Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I was sad when Yahoo bought delicious 'cause I knew it was over. But Delicious was the first of its kind, and provided really good discovery. I dont understand why pinboard bought it. To preserve the bookmarks?


The financial justification was probably as a way of buying users:

> Users will have an opportunity to migrate their bookmarks to a Pinboard account, which costs $11/year.

It's also possible maciej wants to ~~do Machine Learning on the data~~, as they have "over a billion bookmarks", but that seems unlikely to me.

I'd bet the "real reason" truly was sentimental:

> Delicious ... is a fascinating piece of web history. ... I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.


>It's also possible maciej wants to ~~do Machine Learning on the data~~,

Excuse me? "Unlikely"? Understatement of the thread.

And I wouldn't describe that sentence as a sentimental motivation, but rather an _archival_ motivation. Preserve your history or it will be lost.


Yeah, that's what the blog post said.

> Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. […] I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.


I'm still confused as to why it's valuable.


Probably for the same reason that the Internet Archive decided to thoroughly archive all of GeoCities when that closed. People tend to like preserving what they view as being important history.

Also, not wanting a billion bookmarks to vanish is a good reason. Plus I'm sure he can convert a bunch of former Delicious users over to Pinboard simply by operating the service.


Considering it was sold for $35k the value is not high in monetary terms, but there are other kinds of value.


It sounds like from the post he's not thinking about it in monetary value.


> I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.


Sadly that ship partly sailed when Yahoo dumped it; a huge proportion of the accounts never got exported including ones who explicitly consented to the transfer.

I don't know anybody who stayed with it after that




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: