keeping bookmarks saved and organized/tagged is alien to me.
Very recently I deployed (in my personal VPS) espial (<a href="https://github.com/jonschoning/espial" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jonschoning/espial</a>) which basically a self-hosted pinboard clone. I'm extremely happy with it.<p>I wish it had a browser plugin but besides that it is amazing
I like pinboard but when I had problems with my archival account a couple of years ago I didn't receive any response to emails even though I chased for months. No longer subscribe but would love to find a similar alternative. Maybe poor customer service is the reason for the number of active customers dropping off.
I know this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion, but I'm another happy user who loves the product and uses it daily. I feel like it gives me the superpower of being able to answer any question my teammates have with a dump of my favourite books / essays / papers on the subject.
If I have the time, I like to open up /recent[0] to see what's in there. /popular[1] is good too, but with /recent you usually find some obscure less popular (but still good) link that always surprises me. I am glad the Internet still has little rabbit-holes like this that you can get lost in.<p>[0] <a href="https://pinboard.in/recent/" rel="nofollow">https://pinboard.in/recent/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://pinboard.in/popular/" rel="nofollow">https://pinboard.in/popular/</a>
I've signed up in September 2010 and been a loyal user ever since. Pinboard is pretty much my archive: cool things I've seen, project ideas, solutions, etc.
I imported my bookmarks into pinboard, but found it quite a chore to go through them and tag them properly, so I abandoned that. Firefox sync keeps my bookmarks available everywhere anyways.<p>Now I use pinboard for my youtube subscriptions, every time I subscribe to someone on youtube, I add it to pinboard and tag it.<p>Very useful when your subscriptions range from several different sports to tech or gaming.<p>Would do same for instagram but I have too many subscriptions and it's useless when someone changes their @account.<p>They could really do with a lists feature ala twitter.
I became a Pinboard customer on December 17, 2010 and currently have 7,940 bookmarks, the most recent pin was added yesterday.<p>It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.
Note that this blog post is from 2020, but when I visit <a href="https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/</a> then the top post is from 2017.<p>So many the technology refresh did break something! ;-)<p>Disclaimer: I'm a customer.
Pinboard is an abandoned graveyard, I requested a download of my archived bookmarks, got it like 6 months later - not 'under an hour' as promised, better late than never I suppose. I wont be renewing.
I got the bookmark sync one time purchase account years ago and used it for a couple of years but these days I just use Firefox sync and it solves most of what I cared about.
Wow! And thanks for such a great service. I have been a happy customer since 2013 and I believe I bought one of your promo - pay for lifetime account with some $10 or so. :-)
Would love to see a Go-based bookmarking server (no JavaScript) and CLI/ncurses app that uses yaml/toml/json files for bookmarks:<p><pre><code> google:
tags:
- search engine
url: https://google.com
duckduckgo:
tags:
- search engine
url: https://duckduckgo.com</code></pre>