copperbadge:

dorkilybeautiful:

lotesseflower:

shadowedhills:

shitifindon:

spaceshipoftheseus:

odditycollector:

I found my favourite del.icio.us explanation:

I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with
my friend Britta,  who was working at the time as community manager for
Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the
bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate
tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output
along a bewildering number of dimensions.     If you wanted to read a
3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it
seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but
not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate
combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably
write it for you).    By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about
folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative
editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of
friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

from the guy who runs Pinboard, which took in some number of the fleeing users.

He also gave a talk about what happened when he *succeeded* at getting fandom’s attention during the exodus, which I didn’t see before just now, but its kinda funny to look at normal fandom culture stuff from the POV of an outside observer who didn’t mean to get caught in the middle.

this whole thing is super interesting

oh my god that talk is gold

There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.

Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written
requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only
goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I
could not believe what I was seeing.

The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it. 

(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life – so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)

But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community. 

I’m still haunting the ruins of delicious with my bookmarks all by myself – but the linked talk is genius ++good would read again.

Hey, @copperbadge: are you aware of this thing?

I was semi-aware when it was happening but I haven’t checked back since the dust settled – it’ll be interesting to review what’s linked with the perspective of a few years. I do use pinboard, though not in the same way I used delicious; for fannish bookmarking I use Evernote because a side-discovery of the death of delicious was the fact that many of my bookmarks now led to dead pages, and Evernote archives the text of the page along with the link. I do miss being able to make bookmarks public, it made recclists a lot easier, but that was an acceptable loss.

A side-use I had for delicious, however, was bookmarking things I couldn’t read at the moment or wanted to save to review at home, away from work. That’s what I use my pinboard for now – a handful of origami bookmarks that I want at my fingertips, plus a rolling list of “things I uncovered while on computer Y but will need to read when I’m on computer X”.

But my initial thought when I saw that first paragraph at the top of the post was “And then Yahoo destroyed it.”

Ware. Ware of the Yahoo. WARE, I SAY.