The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
> most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)
> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
I think bookmarks, files, and folders (to nostrademons point) is too coarse an abstraction for different organization domains. Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title. Files and folders or bookmark trees can mimic that structure but can't replace it. I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
I think the best approach is still files with embedded metadata (eg. EXIF for images/videos, ID3v2 for MP3s, resource forks in classic MacOS apps). That way you store, organize, and move around the content as a unit, and then you can display it in whatever way you want. And you can write new apps to display things differently as consumer tastes change.
econ · · focus · HN ↗
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)
> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
Karrot_Kream · · focus · HN ↗
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗