Delicious / del.icio.us

~ the obit ~

Delicious (originally written as the URL hack del.icio.us) was launched in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, a New York-based engineer. The premise was deceptively simple: a website where you saved your bookmarks online, tagged them with keywords, and shared them publicly. Other people's bookmarks were searchable, browsable by tag, and discoverable through following individual users.

Yahoo bought Delicious in December 2005 for an undisclosed sum (estimated $15-30 million). By 2010, Yahoo's leadership decided to "sunset" the service. Public outcry forced a partial reversal: Delicious was sold rather than killed, going through several owners (AVOS, then Science Inc, then Pinboard's Maciej Cełatkowski), and on June 1, 2017, Maciej Cełatkowski (who had been competing with Delicious through his own paid bookmarking service Pinboard) announced he had bought what remained of Delicious for the explicit purpose of shutting it down. The site was retired.

The shutdown was, the formal funeral. The cultural moment had been over since 2007, because the body had been on life support for a decade.

~ on paper ~

~ the tagging revolution ~

Before Delicious, the dominant model for organising web content was hierarchical. Folders, categories, tree structures. Yahoo's directory (launched 1994) was a hierarchical taxonomy. Browser bookmark folders followed the same model.

Delicious did not have folders. It had tags, while you assigned multiple tags to each bookmark; bookmarks could be filed under any number of tags simultaneously. The act of tagging was a declaration: "this bookmark is about X, Y, and Z." Other users could see what tags you had used and follow your taxonomy. The collective set of all users' tags formed a "folksonomy". A folk taxonomy that emerged from millions of small individual decisions rather than from a central authority.

Folksonomy was, in 2005, a serious idea, but academic papers were written about it. Library science conferences debated its merits. The argument: user-generated tagging would, given enough scale, produce more useful organisation than expert-curated hierarchies. Delicious was the experimental proof. The experiment worked, briefly, before Yahoo dropped it.

~ how it changed bookmarking ~

Delicious turned bookmarking into a social act; before Delicious, your bookmarks were private, saved locally in your browser, visible to nobody. Delicious made them public by default. The implications were unexpected.

Discovery through other people: You could follow specific users whose taste you trusted. Their bookmarks became your reading list. The mechanism was, an early version of the algorithmic feed, except that the algorithm was "Person A trusts Person B's curation." Modern social platforms use machine algorithms instead of human ones. Tag pages as discovery surfaces: Each tag had a public page showing all bookmarks tagged with it, ranked by popularity. The /tag/javascript page on Delicious was, for several years, a more useful "javascript newsletter" than any actual newsletter. Tag pages were collective intelligence rendered as web pages. The "popular" page: Delicious's popular page showed the bookmarks accumulating the most saves in real time. This was an early attention-economy signal: what is the wisdom of millions of bookmarkers paying attention to right now? The popular page was, briefly, one of the best curated daily-reading lists on the internet.

~ how Yahoo killed it ~

Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005 with clear enthusiasm. By 2007, internal Yahoo politics had deprioritised the property. The Delicious team was reduced. Engineering investment effectively stopped, and the site continued to operate but new features stopped shipping.

In 2010 Yahoo's strategic restructuring leaked an internal slide deck listing Delicious as a property to be "sunsetted." The leak triggered a public outcry, users frantically exported their bookmarks before the announced shutdown. Yahoo, embarrassed, reversed the decision and committed to selling Delicious instead.

The sale to AVOS Systems (a small startup) in April 2011 was a relief but the damage had been done. Many users had migrated their bookmarks to alternatives during the panic and did not return. AVOS tried a redesign that the remaining users hated. By 2014 Delicious was a backwater.

Pinboard's Maciej Cełatkowski had launched Pinboard in 2009 explicitly as a paid alternative to Delicious. Pinboard's pitch: pay $25 once, your bookmarks are yours forever, no advertising, no sale, no shutdown. By 2017 Pinboard had absorbed most of the serious-bookmarker user base. Cełatkowski's buyout of Delicious in 2017 was the symbolic end - the alternative that had outlasted the original buying the original to bury it.

~ what's gone ~

The folksonomy. Tag-based collective organisation has been replaced by algorithmic recommendation. The trade-off is: algorithms are scaleable and personalised; tag-based folksonomy is transparent and shareable. Modern systems have no equivalent of "browsing the /tag/cooking page" as a discovery surface. Discovery is now mediated by algorithms whose criteria you cannot inspect.

The discrete bookmark. We do not bookmark anymore. We "save" things to platforms (Twitter likes, Reddit saves, Instagram bookmarks). Each platform has its own private save system. The cross-platform, exportable, durable bookmark is gone. Our reading lists are scattered across a dozen silos.

The tag as authorial choice. When you bookmarked something on Delicious, you typed your own tags. The act was personal and explicit. Modern saving is, by default, untagged. Pinterest pretends to be a tagging platform but its tags are mostly machine-generated. The discipline of choosing tags for your own future self is gone.

~ words from mourners ~

"my delicious account in 2007 had 4,200 bookmarks tagged with 487 unique tags. when yahoo announced the sunset i exported them all. they sit in a json file on my hard drive. i have not opened them in fifteen years. they are still mine in a way nothing on a current platform is.", m.k. 47

"i learned to use the internet by following the delicious bookmarks of three specific users. one of them was waxy.org's andy baio. he is still around. i am still grateful." - e.ö. 41

"delicious's url hack; del.icio.us, was the cleverest domain name of the early web 2.0 era. when they migrated to delicious.com in 2008 a piece of the magic died. some things should never have been made business-friendly.". a.r. 44