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Pocket's post about the acquisition, referring to the main value their product brings, says, “a platform where high-quality, thoughtful content and free speech

Pocket's post about the acquisition, referring to the main value their product brings, says, “a platform where high-quality, thoughtful content and free speech can rise above the rest.” Pocket used to have a feature aimed at surfacing high-quality content from the collection of things a user had already pocketed. They removed that feature. I was paying for their premium service before that change. After they removed it, I stopped the premium subscription because I wasn't sure what pocket's value to me was anymore. Now they have a recommender that recommends things you haven't pocketed yet. But that just encourages the user to accumulate an ever larger collection of pocketed things, not surface the best things in that collection. Ever since, I've reflexively kept saving things to pocket, hoping they would bring that feature back. But the only practical thing I have done with it is pull up something I just saved recently, because it will be near the top of the list. Pocket's CEO also writes, “In fact, we have a few major updates up our sleeves that we are really excited to get into your hands in the coming months.” I hope they will bring that feature, or something with a similar aim, back.

chrido 10y ago
I have similar concerns. I really used Pocket a lot. Two times I got an e-mail at the end of the year that I'm in the top 1% of their users. That was nice! I want distraction free reading which means no social recommendations, sharing and other stuff. Things I would really like is pdf support, x days of reading left, auto scrolling and detailed statistics about my reading. Also cool would be some garbage collection, e.g., news articles are useless to read in 2 weeks but a blog post may be still useful in a few years.
ttam 10y ago
Not only they removed that feature, but they also removed a bunch of other automatic-categories that I used to love (quick reads!) And, as I've described in a blog post I did about Pocket, the recommendation system they created fails in one huge aspect: it is recommending me things that I've seen elsewhere but just decided not to pocket...
dredmorbius 10y ago
OK, so it's not just me imagining things. My view is pretty much as yours: POCKET IS MY VETTED WEB. If I've saved stuff there, it's because that is shit I've already determined is worth a second look, and I want to be able to find it again. Increasingly, when I hit my Pocket archive (3k-4k+ items, top 1% user), I find that I cannot find what I'm looking for. This negates approximately 80% of the purpose of having Pocket in the first place, and I've been giving strong thoughts to simply using it as a link dump until I can figure out how to: 1. Download the content myself. 2. Download the tags, which are the most important element. 3. Get the simplified-Web view. Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. 4. Be able to search and filter specifically what I've already fetched. And filter by more options: date, website, author, tags (positive and negative filters), etc. None of that currently exists. And it is increasingly frustrating.
- davidp670 10y ago
  +1 for searching and filtering. I use Bookmark OS for this. It's more desktop oriented but the sorting and visual nature really helps me browse what I've already bookmarked. https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Interesting. I've just started speccing out some thoughts on how document references (files, URLs, URIs, ...?) might be improved. A sort of api / multiple-attribute interface strikes me as useful: 1. Meaningful titles / filenames. 2. A content hash. Not exactly human-friendly... I'd prefer something shorter to longer, though there's the collisions problem. Still thinking on this. Could tie into VCS (git, Hg, etc.) 3. Various standard metadata: author(s), editor(s), publisher(s), and their relation(s) to the doc. See various bibliographic or MARC 21 formats. 4. Dates: Initiated, published, modified, accessed, read date(s). 5. Classification schema. Here with time I find that working with extant rather than de novo or ad hoc schema is most likely preferable. Dewey Decimal is apparently more logical than LoCCS, but the Library of Congress classification is nonproprietary. That may well be what makes it win out. 6. Workflow indicators. Unread, read, deep-archive, to-process, etc. 7. Reputation and ratings. Associated with works, authors, other contributors (editors, fact-checkers, etc.), publishers. Some form of distributed assessment here would be useful. The question is how to make these visible. My thought is to treat the parameters as, essentially, search. It doesn't matter what name you use, so long as the set characteristics is unique or determinable. E.g., returning 3 items would allow me to manually determine which I'm interested in, returning 300 would make that difficult, returning 3,000 would probably require some programmatic determination (or further specification). A URL scheme, say, URI:/au=clarke&dat=lt:1980&ti:=imperial&ti=earth ... could, say, return Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth. A filesystem / virtual filesystem approach might work somewhat similarly locally, either from a CLI or graphical approach. I'm thinking of how that might work.... Very early stages.
stroebjo 10y ago
I also was/am a frequent Pocket user. But the removal of features (also pointed out by others here) and on the other hand the addition of the recommendation/feed thingy left me wondering where Pocket was headed. Pocket for me was my archive of things for which I would love to have a great diversity of searching, clustering and organising tools. The addition of recommendation of things I may like is nice, but not a core feature for me - my content is. I also tried Wallabag [0] which looks promising but hasn't the ecosystem around it yet. So I'm exited to see where this open sourcing of Pocket will lead us. ;-) [0]: https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en

chrido 10y ago

I have similar concerns. I really used Pocket a lot. Two times I got an e-mail at the end of the year that I'm in the top 1% of their users. That was nice! I want distraction free reading which means no social recommendations, sharing and other stuff. Things I would really like is pdf support, x days of reading left, auto scrolling and detailed statistics about my reading. Also cool would be some garbage collection, e.g., news articles are useless to read in 2 weeks but a blog post may be still useful in a few years.

ttam 10y ago

Not only they removed that feature, but they also removed a bunch of other automatic-categories that I used to love (quick reads!) And, as I've described in a blog post I did about Pocket, the recommendation system they created fails in one huge aspect: it is recommending me things that I've seen elsewhere but just decided not to pocket...

dredmorbius 10y ago

OK, so it's not just me imagining things. My view is pretty much as yours: POCKET IS MY VETTED WEB. If I've saved stuff there, it's because that is shit I've already determined is worth a second look, and I want to be able to find it again. Increasingly, when I hit my Pocket archive (3k-4k+ items, top 1% user), I find that I cannot find what I'm looking for. This negates approximately 80% of the purpose of having Pocket in the first place, and I've been giving strong thoughts to simply using it as a link dump until I can figure out how to: 1. Download the content myself. 2. Download the tags, which are the most important element. 3. Get the simplified-Web view. Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. 4. Be able to search and filter specifically what I've already fetched. And filter by more options: date, website, author, tags (positive and negative filters), etc. None of that currently exists. And it is increasingly frustrating.

davidp670 10y ago
+1 for searching and filtering. I use Bookmark OS for this. It's more desktop oriented but the sorting and visual nature really helps me browse what I've already bookmarked. https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Interesting. I've just started speccing out some thoughts on how document references (files, URLs, URIs, ...?) might be improved. A sort of api / multiple-attribute interface strikes me as useful: 1. Meaningful titles / filenames. 2. A content hash. Not exactly human-friendly... I'd prefer something shorter to longer, though there's the collisions problem. Still thinking on this. Could tie into VCS (git, Hg, etc.) 3. Various standard metadata: author(s), editor(s), publisher(s), and their relation(s) to the doc. See various bibliographic or MARC 21 formats. 4. Dates: Initiated, published, modified, accessed, read date(s). 5. Classification schema. Here with time I find that working with extant rather than de novo or ad hoc schema is most likely preferable. Dewey Decimal is apparently more logical than LoCCS, but the Library of Congress classification is nonproprietary. That may well be what makes it win out. 6. Workflow indicators. Unread, read, deep-archive, to-process, etc. 7. Reputation and ratings. Associated with works, authors, other contributors (editors, fact-checkers, etc.), publishers. Some form of distributed assessment here would be useful. The question is how to make these visible. My thought is to treat the parameters as, essentially, search. It doesn't matter what name you use, so long as the set characteristics is unique or determinable. E.g., returning 3 items would allow me to manually determine which I'm interested in, returning 300 would make that difficult, returning 3,000 would probably require some programmatic determination (or further specification). A URL scheme, say, URI:/au=clarke&dat=lt:1980&ti:=imperial&ti=earth ... could, say, return Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth. A filesystem / virtual filesystem approach might work somewhat similarly locally, either from a CLI or graphical approach. I'm thinking of how that might work.... Very early stages.

stroebjo 10y ago

I also was/am a frequent Pocket user. But the removal of features (also pointed out by others here) and on the other hand the addition of the recommendation/feed thingy left me wondering where Pocket was headed. Pocket for me was my archive of things for which I would love to have a great diversity of searching, clustering and organising tools. The addition of recommendation of things I may like is nice, but not a core feature for me - my content is. I also tried Wallabag [0] which looks promising but hasn't the ecosystem around it yet. So I'm exited to see where this open sourcing of Pocket will lead us. ;-) [0]: https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en