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A request for Pinboard old-timers
- klelatti 6y agoI'm an old timer who still uses pinboard every day. I converted my account immediately. The new pricing still represents great value and I've had incredible value from my original account. Maciej's approach to this seems to be entirely reasonable: he's being open about the position he's in and giving users the option to support the site whilst not forcing change on them. We could do with more services like pinboard - real utility, reasonably priced and not dependent on VC money and / or needing massive user growth to have a sustainable future.
- lisper 6y agoI know that "me too" posts are generally frowned up here but I think in this case it's warranted: me too.
- foxhop 6y agoAgreed. Great solution Maciej! I did something similar for Remarkbox [0] and switched all accounts to full access and changed the model to pay-what-you-can. I want Remarkbox to become a utility as well and this was the best idea I could think of. [0] https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com
- eitland 6y agoAlready switched last year as I wanted archiving. My biggest fear was forgetting to pay and losing all bookmarks but I asked and the answer was it would fallback to my old account so then it was a no-brainer: support pinboard and get archiving all for one small fee.
- firloop 6y agoAs someone who does not belong to the old-timer crowd, and in fact pays an extra $25/year for an archival account, the news that Pinboard is even being maintained comes as a blessing. In the past year things have happened like the API returning invalid JSON for weeks[0] and the search returning an error whenever I wanted to use full-text search (one of the selling points for the extra archival fee.) Not to mention the ongoing issues with page archiving in general (things frequently fail and need to be manually re-queued). I really like Pinboard, I do, but the reliability issues have made me want to look somewhere else. My subscription is set to renew at the end of March and after seeing this I guess I'll give it another year. Here's hoping things trend upwards. [0]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272
- bscphil 6y agoThis is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project. But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms! I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.
- nyolfen 6y agohow about development bounties by DAO? i’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t already been attempted (i don’t pay close attention to this topic)
- tshaddox 6y agoI think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever. Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.” I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.
- paulcole 6y agoThis is either going to be a wildly popular or wildly unpopular email. Let’s see which way the HN wind is blowing today.
- subpixel 6y agoI'm an old-timer and I haven't actually used Pinboard in years. I'm curious how others are finding it useful in an era of synced browsers and saved tab groups etc. If there is any utility at all, the paid plan is a steal.
- thaumaturgy 6y agoIt's indispensable to me. I've had my account since December 2010. There are over 9,000 bookmarks and 1,600 tags. It is one of two repositories that replaces a long-term memory that I sort of kind of don't have.
- adambyrtek 6y agoJust out of curiosity, what is your other repository?
- thaumaturgy 6y agoThe wiki component of Phabricator.
- AndrewDucker 6y agoI do two things: 1) I take links from there and automatically share them elsewhere. I've got about 2,500 who read them in various places (Twitter/Facebook/Dreamwidth/Livejournal) 2) It's invaluable when I find something debunking the latest nonsense, and can easily find it again 5 years later when the same nonsense resurfaces.
- zimpenfish 6y agoOf my 67k+ bookmarks, I would reckon that at least 85% are from automation (Twitter/Feedbin/Facebook/Pocket/Flickr/Instagram/Fediverse favourites, things I've tweeted/facebooked/flickr'd/instagram'd, etc.) There's no way that works with synced browsers and saved tab groups.
- skinnymuch 6y agoAs others have said. I don’t see any comparison to browser syncing. People say the same thing sometimes about password [managers]. For that too, I don’t see it.
- re 6y ago> I did not make this change retroactive, since that felt like going back on a promise. [...] I have noticed this has created some feelings of annoyance in the paying group, odd expectations in the one-time group, and a general confusion about pricing policy. These two things seem difficult to reconcile. I wonder why Maciej is taking the "ask people to voluntarily convert" approach rather than the fairly typical "new features will only be available to paid subscribers" "carrot" approach, which may cause some annoyance for one-time payers, but is probably still more generally in line with people's sense of fairness. Perhaps because he needs the funding to develop those features in the first place.
- hshshs2 6y agoAt this point I just pay for Maciej.
- Analemma_ 6y agoAgreed. As long Pinboard is alive and profitable, he gets to keep trolling inflated SV egos and they can't even hit back with their usual tactic of, "what do you know, you don't even run a startup". That's worth the annual fee by itself.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoOn that note, here's his excellent 2016 talk on website obesity and godawful IOT devices. https://vimeo.com/190908762 https://vimeo.com/190908762
- derfabianpeter 6y agoThis comment made me flip. Just signed up for a 10 year archive account. Never used pinboard but frequently enjoy and admire the whole story and the level of dedication that flows into it. It’s like watching the story of „UP“ (the movie) happening in the internet. Most businesses are neither fair nor transparent in their business decisions which is often interpreted as a sign of strength and thus fosters trust by users. Moves like this are uncommon and could / should give us faith in the product, but don’t , because we interpret transparency as a sign of weakness. For those arguing that asking for money is somewhat a moral question: try to run anything someone relies on for more than year, then come back discussing the right topics.
- getpost 6y agoI use pinboard a lot, and I'm inclined to pay. I'm curious to see all my old delicious links! But, having said that, I'm planning to replace pinboard with my self-developed bookmarking site on repl.it.
- buryat 6y ago> ask people to voluntarily convert or we'll convert you forcefully. How many old time users there're anyway? If a business came to a position to raise cost on a small group of users I'd be questioning the project future overall.
- fhsm 6y ago> Right now, about 2/3 of Pinboard users with basic accounts are people who signed up, like you did, in 2009 or 2010 with a one-time payment. The remaining 1/3 pays $22 a year. Not qualified as active but looks like this is the majority of users.
- EamonnMR 6y ago> I would describe my work like single-handedly running a restaurant in an old château. It’s cool and fun, and the ambiance is great, but occasionally the soup is served cold or not at all because I have to chase a bunch of bats out of the kitchen, or replace a collapsed beam, while the diners sit and wait. This is no fun for either me or the diners, who rightfully complain that it ruins their dinner. I enjoyed this.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agoMaciej's writing is always hilarious. highly recommend his "Gluetenfree Antarctica" and others (but especially the Glutenfree Antarctica) https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm
- tomgs 6y agoAlso, on the same note(see highlighted yellow text): https://idlewords.com/#archive:~:text=ceglowski.com-,Threat,Please%20ask%20permission%20before%20reprinting%20full%2Dtext%20posts%20or%20I%20will%20crush%20you https://idlewords.com/#archive:~:text=ceglowski.com-,Threat,...
- EamonnMR 6y agoOh, I wasn't aware that this was idlewords writing.
- tjstankus 6y agoI'm an old timer. I paid a small, one-time fee over ten years ago and have used Pinboard (not without some frustration) ever since. I paid the subscription fee when I received the email a couple days ago. It only seems fair.
- latexr 6y ago> I paid the subscription fee when I received the email a couple days ago. I’m also an old timer but didn’t get an email. I wonder if it’s due to having a low number of bookmarks which I regularly clean.
- idlewords 6y agoI've been sending out emails slowly in hopes of avoiding a big public conversation about this (while welcoming conversations with actual users). Now I guess I can send emails quicker.
- lemonberry 6y agoI'm one of the old-timers and upgraded my membership immediately upon finishing this email. I use Pinboard multiple times a day and am happy to see it still being maintained.
- karlicoss 6y agoAn old timer and haven't used Pinboard for bookmarks for a couple of years now (since mainly switch to org-mode). But still subscribed to some people's bookmarks via RSS, and nothing comes at par in terms of quality of (semi-curated) content. Seems very fair to me.
- skinnymuch 6y agoGot any recommendations? Or how to look for book markers to follow
- karlicoss 6y agoNot sure about who specifically I can recommend, but in terms of 'how' sometimes I search the site for some interesting link I liked, to see who bookmarked it. Then judging by tags I might explore what other tags the person has, in case our interests overlap. Similar for specific search terms.
- rdslw 6y agolet me disclose my secret: i meticulously every week add bookmarks to my pinboard as troves of internet knowledge to be used by me. After 6 yrs (still adding), I admit I never came back to fetch any of them.
- fastball 6y agoMy trick is that historically when I was bored (or on the toilet) I would always reflexively reach for social media (mainly reddit) to pass the time. A couple years ago I made the conscious decision to stop using reddit, but wanted something to replace those little moments of downtime[1] with. So I bought a nice-looking Pinboard client[2] for my phone, and have trained myself to reach for pinboard in those little moments of boredom, generally reading through things in my "read later" queue. [1] https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/ [2] https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/ https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/
- idlewords 6y agoThis is basically the business model of all online bookmarking except Pinterest. You pay to not feel guilty about never looking at the stuff again.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI did the same but I stopped. I use firefox bookmark sync and that's enough for me for now and has been for years :)
- jscheel 6y agoOdd, I am on the one-time-payment plan, but I didn’t get the email anywhere.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI think it only went to people of an older vintage
- JimDabell 6y agoMy lifetime account is almost ten years old and I didn’t receive an email either.
- benjaminl 6y agoIf Pinboard is being maintained, this is great news. I had thought it was abandoned and I have been looking for alternatives. My biggest pain point is the lack of maintained iOS clients.
- firloop 6y agoBy way of the Shortcuts app, every iPhone has a pre-installed Pinboard integration. I’ve taken to just using that to make new bookmarks, because you can make shortcuts that accept URLs from the share menu as inputs. Here’s my shortcut to add an item to my Pinboard unread list. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/486bc6782a60453cbdbcf9988c3fddfb https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/486bc6782a60453cbdbcf9988c3...
- pwdisswordfish0 6y agoOMG, I had just been looking for this exact thing a couple of weeks ago and missed it! Thank you for this comment! I’ve become intolerably disappointed with Pocket and this should enable me to self-host my reading list and still be able to use the iOS share sheet without having to get a costly dev license (or device) from Apple.
- fastball 6y agoI really like Pushpin[1], which is actively maintained. Another user in this thread has also created a new client[1]. [1] https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/ https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622
- idlewords 6y agoYou would know pretty quickly if Pinboard stopped being maintained. Try the new Pins for Pinboard app, which just came out. I'm hopeful that once I get the new API out, it will be a lot less painful to build on top of, and we'll see some life in the apps department. The current API is a calque of the 2004 delicious API and lacks a lot of basic features (like "tell me what changed since time X") that clients need.
- 6y ago
- jedgardyson 6y agoNot an old-timer, but really hope more and more ppl choose to support the service financially since I get massive value out of it. Maciej's writing is great too! He's just generally a person worth sponsoring/supporting IMO.
- benrapscallion 6y agoI am on “old timer” and signed up partly to support Maciej and partly for the site’s quirkiness. As others have said, I am surprised he is still tending to the website because it is in shambles and completely unreliable. I have had warnings from ifttt.com several times now that pinboard is offline. I will not be joining the subscription plan and am instead searching for an alternative that is reliable.
- idlewords 6y agoOne reason you get the warnings from IFTTT is that they crashed my API! Totally blaming the victim here. Try raindrop.io or stavros's historio.us.
- Aeolun 6y agoHow does IFTTT crash an API? Too many requests? I feel like there is a story here.
- lemming 6y agoSee here: https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/03/my_heroic_and_lazy_stand_against_ifttt/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/03/my_heroic_and_lazy_stand_ag... and here (among others, you might have to ferret around on Twitter a bit): https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/712031809433968642 https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/712031809433968642
- Aeolun 6y agoAh, that sure sounds like a dick move.
- benrapscallion 6y agoYour skills as an expert politician and deflector are on full display here. Why is your and IFTTT’s issues my problem as a paid customer for your service? If I paid you a yearly subscription, is there any chance you’ll fix these decade old bugs? I don’t think so.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sprice 6y agoThis was an easy decision. I appreciate the kind push. I continue to use and rely on Pinboard regularly. Also, this is the first time I've noticed © Nine Fives Software which is just the best tech business name ever.
- jhealy 6y agoI'm an old timer and would probably convert, but I get this at https://pinboard.in/convert https://pinboard.in/convert: > nothing to see here
- idlewords 6y agoProbably means you're paying for archiving
- filmgirlcw 6y agoYup -- I get that too, and I am paying for archiving. I asked in another comment, but I'll ask directly here too: is it more financially beneficial for me to pay you $39 a year for archiving for would the $22 a year for the service work better? I assume it is the former (especially given the relatively small size of my archive amortized over storage prices per year), but I'll go with whatever option gives you the most money.
- idlewords 6y agoThe archiving is definitely better. Thank you for asking!
- filmgirlcw 6y agoI'll keep that up then! Thank you for Pinboard!
- skinnymuch 6y agoHow do we re-up? I vaguely remember seeing somewhere I’m good until 2021. I’m likely close to my prepaid yearly archival subscription coming to an end.
- quanganhdo 6y agoShameless plug: The other day I launched a new iOS/macOS Pinboard client named Pins (Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622) If you're looking for a modern client for Pinboard, give it a try.
- idlewords 6y agoThis is a good client and you should try it!
- dewey 6y agoThis is great, thanks! I was always searching for something like that as most of the others are deprecated and broken.
- klelatti 6y agoIt looks great but refuses to sync for me :( Too many (37000) bookmarks?
- oneeyedpigeon 6y agoAs someone who spent five minutes writing a pinboard client for my own personal use [1], it was frustrating that there was no way of testing these kinds of cases since even a test account would require extra payment. If pinboard were to pivot to a more api-friendly service, having some kind of test account(s) would be high on my wishlist. [1] Almost the only feature is to prefill things like title, description, etc. because I wasted so much time, when using pinboard, viewing source and copying these manually.
- idlewords 6y agoThanks for this good idea. I'll think up some way to have test accounts for devs when the new API drops.
- quanganhdo 6y ago37000 should be fine. Try changing the device’s auto-lock setting to 5 mins and leave it undisturbed for that amount of time for the initial download to go through. I’ve got a few users with 100000 bookmarks. This support article for Pins would give a bit more detail: https://get-pins.app/posts/pinboard-sync-v1/ https://get-pins.app/posts/pinboard-sync-v1/
- qwerty456127 6y ago> You joined the site back when there was a one-time signup fee. I wouldn't if it wasn't the case. I am much more willing to pay a one-time fee for a lifetime unlimited plan than a subscription. No matter how expensive is the former or how cheap is the latter. I just feel extra constant anxiety for every thing I don't own which sucks money from my account regularly, also ready to fail me as soon as I stop paying or move to another country or something. I feel insecurity and anger every time I'm offered a subscription. Having bought something on a single-pay basis, on the contrary, floods my brain with the senses of achievement and security. Paying some bucks manually every month may do too (provided I find the service extremely useful), but not annually and not automatic (by the way I was extremely delighted to find an easy option to disable automatic payments in Pocket - the only service I've found to offer this).
- akerl_ 6y agoThis feeling runs contrary to the practical reality. Paying once for a service someone else is running doesn’t actually mean you “own” it; Pinboard could disappear at any time. By contrast, if you’re paying a recurring fee, you’re incentivizing the company to continue operating the service.
- qwerty456127 6y agoI understand, but I want to feel the problem solved once and forever and I am not going to have to pay any more ever. This is not really rational, I just feel this way. I am not going to be mad if the author actually discontinues the service (provided he lets me export the data). This probably is because I'm a gig survivalist and have never had a long-term stable source of income. What I buy during a prosperity time is what is going to keep me warm during a broke time and help me out of it. Regular payment obligations are a danger, a paid-forever thing is an asset.
- hollerith 6y agoAlso paying once per lifetime greatly increases the incentive for scammy behavior.
- 6y ago
- fastball 6y agoWhat was the one-time payment originally?
- 1123581321 6y agoIt started at a few dollars and increased a tiny amount with every signup. I paid $9.22 so was a relative latecomer. At some point it became a fixed price and then the annual price used today.
- idlewords 6y agoI believe it started at two bucks and change, and went up a penny every 40 users. The original payment model (in 2009) was an anti-spam measure, because I remembered how much delicious had suffered from growing pains. Joshua Schachter came up with the idea of bumping the price with every signup, which was brilliant.
- trustfundbaby 6y agoOld timer here. I actually wound up building something that worked a little better for me (I wouldn't deign to call it a competitor) but the value pinboard has provided me for years makes this a no brainer. I will pay for at least one year. Thanks for being so straightforward about this and letting us use it for free all this time!
- Witeshadow 6y agoI try to not sign up for things where I'd be super sad if I stopped paying and things went away, like old emails on an account I haven't used in ages. I'm really tempted to do this. I fear there is no going back if I do though. I've been in tight spots financially before so commitment of this kind makes me a bit nervous.
- idlewords 6y agoThe worst-case scenario (apart from bus accidents) is that you switch over, stop paying, and then your stuff gets locked into read-only mode. Expired accounts don't get deleted.
- sprafa 6y agoPinboard is amazing. I’m surprised people here are surprised and saying it looked derelict - I haven’t had an issue with it in 3 years of use.
- rsanheim 6y agoYup, it does what it sets out to do, and it stays out of your way and doesn't nag you or annoy you. The fact of the modern web is that this is a bar most products don't reach, and many of them charge much more aggressively than pinboard.
- crossroadsguy 6y agoIt's a kind of service that I would never use and have never used the advanced features of. I guess I barely use even the basic ones. Not because it's not a great service, but I am too much of a passive user of it - I just don't do this (any more). 4-5 bookmarks in 2020, 7-8 in 2019, and 2 in 2018. I have around total 900 bookmarks most of them from delicious import from the days when I bookmarked. So yeah, while I am afraid I'd not be paying for it, I guess I'd just move everything to Firefox or iCloud or something (which I use anyway as of now). One way I can definitely help is by emptying my (almost) freeloading spot at this point. Services like this deserve a regular payment model I guess.
- idlewords 6y agoYou're welcome to stay and use the site as long as you want. I agree that with your use pattern, subscribing to any bookmarking service doesn't make much sense.
- l0b0 6y agoAs soon as I realized there was an archival variant I signed up - 15k bookmarks archived using 45GB of space, which I can download anytime I want. The profile page even shows filters for any dead links (and why they're dead) so I can fix links if I feel like it. Still the best online service I've ever signed up for.
- Macha 6y agoI guess since the majority here is positive I shall offer my dissenting opinion. I signed up for the site in the early days prior to browser sync being a common feature, but I just never found it fit my use model. It turns out the bookmarks I use tend to be either quick access shortcut which browser features like the bookmark toolbar or speed dial is a much better fit for, or short term reference which I end up just keeping in tabs. I know HN here is generally very positive about subscriptions and mentions it's just a cost of coffee, but eventually they add up and the last couple of years the amount of cups of coffee and the overhead of thinking about which are actually providing their value has soured me on it and left me longing for days when more items were just purchased outright. I've mentioned in other posts moving back to music download purchases after subscription service library changes became problematic as an example. Bookmark sync is just not worth a recurring payment to me. I use Firefox Sync these days, but if that went away I'd just run an instance before I'd pay for it. It sounds like from other comments here that Pinboard has not been much more reliable of late so it's not even like by letting someone else deal with running it that you get a more reliable service.
- idlewords 6y agoSo you don't use the site, and you don't want to switch over to the new payment model. Seems like the problem is solved twice over.
- freediver 6y agoThere is https://tinygem.org https://tinygem.org which is free and a bit different twist to bookmarking/content discovery. Would love to hear what you think! (disclaimer: me/author)
- forgotmypw17 6y agoFor those who prefer or are limited to no-JS: http://archive.is/epAv5 http://archive.is/epAv5
- raxi 6y agoarchive.is should add (paid) accounts too, it creates much better page captures than pinboard.
- binaryorganic 6y agoI paid a flat fee to join. I think it was like $7 or something. I think the price used to go up incrementally with each new signup. I gotta say though, the whole value proposition he made back then was a one-time fee. I had no problem with the switch to subscriptions for new users. But asking those original folks to switch over means that they can never not pay from that day forward without losing access to their once-permanent service, right?
- idlewords 6y agoCorrect, I'm asking people to voluntarily turn in their all-you-can-drink token.
- binaryorganic 6y agoThanks for confirming. All the best as you turn this new page! You have my heart (if not my wallet).
- helipad 6y agoYeah not only was the value proposition a one-time fee, but also paying at all. A lot of alternatives were free, and the pitch IIRC was if you pay then the archive is more sustainable. I'd be interested to see what a re-up of a one-time (two-time?) fee looks like. When I'm being frugal I tend to cut subscriptions, but today I can afford a lump sum. I'd sooner pay today for the 2011 Pinboard Civic and run it until it needs replacing, than lease a 2021 Pinboard Model Y.
- emptyparadise 6y agoI'd love pay for a Pinboard tier which could solve the bookmark read it later backlog problem. Can Maciej do the impossible?
- idlewords 6y agoI've seriously considered charging more for a feature that quietly deletes 1% of your unread bookmarks a week.
- zimpenfish 6y agoI've got an iOS Shortcut which fetches all my Pocket URLs (via a text file I generate myself), shuffles them, and then pushes the top 20 to the top of the pile as "READ THESE PLEASE" kind of prompt. Should be easy enough to lash up some code using the Pinboard API to pick some random RIL URLs and push them into email / something.
- idlewords 6y agoSo the story here is that Pinboard used to be a site that charged a one-time signup fee for basic accounts, and in 2015 switched to an annual fee. People who signed up before the change in business model were grandfathered and grandmothered in, since a deal was a deal. Most companies solve the problem of lifetime accounts by going out of business or pivoting, but this isn't really the Pinboard style. At the same time, the situation in 2021 is different than in 2015, let alone in 2009. As outlined in the letter, having old-style users move to the new model would give me resources to do a lot more on the site than just keep it running. Over the years, a number of people told me they'd be happy to pay annually to support the site. It occurred to me that I would also be happy to take their money. So I finally built a mechanism that pre-2015 users could use to voluntarily convert accounts over. I was looking for a low-drama way to announce this, laying out my reasons while not forcing anyone who didn't want to switch to make the change. So I sent out an email. But here we are on the front page of Hacker News instead.
- tptacek 6y agoPut a button on the site that lets me send you some fixed amount of more money and a bunch of us will push it. I clicked the link in this mail and it said "nothing to see here". Do I have to sign my non-consenting kids up for accounts? You once made fun of me for how few bookmarks I had in the site. Then I learned about full-text search. Now I'd be fucked without Pinboard.
- idlewords 6y agoIf you got the email, it was by mistake. Old-timey users who have archiving are already paying the full rate and were not the audience for what was supposed to be a modest effort to expand the recurring revenue base in a low-key way.
- omilu 6y agoconverted and got my 10 year old an account also, thanks for the fantastic service!
- deleted 6y ago
- filmgirlcw 6y agoSo I just checked, and I joined in July 2009 for a one-time fee of, I want to say $11 (the price went up based on how many people signed up or something, I don't quite remember). Over the years, I've paid for the archive feature, mostly as a way to continue to support Pinboard/Maciej -- even though I really don't ever use the archive feature. I haven't received the email/the convert feature hasn't been flagged on my account yet, but if it is flagged, I'll be happy to convert. That said, if I do that, I almost certainly will not continue to pay for the archive feature, as I don't use that and just pay for it to support Maciej. So my question is -- and I should probably just wait until I receive an email asking me to do this, but since we're having this discussion, I'll just ask now: Will you get more benefit from me paying $39 for archiving or is the hard cost of that service/the ~92GB of data I have greater than the $22 a year for a recurring sub? Because I'll do whatever option gives you the greatest income -- but I'm not quite prepared to pay $61 a year for bookmarking (not that an extra $22 a year means anything to me...it's just hard to justify paying about the same as I pay for my password manager for my whole family for a bookmarking service).
- idlewords 6y agoI'm not sure I understand where the $61/year figure comes from?
- filmgirlcw 6y agoIf I were to pay $22 a year AND $39 a year for archiving
- idlewords 6y agoOh, I see. No, the two things stack. $39/year is the most you can pay for one account.
- filmgirlcw 6y agoExcellent -- thanks so much!
- runjake 6y agoDone. Immediate done. Was easy.
- geoffeg 6y agoWhen I went to the /convert URL I was given the option to pay for 10 years worth of service for what I consider to be perfectly fair fee. Running a site like pinboard on my own, or with a very small team, would basically be my dream job. Happy to support Maciej and the site.
- idlewords 6y agoThank you so much for that!
- raybb 6y agoIs this tool in the same category as wallabag?
- johncoltrane 6y agoI joined the beta early so I never had to pay the one-time fee. I guess that makes me a very-old-timer. A very-old-timer who just paid for 10 more years of service. Go, Maciej!
- theshrike79 6y agoIn addition to Pinboard, Reddit is a place I tend to store stuff I intend to read "later" (never). Anyone know of a tool that could grab my Reddit saves and transfer them to Pinboard?
- zimpenfish 6y agoIf you can get those saves as an RSS feed, you can use IFTTT to send them to Pinboard.
- tsp 6y agoI have been a Pinboard user for many years but switched to Raindrop (https://raindrop.io/ https://raindrop.io/) some time ago. Pinboard did not see any update in years and the developer ignored my support requests regardless of me being a yearly subscriber. There are better alternatives out there by now.
- jonnytran 6y agoIs there a way to make a one-time donation without giving up my life-time membership? I love that the creator is doing this. There are so many services that I would have paid for, but instead they got shutdown or turned into crap. I was going to convert immediately, but the thing that gave me pause was "if you are getting more than $1.80/month of value". It's not clear to me that I do. Not because the service is bad. I've not had issues with downtime, and I think it's a fair price. But I don't know if I, personally, use it enough to get that much value out of it.
- idlewords 6y agoIf you don't get that much value out of it, you definitely shouldn't convert over. There's no need to make a one-time donation; you already did that ten years ago :-)
- tokamak-teapot 6y agoMy general use of Pinboard goes like this: Several times a day: Bookmark a thing (usually marked as 'unread'). Every week or so: Look back at my unread bookmarks. Read, or just mark read because I want to keep a bookmark but I don't want to actually read. A few times a month: Use Pinboard to look something up that I remember seeing, or I don't - but hope I did actually come across already. Full text search helps here. I wonder if Maciej would consider getting some browser extensions and mobile apps developed? I've probably paid the same for apps over the years as I have for Pinboard itself [1], and they've generally been terrible. I'm certainly willing to pay more than I already am for Pinboard if it comes with some decent tools. Something like Promnesia [2] and note taking being integrated would make it the tool I use the most all day, so this would be well worth it. [1] I'm a paying Pinboard user since 2011 and have been paying for full-text indexing since it became available. [2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html
- idlewords 6y agoThere's new browser extensions on the resources page. They're simple but they do the job.
- tokamak-teapot 6y agoThanks for responding. I’m the author of a Pinboard browser extension! I’d love to make it full featured, not simple, but don’t have the time. Others I’ve used just get abandoned too, and as you mention perhaps the API is what’s holding them back. The reason I thought your own client(s) may be on your todo list is that developing a great API is easier when you’re dogfooding.
- idlewords 6y agoI hate the phrase dogfooding. Who on earth eats dog food? I don't really understand the need for an app vs. a website that works well on mobile (my current project). Since many people like standalone apps, I'm clearly missing something, and would love to understand better what the advantages are there.
- gregjw 6y agoVery well-written way of asking. Good job Maciej.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoOff-topic, but how Pinboard compares to Pocket (which I use)? Does it have an offline reading app?
- nicolas_t 6y agoAs someone who hasn't used his pinboard account for year. Are there any good browser extensions and app with pinboard integration? I used to have an archival account and could see the use but eventually stopped using it, mostly because it didn't really integrate well with my use. I'm also curious about your use for it. I see some people mentioning following other people's bookmarks on pinboard. Who do you recommend to follow?
- jonnytran 6y agoI just installed the Pins iOS app, and it seems good. There's a new official Firefox extension. There are more links here: https://pinboard.in/resources/ https://pinboard.in/resources/
- getpost 6y ago@idlewords, I renewed for a year, having signed up in 2014. For me, it's an essential service. I didn't receive any email about this; the most recent message I have is a password reset in 2017. Aren't the deep discounts for multi-year renewal tantamount to recapitulating the problem with the original one-time sign up fee? i.e., having to run the service with no recurring revenue.
- idlewords 6y agoYou should see an invoice for it on the site. I don't email out receipts, but maybe I should start. The discounts are still two orders of magnitude more than what people were paying for 10 years of service before, so I don't feel particularly stuck in the same problem. And it will be a nice surprise for me in 2031.
- getpost 6y agoI have the PayPal receipt. I meant, I didn't receive the email sent to old-timers. I figured you might want to know in case this was an oversight, and there are old-timers you intended to contact, but didn't.
- idlewords 6y agoOh, I see. I'd been doing it piecemeal in batches of fifty or so so I have time to reply to people individually. Did not expect it to become A Thing.
- throwaway_panda 6y agoI’m a longtime fan of Maciej, and a regular-ish user of Pinboard for a decade-plus. We have friends in common. I hesitate to support this effort. What I appreciate the most is how he is an example of how to escape the tech rat race. And how he’s been able to live his values and get involved in important political issues. I thought it was worth supporting a contrarian, hardworking indie dev and rationalized away all the numerous bugs, reliability issues, and just plain missing features. And I’d probably still be a supporter if he hadn’t bragged, on multiple occasions around 2017-8, that there were years where he literally did nothing on Pinboard. I still admire that in a way - it should be possible to say that software is done, it doesn’t have to be ever-expanding. But I don’t love it as a user. Now every time I enter a bookmark I’m annoyed that (for instance) it won’t even prefetch the title for me. I suppose it is foolish to expect any contrition, but I feel like I was lied to.
- idlewords 6y agoPinboard is like Newton's conception of the divine, if an active Creator were not constantly involved, the whole thing would grind to a halt instantly. So I would take whatever I said about taking years off with that grain of salt. I don't understand the bit about not pre-fetching a title. Are you using the add URL page or something, rather than a bookmarklet or extension, which does exactly that?
- throwaway_panda 6y agoExtensions and bookmarklets I’ve used break eventually. I don’t recall any official bookmarklet that prefetched titles. Apps I’ve used go unmaintained and accumulate weird bugs (Pushpin, for instance, now hides the first result of a search under its interface, and updating the local db seems to be broken at times). The website on mobile might as well be microfiche. In my experience the only thing that works every time is the add url page and the desktop website. If this is deprecated and there’s a better way, that wasn’t clear to me. I’m fully aware this is part of the deal. And at least you haven’t had an our-incredible-journey post, unlike most of your competitors. It’s not been fun for me lately though.