I don’t really remember delicious, but what would the difference be from something like https://pinboard.in/popular/ ? I was under the impression that’s basically a clone. Was it just a different aesthetic?
Pinboard was a clone with a different business model: users actually paid for it.
Fast forward, and delicious died, only to be acquired by — you guessed it — Pinboard [1]. Because Pinboard was actually serving its paying customers, it just kept trucking along.