alt.hn

2/28/2026 at 12:46:36 PM

No Bookmarks

by herbertl

2/28/2026 at 3:06:18 PM

Based on the title I thought this was a personal call-out to me and others like me who obsessively bookmark/save links and yet seldom even glance at their collection.

by FireInsight

2/28/2026 at 5:38:54 PM

This is (tragically) the reason why I remain a tab hoarder: the UI carries an implicit nudge (a costly signal of visual real estate), for my future self to engage with it.

In a similar spirit to OP: it did help mitigate the hoarding, when I began thinking "how hard is it to find this resource/reference again, should I actually need it?". And if it's trivial to google (and mnemonically sticky enough I can trust my future self to remember it), I can close the tab.

by lukifer

3/1/2026 at 6:43:06 AM

I keep thinking about something like a search engine integration that would suggest relevant bookmarks at the top of your search results. It might have been even cooler back when we had things like delicio.us and if we could have gotten recommended relevant links from people we followed's bookmarks too. But even knowing how to code like I do I sorta can't think of how to do it, maybe a browser extension that injects over google? I guess I've more thought about how it would interact than how to actually make it.

by michaelbrave

2/28/2026 at 7:07:00 PM

same here. That is why i came to discussion to find out how are people using those.

by celurian92

2/28/2026 at 2:20:23 PM

This is interesting. I took the opposite path. I used to remember page numbers while reading books, just so I could come back without getting lost. That habit started in the School library. These days, I bought a simple, cheap, paintable bookmark, about 100 of them, which my daughters can paint. I have them lying around in books, as I tend to read multiple books at a time. My daughters keep painting them with whatever they want, from anime to their favorite characters, to just about anything. So, bookmarks for me everywhere. Sometimes, I tend to go back a few pages just to recollect the books I was reading a while ago.

by Brajeshwar

3/1/2026 at 2:21:51 PM

> “I used to remember page numbers while reading books…”

Big fan of marginalia myself.

by xtiansimon

2/28/2026 at 2:45:33 PM

I used to be a rememberer too with borrowed books, but now I buy used paperbacks and dog ear my pages.

by wonger_

2/28/2026 at 3:50:11 PM

I don't use phones, so if I have to go somewhere, I have to memorise the route. I enjoy the exercise. I look up the directions on my laptop, mentally rehearse the points of interest that will indicate to me where I need to take particular turns, and then have to put into practice my memory with the actual physical landscape I tour as I follow this route. Sometimes I make mistakes, but correcting them is part of the exercise.

It seems very few people nowadays know how to follow a route, especially an unfamiliar one, without being tethered to their GPS.

by jordigh

2/28/2026 at 3:54:21 PM

In my personal experience, when I take a wrong turn, it's impossible to find my way back. I understand if you're describing the route from one large city to another, but if you need to get to a specific street in even a medium-sized city, it's impossible to remember every turn the first time around.

how old are you? How can you memorize a new route?

Because i am born in the TomTom era and i had google maps on my first phone ( not smartphone ) but it have it

by alienpingu

2/28/2026 at 3:57:21 PM

Even at unfamiliar places you can probably get by just knowning the general direction you want to go and glancing at street signs.

Highly depends on your location.

by 8cvor6j844qw_d6

2/28/2026 at 3:17:17 PM

I can generally re-find my place in books, but years ago I acquired a stack of orange punch cards from a university library that they were giving away as scrap paper. These make great bookmarks and also interesting historical conversation pieces if someone notices/recognizes them.

I think the previous use for the punchards to have one for each book and scan them on checkout/checkin (maybe this predated barcodes?)

by zdw

2/28/2026 at 3:16:25 PM

Very nice piece of text. For me it’s the fact that the book is always there and no amount of pages can be too much for me to gather something from rereading a part of the book that leads to where I left off. In a way I think we’re also past the point of bookmarking anything in our lives. Culture after all is just the reinforcement of the same idea.

by AreShoesFeet000

3/1/2026 at 2:56:53 AM

I'm a little surprised. How do you manage to remember small, changing bits of information so easily? I'd lose my page every few days.

by nicbou

2/28/2026 at 3:22:45 PM

This is what I used to do and then life gotten complicated.

ADHD fish memory doesn't help either.

by BloondAndDoom

2/28/2026 at 3:49:41 PM

This gets a little more fun if you enjoy falling asleep to audiobooks

by apitman

2/28/2026 at 5:39:53 PM

For me, this misses the point of bookmarks - it’s not about remembering where I have been but getting there extremely fast.

by pflenker