Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.

We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.

Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.

W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.

Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.

[1] https://dev.w3.org/Amaya/amaya/AmayaPage.html

I just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well.

  - Local go server to index everything into sqlite or postgres
  - browser extension to send the DOM for indexing. 
    - This happens after each page is finished rendering, so client side rendering doesn't break, and it doesn't require fetching the url a second time on the back-end.
  - Filter rules to control what gets indexed (basic url regex patterns, nothing too fancy)
  - Text-based query interface for terminal dwellers like me.
  - Local file indexing that actually works well so that you can search your history and your documents in one place.
  - Custom extractors for understanding specific sites and file formats.

It's really great, just about perfect for my needs.

"The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search."

The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by default

Each website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example below

An .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps

   /tmp/w3c-cache/.index

Pages are cached in temp files, e.g.,

   /tmp/w3c-cache/308/temp_lbAfil

HTTP response headers are stored in .meta files

   /tmp/w3c-cache/308/temp_lbAfil.meta 

   grep -r whatever /tmp/w3c-cache

The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxy

I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser

"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me

I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format

Related : Hister https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743097

That realization - that you realize there's really nothing [worthwhile] for you to do - after getting over that initial break from your phone, is a magical threshold that I wish I'd crossed a lot sooner. The time and energy it frees up is so powerful, no matter what else you choose to do with it. Reading 4 books is incredible on its own but in this day and age it (and any other deliberate, non-scrolling activity) has incredible effects on your attention and emotional-balance, which I'm sure you've noticed.

I'll object to "no doomscrolling" a little bit. My first case of doomscrolling was on my PC, in high-school, in early years of Facebook. It happened not with social feeds, but with news. I had this stupid idea that I need to follow news to "stay informed", and it took me I think a good year before I noticed I'm constantly sad, depressed, angry at, or afraid for the world. When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing. Plus, I realized some time later that reading news doesn't make you more informed, but more disinformed.

Social media had one benefit: to connect with like-minded people during the madness of the covid era. Ironically, the madness was fed by social media, in part because it allowed groups of like-minded people to connect. Note: this comment holds true no matter which side you considered mad and which side you considered reasonable.

HN is social media :)

I cut Facebook a while ago when I realized they wouldn't let me at what I want it for.

I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.

However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.

I once came across the concept of a “day list,” and it’s helped me reduce similar habitual distraction/procrastination. It’s like a to-do list, but reframed as “these are the things I could do with my time. Not must.” I describe each item in the simplest possible way, even if it represents a complex task.

Of course, I still use task managers, calendars, and notes apps, and they’re useful in their own ways. But physically writing a day list with pen and paper reliably keeps me on track. If I start to drift, I look back at the list and it brings me back.

Your mileage may vary.

From time to time I remind myself of a rule that has worked well for me. I call it 'no idle screentime'. It makes me more cognisant of when I am browsing without purpose or going off on an unhelpful tangent.

yeah same here. I actually don't spend too much time on my phone and I feel pretty smug about it until I realise I just replace the smaller screen with the bigger one a lot of the time :<

I've got two LANs at home, one of them I disconnect from the Internet by pulling a single ethernet cable (in a "try to hack this" way).

It's honestly very refreshing to have stuff I self-host and be operational without needing 24/7 Internet connection.

I'm running such a setup since years and, IMO, it helps me focus.

One way to do this is by going mobile-internet only with limited data. It doesn't stop doomscrolling on sites like this, but it does stop TV and online gaming and that could be very helpful for many people.

"intentional web surfing" is a phrase i've been exploring recently. hosting an event to turn it into an activity here in my city, should be interesting to see how people respond.

There are a few particular problems with this. Let's go with the most extreme example I can think of.

You walk up to the interface of an infinite digital library. In this library there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read, or even contain anything coherent for you to read. The problem is there is also an infinite amount of books you don't want to read, can't read, or aren't even coherent information. And this second infinity is so much bigger than the first infinity that it is infinitely improbable that you will ever pick out a coherent book.

Everything you do in a coherent informational world is directed by sets of biases. Algorithmic recommendations are just another one of the tools used to traverse this infinite world, and if you understand the biases they impart you can use these tools successfully.