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Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctl
by glenstein 6y ago
Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly.
I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service, and a better-executed alliance with Mozilla and rode them into prominence and relevance.
All the pieces were there, just the management vision appears not to have been.
- mmahemoff 6y agoYou can at least draw a line from Delicious to Reddit. Digg was originally modelled on the "popular" section of Delicious, an example of building a product out of a feature. Then Reddit saw a huge boost from the eventual Digg community exodus, after a time when Digg itself was the cultural nerve centre.
- g5becks 6y agoI was wondering if anyone was going to point this out. I can remember digg being bigger than everything besides maybe stumbleupon for a short while when it came to bookmarking sites.I never would have imagined reddit being what it is now.
- bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y agoDigg was massive right at the tail end of seeker-net. I myself watched nearly every episode of Diggnation. Great times.
- ngold 6y agoKevin Rose had some great shows all the way back to tech tv Leo Laporte days. I wonder what happened to that guy. I would gladly trade a drunk Kevin for a Zuckerberg.
- solstice 6y agoI agree. I like their pre-Digg skits "thebroken" and "hacking with Ramzi": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNQ280Zkk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNQ280Zkk4
- trynewideas 6y agoas with all founders who faded out, he became a VC. True Ventures partner https://trueventures.com/team/kevin-rose/ https://trueventures.com/team/kevin-rose/
- inDigiNeous 6y agoUsed to love Diggnation and Digg reel, it felt wild and uncontrolled, yet the production values were good. Really liked the hosts of Digg Reel also, Andrew Bancroft and Annie Gaus (had to look them up). Revision3 had some other great shows also on their list. Too bad there is nothing like that anymore on the internet, at least to my knowledge.
- rbinv 6y agoHe still does "The Random Show" with Tim Ferriss every now and then: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+random+show https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+random+show
- tripzilch 6y agowhat is (was) "seeker-net"?
- bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y agoOh, easy. That was the internet when it was mostly composed of enthusiasts or people interested in discovering things. That time has gone, and the internet now is mostly a tool for normies to reproduce their "real" life on the internet. Pictures, personas, various frivolities that early users of the internet were trying to get away from.
- jonny_eh 6y agoI miss the days when big sites/companies would sometimes go under.
- rtx 6y agoBeautiful.
- rkuykendall-com 6y agoTumblr
- charwalker 6y agoWhat is dead can never die.
- joshu 6y agoDigg wasn't a bookmarking site at all. They put that on for a bit because Delicious had raised money. Delicious was about 10x-15x the size of Digg.
- jrnichols 6y agofunny thing is that I actually use Digg more now than I did before its implosion. it's cleaner, nicer, and no comments. Refreshing.
- wombatmobile 6y agoOne difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising. Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut. The rise of advertising everywhere, and the loss of privacy, and the glut of trivia, hatred, and anti-science in the form of Facebook content, have resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago, and is governed by incompetent personalities. The return of del.icio.us might just be one small step back in the right direction.
- mav3rick 6y agoAll that talk but forgot to say what Yahoo didn't do - show you what you wanted on the first page. You can run circles around it they just weren't good enough. But sure nostalgia is great and bringing delicious back will be amazinggggg
- dexterdog 6y agoWho shows you what you want on the first page? Facebook shows you what they want. If you don't have an ad blocker Google shows you what they are paid most to show. Amazon the same.
- mercer 6y agoIf you do a search from the browser search/url bar, my experience is that with Google as the default search engine, the first page will still show me what I want, on the first page, better than any past tools. There's a ton I don't like about Google, and whether true or not it feels like they were 'better' in the past. A huge step up from the multiple AltaVista searches or the clicking around on Yahoo that I had to do pre-google. Maybe there are better alternatives these days, but DDG still isn't fully there for most of my searches, and I use Bing for very specific types of searches that I wouldn't bring up in polite society...
- nikhizzle 6y agoEx-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy which killed us. Here are an example of each: 1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings. 2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.
- organsnyder 6y agoHard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run. Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.
- purple-again 6y agoSeems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.
- glenstein 6y ago>Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
- 6y ago
- jobigoud 6y agoAnd Yahoo Pipes, to build your custom feed by taking multiple RSS feeds and building a graph with filters, split and merge.
- criddell 6y ago> I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly Delicious was pretty much perfect as it was. Morphing into something like a Twitter or Reddit would not have been a move in a positive direction.
- glenstein 6y agoI don't disagree. It really was awesome. But whatever you call delicious from Yahoo aquisition onward wasa failure to steward it correctly. If all it took was not messing with it, that was a standard that was not met.
- kerkeslager 6y ago> Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss. "But it doesn't scale!" is practically a mantra for HN, but scalability is fairly low on the list of values for me. I'd rather have interesting websites than big websites, and I'd rather see websites go bankrupt than compromise their values. The reason I care that Delicious might come back is that it was still interesting when it went down last. Digg and Slashdot still exist, but frankly I care so little that I actually had to look up that fact, and after verifying that they existed, I clicked away.
- bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y agoNow with the idear of delicious coming back, your comment makes me consider all the good low-to-mid scale shit we've lost over time. In ~ 2008 it seems like there were just more fun/interesting sites around. Maybe I was just in an exploratory phase - late teens - and was discovering new things often. Or maybe the barrier to entry today, in terms of design/polish/product is weirdly high, and has pushed out the seeker-net in favor of normie-net.
- kerkeslager 6y agoThe barrier to entry for most interesting things is <$100 and a few hours time. The barrier to entry for making money is a different thing.
- bE9a3S5So8igd3 6y agoThe point I made is more nuanced than that. I didn't say there is a large financial barrier to entry for the production of a modern website. The point is, Delicious, Digg, etc. would fizzle out today pretty quickly. Consumers have come to expect a certain refinement of design, usability, mobile-bullshit, etc. etc. that web companies of yore weren't exactly known for. What we're left with today is a bunch of crap that looks good but lacks novelty. It's mostly due to this principle actually that Facebook usurped Myspace despite having far fewer features. One exception to the rule lately is Roam Research, which looks like dog shit but is apparently popular.
- ghaff 6y agoPart of me agrees with you. Part of me thinks Yahoo largely bet on all the wrong horses. Users mostly didn't want directories of web sites and portals (which couldn't really scale anyway), they wanted search. Microblogging (and individual blogging sites generally) fell out of favor. I consider it a minor miracle that Blogger is still around and Google even did a minor and only somewhat regressive update recently. Most people didn't really want "serious" photo sites like Flickr. They wanted free social sites dominated by "influencers" like Instagram. (We'll see how long Flickr holds on under a small owner like Smugmug.)
- b4ke 6y agoI doubt long.... i attempted to create a new account the other day. it was a failed affair.
- ghaff 6y agoIt's too bad. I find it a handy place to keep my "good" photos in a way they can be publicly accessed. And act as a backup of last resort. But my sense from various moves/announcements they've made is that the revenue/cost may not be working out. I hope that's not the case but... The other big loss for me personally is that they're a great source of CC photographs (in addition to the Flickr Commons). But it's probably unrealistic to expect a small company that doesn't have other big sources of revenue to provide that amount of free hosting. Google should have bought Flickr way back when but... Google.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago> But my sense from various moves/announcements they've made is that the revenue/cost may not be working out. I hope that's not the case but... I'm curious what those moves/announcements are; I haven't been keeping up with Flickr, but I was actually rather happy SmugMug bought them as opposed to most other possible outcomes. SmugMug has always been a subscription-supported service with no free plans, so they were always "doomed" to be much smaller than competitors -- but they've also been around since 2002, are apparently profitable, and remain pretty laser-focused on their niche.
- szermer 6y agoLet's not forget the exploit vector that it offered. Since they allowed you to export your bookmarks from IE/ Firefox/ Safari, lots of folks would bookmark a paywall site and append the login info (i.e. WSJ L:ABC P:123)
- ohjeez 6y agoAt the time I thought it was superseded by Digg.com, at least in the sense of helping other people discover cool stuff. I had a few articles go viral on delicious... well viral for the time. Digg is still around, too, but not in a recognizable form. (At least, if there's a way for mere mortals to submit links, I haven't found it.)
- frogpelt 6y agoSo like the Western version of Tencent?
- kebman 6y agoI used to think Flickr was great, until it became free, and then not free anymore, and they told me they'd delete all my pictures unless I paid.
- bradgessler 6y agoI read that with a nostalgic tone and think, “If that happened, we’d all be up in arms about the power and corruption that Yahoo/Mozilla duopoly wielded”