I have over five thousand bookmarks. I know this because I counted them recently, during one of those periodic moments of self-reckoning where you look at the mess you've created and wonder whether you're a thoughtful collector or a digital hoarder. The answer, as with most uncomfortable questions, is probably both.
The bookmarks span a decade. Articles I wanted to read later. Designs I wanted to reference. Restaurants I wanted to try. Products I wanted to buy. Threads I wanted to return to. Portfolios I wanted to study. Recipes I wanted to cook. Interviews I wanted to revisit. Five thousand digital flags planted in the vast territory of the internet, each one representing a moment where I thought "this is worth keeping." And the honest truth - the statistic that keeps me up at night - is that I've probably revisited less than ten percent of them.
This is the digital magpie problem. And if you're reading this, you almost certainly have it too.
The library vs the landfill
There's a useful distinction between a library and a landfill, and it comes down to one word: organisation. A library contains thousands of items, but every single one has a place, a classification, a reason for being where it is. You can find what you need because someone - a librarian, a system, a structure - has done the work of making the collection navigable. A landfill also contains thousands of items. But nothing has a place. Nothing has a classification. You can't find what you need because nobody did the work of organising it. The items are the same. The difference is the system.
Most people's bookmark collections are landfills pretending to be libraries. We save things with the vague intention of returning to them, but we never build the system that would make returning to them possible. We dump links into a default "bookmarks" folder and move on. We screenshot designs and leave them in our camera roll between photos of our son and pictures of receipts. We add articles to read-later apps and then never open those apps again. The act of saving becomes a substitute for the act of engaging. "I'll read this later" really means "I'll never read this, but saving it makes me feel like I might."
Why we hoard
The psychology of digital hoarding is interesting because it isn't the same as physical hoarding. Physical hoarding has real constraints - space, weight, visibility. Your flat can only hold so many books before it becomes unliveable. Digital hoarding has no constraints. Storage is infinite. The cost of saving one more link is zero. There's no physical reminder of the accumulation - no teetering pile of magazines, no overflowing cupboard, no room you can no longer enter. The mess is invisible, which means the mess can grow without limit.
There's also a fear-of-missing-out dimension to it. Every link you don't save is a link you might need someday. That article about Japanese design philosophy - you might need it for a project next year. That thread about brand strategy - it might come in handy in a pitch. That portfolio you stumbled across - you might want to reference it when building your own. The fear that you'll need something you didn't save is what drives the compulsive saving. It's insurance against future regret, and like most insurance, you pay the premium but rarely make a claim.
I recognise this in myself completely. I'm a collector by instinct. Books, links, references, screenshots - I accumulate. It's the magpie brain, the one that sees something shiny and thinks "I need to keep this." The instinct isn't bad. The instinct is actually the beginning of taste - you're drawn to certain things and not others, and what you choose to save reveals patterns about who you are and what you care about. The problem isn't the collecting. The problem is the lack of processing.
The processing gap
Here's where most tools fail. Every bookmarking app, every read-later service, every "save for later" feature makes the saving easy and the processing hard. One click to save. Zero help understanding why you saved it, how it connects to other things you have saved, or what it reveals about your interests and patterns. The tools are brilliant at ingestion and terrible at digestion.
This is exactly the gap that Trove is designed to fill. Trove isn't a bookmarking tool - I'm emphatic about that distinction. Trove is a taste engine. It doesn't just store what you save. It processes it. It finds patterns. It shows you what your collection reveals about your interests, your aesthetic, your intellectual preoccupations. It turns the landfill into a library by doing the work that no other tool does: making sense of the pile.
The insight behind Trove is that your bookmarks are data about you. Not data in the cold, analytical sense. Data in the personal, identity-forming sense. The things you choose to save are signals. They tell you what you value, what you're curious about, what you aspire to. A thousand bookmarks, properly analysed, can tell you more about your taste than a hundred personality quizzes. But only if something helps you see the patterns. Without that processing layer, they're just a list. With it, they become a mirror.
The collector's discipline
The difference between collecting and hoarding isn't quantity - it is intention. A great book collection isn't defined by having fewer books. It's defined by every book being there for a reason, and the collector being able to tell you that reason. "I bought this because it was the first edition and I love the cover design." "I kept this because it changed how I think about colour." "This one is here because it was a gift from someone important." Every item has a story. Every item earns its place.
Digital collecting should work the same way, but the tools don't encourage it. They encourage the drive-by save - the mindless click that adds something to the pile without any reflection on why it belongs there. What would change if, every time you saved a link, the tool asked you: "Why are you saving this?" Not in a gatekeeping way. In an understanding way. "Is this for reference? For inspiration? For a specific project? Because you want to read it properly later?" That one question would transform the landfill into a library, because it would force the moment of processing that most people skip.
Curio takes a different approach to the same problem. Where Trove looks inward - what do your saves reveal about you - Curio looks outward. It aggregates what your network is sharing and surfaces the things that are getting the most attention from people you trust. It's a filter for the firehose, a way to see the signal without drowning in the noise. If Trove is the librarian for your personal collection, Curio is the librarian for your social feed.
Towards better collecting
I think the future of collecting online isn't about saving less. It's about processing more. The instinct to save interesting things is good - it's the foundation of taste, of curiosity, of intellectual ambition. The problem isn't that we save too much. The problem is that we process too little. We collect and then we forget. We save and then we never return. We build vast archives that we never browse.
The tools we need are tools that help us understand our own collections. Tools that surface connections between things we saved months apart. Tools that notice when we save five articles about Japanese design in a single week and ask us if that's a new interest worth exploring. Tools that periodically resurface old saves and ask if they're still relevant or ready to be discarded. Tools that treat a bookmark not as a dead object in storage but as a living signal in an ongoing conversation about who we're.
This is what I'm building towards with everything I make. Not more saving. Not more consuming. More understanding. The question is never "how do I save more stuff?" The question is "what does the stuff I've already saved tell me about what I should do next?" That's the question that separates a collector from a hoarder. And it's the question that most of the internet's tools have completely failed to answer.
So yes, I have five thousand bookmarks. And no, I don't think that is a problem. The problem is that until recently, nothing helped me understand what those five thousand bookmarks were trying to tell me. The collection was always there. The meaning was hiding inside it, waiting for the right tool to bring it out.
