Valtteri Tastula

Let me tell you a story about a personal tragedy. Or many tragedies, I guess. It feels like there is so much wrong here.

Earlier this year, I wrote a humorous article for a student magazine. Titled Välilehtipsykoosit (something like Tab Psychosis), it rationalized my habit of not really closing any tabs, but collecting and organizing them. My tabs are my workspace. My tabs are my to-do list. With a few tricks, you can have hundreds of tabs in multiple windows open efficiently. I believe that browsing history, bookmarks and tabs form a powerful and personal database that can be used in everyday life. Forget googling for previous stuff; nothing is forgotten or erased from local storage! All browsers have great tools for managing this information and with some extensions, it gets even better.

When I first mentioned this “system” in the guild room, people were flabbergasted. For me, it’s almost like journaling. For others, it’s clearly just data hoarding or pure madness (hence the title). People don’t understand. Tragedy #1.

In the article, I focused mostly on tabs. They had the greatest potential for silliness. But to be honest, by far the most important part of the system is bookmarks. Tabs create flexible work contexts and save resources temporarily. Bookmarks save knowledge and create shortcuts that last forever.

Except they kinda don’t. They really don’t.

Today is a calm, boring, dark Sunday. I decided to tidy up my bookmark collection as one does. Soon I noticed two things. First, my quest for saving knowledge has become sloppy. I’m not saying my system is flawed or I have too many bookmarks – of course not – but they’re so unorganized it’s hard to get the maximum benefit out of them. No folder structure, no tags, no clean titles. Second, there’s a concerning amount of link rot. Defunct apps, blogs that moved without redirection, content that was taken down.

I decided to analyze all of my bookmarks for duplicates and broken links with an extension. I ended up with 9,712 unique bookmarks. I really don’t know how much a normal user has. 9,712 is probably too much? The results of the broken link analysis are displayed below.

That’s 674 bookmarks. Some of them – like the unauthorized requests – are false positives. Then again, some links are technically working, but lead to wrong stuff. About 7 % of my bookmarks are useless now. That’s way more than I’d like. How much link rot do I have in my history? I am losing control of the personal database. Tragedy #2.

Whether I liked it or not, this is a wake-up call I get every now and then. If something is truly great, I should do more than just save it for later. Take notes or write about it. In private or in public. Actively process the information once it’s there. But it takes so much time and I doubt it’s really worth it after all. Tragedy #3.

Maybe I should filter the stuff I find interesting better. Sometimes I feel like I have no filter at all. Or maybe I should expand the system and start archiving the websites…