Aged-out bookmarks

Apr 10, 2023 • Yousef Amar • 1 min read

I'm in the process of organising a big pile of bookmarks, the current batch dating to 2019. I realised that while the ones from 2022 are still relevant, I really don't know why I bookmarked some of the things that I did in 2019. Some of them are kind of interesting articles, but I no longer remember what my intention was.

Was it to read them later? I think they're mostly just not that interesting to me anymore. Was it to do use them somehow or keep them as a resource? If so, I don't see how, as they've usually lost their relevance.

I have already noticed that the rate at which I bookmark links is much higher than the rate at which I triage them. Part of this is because the triage process is still too high-friction for me. Most of the time, I want to be able to very easily categorise and store a resource in the right place for later search, or append it to the scratch file of a relevant project.

I always knew that I need to take measures to ensure that the "service rate" of these lists is higher than the rate at which they grow, but now I also think that there's a certain time cutoff after which the lists might as well be self-pruning. After all, if something's been in the "backlog" for so long, surely it can't be that important? I need a Stale Bot for bookmarks!