Pinboard Blog

What is Antisocial Bookmarking?

I've noticed that Pinboard users fall into two camps. One group uses the the service as a kind of 'Delicious plus' - they are perfectly happy with the social aspects of Delicious, but have been lured to Pinboard by some missing features (mainly speed, integration with outside services and the 'read later' bookmark status).

The second group is attracted to the idea of an antisocial site, where you can keep data on a central server but have it be entirely private. We have about a thousand users who have the 'make everything private by default' setting turned on. These users tend not to be interested in integration with other sites, since that goes against the antisocial aspect, but rather want a simple and fast bookmark archive that they don't have to maintain themselves.

Since the goals of these two groups of users are somewhat in tension, I thought I'd explain my own motivation for setting up an 'antisocial' service, what exactly I mean by the term, and how it affects features that will or won't make it into Pinboard.

Despite being friends with the founders, I was a late convert to Delicious. For a long time I could not understand why anyone would bookmark to a central server, rather than just save things within their browser. The service only seemed to make sense for people who used multiple computers, or who chose to broadcast their entire online life to the world. Since I did not fit in either group, I failed to see the purpose of a public bookmarking site.

What brought me around were two Delicious features. The first was tagging. This was moderately useful for remembering things in one's own account, but what bowled me over was how well the aggregate tags for a URL from multiple users summarized its content. Through a simple UI trick, Delicious had succeed in creating better link descriptions than anyone else on the Internet.

The second feature was the 'inbox', a kind of subscription list that let you siphon links from other users. Even after Delicious had grown big enough for the front page to no longer be interesting, with a little effort you could put together an inbox that would provide you with a steady stream of nice things to read. In the days before sites like Reddit or Digg, when there were relatively few streams of engaging stuff to click on, this was a valuable resource.

So I became an active user of Delicious, with the enthusiasm of the late convert. But as time went on, and as people started to subscribe to my account, I found myself increasingly self-conscious about posting links to the site. Bookmarking had started to feel a little bit like publication. This made me hesitant about filling my account with bookmarks that were not of general interest, even when I needed to keep them around for my own use. For example, in the course of writing a long article about the Space Shuttle, I ended up bookmarking over a hundred items in the space of a few days, all on that topic, and by the end of the process I felt myself wincing with each bookmark, conscious that I had lavishly spammed my friends' bookmark streams with endless NASA articles and powerpoint decks.

I decided that what I really wanted was a site that would retain the advantages of public bookmarking (aggregate tags and user subscriptions) while removing some of the social expectations that made bookmarking awkward. In my mind, Delicious was something like a coffee table, a semi-public place where you put out a careful selection of things meant to entertain your guests, and tried to impress them with your cleverness. What I wanted was something like a library carrel, a place I could store things that interested me without much caring what impression they made on others. People would be welcome to poke around, but always with the understanding that they were looking at a set of links curated for my own benefit. If they got bored, it wouldn't be my fault. And I would be able to find and snoop on interesting people without having to, god forbid, ever interact with them.

Pinboard still has a long way to go before it can do all the things I expect from a personal archive. There is still no way to make lists of interesting links around a topic in anything except chronological order. It's impossible to effectively search your browsing history. People still can't bookmark together in small groups, or search their archived links except by description or title. There's no way to assemble offline reading lists and it's hard to manage more than a few dozen bookmarks at a time around a given topic without a lot of heroic tagging and clicking. But with enough time and effort, these are things I'd like the service to do well.

One of my favorite places to work is the reading room of a large municipal library. It's a kind of half-private space where you have access to endless books, a desk with a little green-shaded lamp, and someone stern to shush people when they get too chatty. Working quietly with others is not forbidden, but you don't go there to socialize. You have room to spread out your materials and you can dive deep into the things that interest you. And you're surrounded by other people doing the same thing.

I don't presume to have the ability to build that kind of online space myself, but it has been a helpful metaphor to work towards. Online communities over the past two years have fixated on what's happening right now, what your friends are doing right now, activity streams, trending topics, and staying on top of a wave of frequent and evanescent snippets of text. I think this leaves room for a site where you can hamster away information to come back to at your leisure, in the company of interesting people, without worrying that it will disappear.

At the same time, I realize that not everyone is an information hermit. I've been delighted to see Pinboard fill up with people enthusiastic about plain old social bookmarking, who just want to see it a little faster or better-integrated with other services. I welcome these bright-eyed extroverts who wish to connect everything to everything else, and will happily add all the features they ask for, just as long as the silent majority of shy nerds can continue to feel welcome on the site and benefit from its features.

—maciej on April 11, 2010