Ask HN: What do you do with your list of articles links?

4 points by electricant 2 days ago

10 comments

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Over the years I hoarded a fair bit of articles and links I found on the web. I found them interesting or maybe useful in the future. I also compiled a markdown file where I try to keep them organized. But the truth is, I never reference them again. If I read this list now I still think they are interesting so I'm reluctant to just throw this stuff away. Some of them could be combined into an essay of some sort, but is it worth it?

So the question is. What do you do with your lists of links? Are they actually a waste or time or what?

asdefghyk 2 days ago

I just automate it all.

Save every webpage I view - using browser extensions for several years..

Then when I want to recall something, just search for it. I worked out the storage space required once, my recollection is its one or 2 terabyte's a year

As a backup, I use history trends unlimited for about the last 3 years. I used to use pinboard archiving, but when my saved webpages got to a large number. I stopped using it, as I thought it was abusing the unlimited service offered. I loaded about 5 years of saved browser links into pinboard.

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aquariusDue 2 days ago

Well, sometimes I'm digging through my (multiple!) lists of links when I remember a tidbit that relates to what I'm working on but most of the time those lists gather dust.

In the future I'd like to maintain a link log or something similar on my personal website like some people do:

- https://matklad.github.io/links.html

- https://dotat.at/:/

- https://til.simonwillison.net/

The weird thing about saved links in my case is that I get the most satisfaction out of them when I share them with friends and so on, a bit of "Hey! I think this might be helpful, here you go" and that ends up being the extent of that particular link's usefulness for myself most of the time. Of course I can't accurately gauge how helpful it actually is for the other person.

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citizenpaul 2 days ago

A few years ago I stopped bookmarking and started putting the info into Obsidian (a personal knowledgebase). Its really good at accepting copy paste of web data.

I noticed a lot of links dissapear over the years and this keeps the info more memorable anyway. As it forces you to at least lightly process the data mentally.

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  • aquariusDue 2 days ago

    With the Obsdidian Web Clipper browser extension it's super easy and configurable, I did the same thing for a while before settling on sharing links to myself (Saved Messages) on Telegram. While that makes capture especially quick now I'm looking for a way to import those messages/bookmarks into org-mode.

    Though if you're looking for something closer to an archive then Obsidian with the Web Clipper remains the better option because you can easily add the content you're interested in to the clipping. Personally I just don't really care for bookmarks all that long anymore even if I used to categorize them in folders in the bookmark toolbar in browsers a decade ago.

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al_borland 2 days ago

I mostly gave up on this. But I would say, a link isn’t enough if you want to keep them. Make your own archival copy. I can’t tell you how many articles I saved to read later were gone by the time I actually got around to wanting to read them. The same goes for YouTube videos. Some things I was able to track down on archive.org, but not everything.

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  • max_ a day ago

    Is there something like archive.is but for YouTube Videos?

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    • al_borland a day ago

      I actually found several of the deleted YouTube videos on archive.org, but it was pretty hit or miss and was mostly the older ones.

      For personal copies of videos I want to keep incase of deletion, I generally look to yt-dlp.

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    • vik0 a day ago

      Using the wayback machine can work if you have the exact video link, but it's not guaranteed that they'll have it

      You can occasionally find a torrent out there of some channels entire video log

      Other than that, no

      If you come across a video that you really want to save, just use ytdlp to download it

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