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To solve this problem, I have developed a local-first read-it-later software specifically for this purpose. A total of a few thousand offline pages are currently saved.
https://hamsterbase.com
I have saved all the articles I am interested in so that I can search for them in full when I need them. I don't have to worry about losing the site because the data is local.
Here's how I use it
1. when I come across an article of interest, I take a quick look at it and save it as mhtml in cmd + s. hamsterbase will automatically import and index it.
2. I've designed the unread list to only show articles added within 14 days, so I don't have to worry about piling up thousands of unread articles, I'll read through them when I can and highlight them as I read them.
3. I can quickly find the previously saved pages because of the support by domain, date added, whether they have comments or not, and whether they are liked or not.
From time to time (months to years) I go back to those links (usually saved in my rss reader), or at least some of the newest, and try to turn some of those links into knowledge. Some may not work anymore, the remaining I try to put in categories/bookmarks, or give me time to read and then decide what to do with them. Sometimes that read implies more work, like taking notes, learning more about some discussed topics, link them somewhat with other pieces of saved content.
The awesome lists ( https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome and related ) helped me to take off some of the burden. It is not that I need to have those links, but having them somewhat available when I need them, at least for a lot of places/software/etc.
In the end, is in part some sort of external memory. Knowing how to recover something interesting you found about a particular topic make it useful. It implies work, not just storing but refreshing/(re)organizing and putting them into your present context. But either on time or volume you must put some restrictions.
to help manage this i created a "speed dial" extension and use it basically as a visual bookmark manager. the advantage to tabs in a list is that they are easy to reference visually, and like any bookmark can be sorted and arranged into folders. so i have on for technical references, various research topics, etc that i plan to come back to. and its easy to pop one off the list to maintain them. check it out if youre curious, its open source:
https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
TL;DR: it doesn't matter how many tabs you have or how you close them, the value I get out of them comes down to intellectually engaging with them fully, which is exhausting and rewarding. The most valuable practice I found is "generating" out of tabs, and for that, sometimes just the tab title is enough.
I have a variety of ways of approaching link hoarding. I have a few modes of "consuming" these tab piles.
1. doing in-depth studying
This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book. It's sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it. It's slow af, but it's very rewarding, and of course I learn things. Over the long term, the value of that learning diminishes, sometimes very rapidly, depending on what I focused on. I learned awk and R repeatedly, at times over months, and it's all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the "it takes a full day to close a single tab" mode.
Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3 semesters to work through, so there's a wide range in what "in-depth" itself means.
2. reading and annotating
This is where I sit down with an article (for example using Reader) and read it with the intent of really engaging with it. I don't just highlight interesting passages, I put myself in the mindset of having a conversation with the author, of putting my own ideas against theirs. This is pretty high-intensity too, and when I do this over the weekend, I would put it in the "it takes an hour to close a single tab" mode.
This is what I actually find has the most "return on time reading". I have a fairly productive Zettelkasten thing going on, and filing thoughts that come out of articles, along with notes, is very productive, often leads to blog posts, and I have found how to make highlights and quotes and crosslinking work for me.
The downside is that usually, for every tab closed, 80 more get opened. I can reasonably process about 5-6 tabs this way during a work week, maybe 10 if I'm pushing it. On holidays I would average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you go.
3. just reading
This would be just reading a tab for fun. Personally, this happens if I just opened a tab. I rarely go back to an old tab and then just read it for fun, usually it's just more dopamine-rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast, and usually pretty transient in terms of "return on investment". Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider it entertainment (which is great!).
4. filing links
This is something I need to get better at. I think there is a lot of value of just looking at the title of a tab, quickly scrolling through it, and then discarding it, or keeping a reference to it along with a small paragraph. I never file a link without a small paragraph about why I think it is important to keep it, which in a way is a quick way to generate a thought, like in 2. Just the fact of writing that paragraph means I probably get more "value" (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future) than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually "created" something myself.
If that little paragraph is stored in a relevant location, it means that the next time I want to study that topic or look something up, I will find it, along with its link, and immediately get context. That is actually extremely valuable. This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and definitely want to work on more.
A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming language](https://fennel-lang.org). Incredibly interesting to me, but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a year of attention to "really" get it. I can file it away under Lisp / Lua / Programming Languages and my daily log in my obsidian vault, maybe skim the website and make a little bullet point list of points I find interesting, link a HN discussion. This takes about 2-5 minutes per tab. It is also exhausting work, if I do this for two hours, I'll be ready to just plop down in front of Netflix.
So, is any of these better? I like all of them, and I definitely had to build workflows for 1, 2, 4. I am content now knowing that there is no solution, and feeling like you can process 800 links a day is impossible. Instead I focus on time-boxing "quality time", and just close all the tabs once I'm done, there'll be plenty of high-value quality time the next day.
I have the same habit and wrote a web app to catalog the links I come across:
https://digraph.app/
- [Checked C](https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc) - extensions to make C safer #cpp
I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront. It's simple but something I use many times every day.
feel free to try it out:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
I mostly read HN. Unfortunately is like drinking from a firehose.. My take to stay sane:
- If it's interesting I upvote. If it's really interesting I bookmark on my browser. This still means ~20 links weekly..
- Once a week I copy/paste browser bookmarks to my markdown file[0] At least every month I tree shake them. Time passes and some stuff are not so relevant/interesting anymore. Eventually they move to my notebook[1] or to my news aggregator[2].
[0] https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system
[1] https://github.com/slowernews/notebook
[2] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
I mostly read HN. Unfortunately is like drinking from a firehose.. My take to stay sane:
- If it's interesting I upvote. If it's really interesting I bookmark on my browser. This still means ~20 links weekly..
- Once a week I copy/paste browser bookmarks to my markdown file[0] At least every month I tree shake them. Time passes and some stuff are not so relevant/interesting anymore. Eventually they move to my notebook[1] or to my news aggregator[2].
[0] https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system
[1] https://github.com/slowernews/notebook
[2] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
I mostly read HN. Unfortunately is like drinking from a firehose.. My take to stay sane:
- If it's interesting I upvote. If it's really interesting I bookmark on my browser. This still means ~20 links weekly..
- Once a week I copy/paste browser bookmarks to my markdown file[0] At least every month I tree shake them. Time passes and some stuff are not so relevant/interesting anymore. Eventually they move to my notebook[1] or to my news aggregator[2].
[0] https://github.com/slowernews/hamster-system
[1] https://github.com/slowernews/notebook
[2] https://github.com/slowernews/slowernews
The problem with a lot of these tools is there is no incremental escape hatch. I had 25,000 tabs last year which I saved as a line delimited text file.
Then every day I automate opening 7 tabs and I force myself to get through them. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes it ends with me adding 50 more links to the text file. Sometimes the tabs are garbage but often they are worthwhile.
https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/computer/blob/main/.config/...
https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/computer/blob/main/.config/...
But over the past year I've gone through 2,555 tabs! So it seems like it is working. Maybe in 10 years I'll reach tab zero