Open your browser. Go to your bookmarks. Count them. Actually, don't count them - you already know. There are hundreds. Maybe thousands. Articles you were going to read later. Tools you were going to try. Recipes you were going to cook. Shops you were going to visit. Threads you were going to come back to. Videos you were going to watch when you had time.
You saved them all. You revisited almost none of them.
This isn't a personal failing. It's a universal human behaviour. We're all burying things in bookmark graveyards, convincing ourselves that the act of saving is the same as the act of engaging. It isn't. But it's something far more interesting than we give it credit for.
The performance of productivity
Saving a bookmark feels productive. There's a small dopamine hit when you click that little star icon or tap "Save for Later" or add something to your reading list. You've done something. You've taken action. You've captured a thing from the infinite stream of the internet and claimed it as your own. You'll get to it later, when you have time, when the moment is right, when you're in the mood.
You won't. We both know this. The bookmark isn't a promise to your future self. It's a performance of intention. It's the mental equivalent of buying a gym membership in January - the purchase feels like progress even though nothing has actually changed.
I've thought about this a lot, partly because I'm the worst offender I know. I have bookmarks in Chrome, in Safari, in Notion, in Apple Notes, in Slack messages to myself, in email drafts I sent to my own inbox, in screenshots on my phone, in Twitter likes, in Instagram saves. Six, seven, eight different places where I've squirrelled away things I found interesting, and I almost never go back to any of them.
But here's what I have realised: the bookmarks aren't useless. They're just being used wrong.
The bookmark as autobiography
Look at your bookmarks again, but this time don't think about what you should have read or watched or tried. Think about what the collection says about you. Think about the pattern.
When I looked at mine - really looked, for the first time - what I saw wasn't a disorganised mess. It was a map. A map of my interests, my obsessions, my aspirations, my anxieties. There were clusters. Japanese design blogs. Restaurant reviews. Articles about the advertising industry. Brand strategy frameworks. Electronic music labels. Vintage magazine covers. Product design case studies. Pieces about parenting. Nottingham Forest analysis.
Each bookmark was a moment where something caught my attention strongly enough to make me pause, mid-scroll, and think "I want to remember this." The fact that I never went back to it doesn't diminish that moment. The moment of recognition - the spark of "this is for me" - is the data point that matters. Not the follow-through.
And when you look at hundreds of those moments together, across months and years, what emerges is a remarkably accurate picture of who you are. Not who you think you're, or who you tell people you're, but who you actually are, as revealed by the things that make you stop scrolling.
Collecting versus hoarding
There's a difference between collecting and hoarding, and it's entirely about intention. A collector acquires things with purpose. They know what they have, they know why they have it, and they know how each piece relates to the whole. A hoarder acquires things compulsively, without system, without reflection, driven by the fear of missing something rather than the joy of finding something.
Most of us are bookmark hoarders. We save indiscriminately because the cost of saving is zero and the anxiety of losing something is real. What if I need this article later? What if this is the recipe that changes my cooking? What if this tool is the one that fixes my workflow? Better to save it and never use it than to lose it and wonder what might have been.
But what if there were a way to turn hoarding into collecting? What if the act of saving could be transformed from a performative gesture into something genuinely useful? Not by making you go back and read everything - that's never going to happen, and that is fine. But by making the pattern visible. By showing you what your saves say about you.
That's what Trove does. It isn't a better bookmark manager. The world doesn't need another bookmark manager. It's a taste engine. You feed it the things you find interesting, and it finds the pattern. It tells you what you keep coming back to. It shows you the threads that connect your seemingly random saves. It turns your bookmark graveyard into a self-portrait.
The insight that led to Trove wasn't "bookmarks are broken." Everyone knows bookmarks are broken. The insight was that the brokenness isn't the problem - it is a symptom. The problem is that we treat saving as a productivity tool when it's actually an identity tool. We think we're building a reading list when we're actually building a taste profile. We think we're being practical when we're actually being expressive.
The links that define you
Think about the last ten things you bookmarked. Not the things you actually read - the things you saved with the vague intention of reading later. What do they have in common? What theme runs through them? What kind of person saves those specific ten things?
I'll tell you what mine were, roughly: an interview with a Japanese architect, a thread about how Stripe thinks about design, a recipe for homemade ramen, a piece about Brian Clough's management style, a profile of a small record label in Berlin, an analysis of why certain ads work, a list of the best restaurants in a neighbourhood I've never been to, a tool for generating colour palettes, a piece about the death of taste in social media, and a photo essay about brutalist architecture in London.
That isn't a random collection. That is me. That's my taste, laid bare in ten links. Design, food, football, music, culture, advertising, London, Japan. The things I care about, expressed not through what I say but through what I stop to save.
Now imagine multiplying that by a hundred. By five hundred. By every link you've ever saved across every app and platform and browser. The portrait gets more detailed, more nuanced, more accurate with every addition. And it tells you something that you might not have been able to articulate yourself: this is what you care about. This is your taste. This is who you are when nobody is watching.
The bookmark graveyard isn't a failure of organisation. It's a library of intent. A museum of micro-decisions. Every save is a vote for a version of yourself, and the aggregate of those votes is more honest than any bio you've ever written.
So no, you're never going to go back and read all those articles. You're never going to cook those recipes or try those tools or watch those videos. And that is absolutely fine. Because the value was never in the content. The value was in the choosing.
Your bookmarks know you better than you know yourself. The question is whether you're willing to look at what they're saying.
