I have bookmarks everywhere. Safari reading list - hundreds of links I saved and never returned to. Slack saved items - articles people shared in channels that I thought I would read later. Notes app - URLs pasted with no context, just a naked link staring back at me weeks later with no memory of why I saved it. Emails to myself. Screenshots of tweets. Voice notes describing an article I read on the tube. It is chaos. Absolute, embarrassing chaos.
And I know I'm not alone in this, because every time I mention the problem, people nod. Everyone has the same mess. Everyone has bookmarks scattered across five different tools, none of which talk to each other, none of which help you find anything again, none of which do anything useful with the patterns in what you save.
The state of personal link management in 2026 is embarrassing. We put a man on the moon. We built AI that can generate photorealistic images from a text prompt. But we can't build a decent bookmarking tool. Something has gone very wrong.
What died
Delicious was perfect. Not perfect in the way people use that word casually - genuinely, functionally, perfectly designed for what it did. You saved a link. You tagged it. You could see what other people tagged the same link. You could discover new things through other people's bookmarks. It was simple, social, and useful. Then Yahoo bought it and slowly, methodically destroyed it. By the time they sold it on, the magic was gone and the users had scattered.
Nuzzel was perfect. It did one thing brilliantly: it showed you the links that your Twitter network was sharing. Not what the algorithm thought you wanted. Not what was trending globally. What the people you actually chose to follow were reading and sharing. It was the purest expression of social curation ever built. Then Twitter acquired the team and shut it down. The feature never appeared in Twitter itself.
Google Reader was perfect. It was the connective tissue of the blogging era. You subscribed to the feeds you cared about and everything came to you, chronologically, without algorithmic interference. It was how an entire generation of internet people consumed information. Then Google killed it in 2013 because they wanted everyone on Google Plus instead. Google Plus is now dead too, obviously.
The pattern is unmistakable. A beloved curation tool gets built. It grows a passionate community. A platform acquires it or copies it. Then they destroy it, because the platforms don't want you to curate. They want you to scroll.
The link as signal
Here's what nobody seems to understand about links: a link isn't just a URL. It is a signal. Every time you save something, you're revealing an interest. Every time you share something, you're making an editorial choice. Over time, the accumulated pattern of what you save and share creates a map of your taste, your curiosity, your intellectual obsessions.
That data is incredibly valuable - not in the surveillance-capitalism sense of valuable, but in the genuinely-useful-to-you sense. If a tool could analyse your last thousand saved links and tell you what themes keep recurring, what subjects you always return to, what blind spots you have - that would be transformative. Not because it tells you something you don't know, but because it makes the implicit explicit. It holds up a mirror to your curiosity.
Nobody is doing this properly. The bookmarking tools that exist are glorified filing cabinets. You put links in. You (sometimes) take them out. But nobody is analysing the patterns. Nobody is using the signals to help you understand yourself better or discover things you wouldn't have found on your own.
That's what I'm trying to build.
Three tools for a new link ecosystem
Trove is a personal taste engine. It learns from your bookmarks - not just what you save, but the patterns in what you save. Over time, it maps your taste. It tells you what you consistently care about, even when you've not articulated it yourself. Trove looks inward. It answers the question: what do I actually care about?
Curio is a social signal aggregator. It surfaces what the people in your network are sharing and reading. Not what an algorithm thinks you want. Not what is trending. What the specific human beings you trust are paying attention to. Curio looks outward. It answers the question: what does my network care about?
CultureTerminal is curated news filtered through editorial taste. It covers the intersection of advertising, design, fashion, media, and brands - not comprehensively, but selectively. The curation is the product. CultureTerminal looks across. It answers the question: what does culture care about?
Together, these three tools form a vision for what the link economy should be. Personal taste. Social signal. Cultural curation. Three lenses on the same question: what matters?
The rebuild
I want to be honest about what these projects are. They aren't just side projects. They aren't portfolio pieces or learning exercises. They're a thesis about how information should flow on the internet.
The current model is broken. Platforms decide what you see based on what will keep you scrolling longest. Algorithms optimise for engagement, which means they optimise for outrage, controversy, and the lowest common denominator. The result is an internet where the most important things are buried under the most engaging things, and engagement almost never correlates with importance.
The alternative is human curation. People deciding what matters, based on taste and judgement and editorial conviction. Not because humans are infallible - we aren't - but because human curation produces something that algorithms can't: a point of view. A perspective. A sense that someone with taste and intelligence has looked at the firehose of information and said: this matters, and this doesn't.
That's what Trove, Curio, and CultureTerminal are building towards. Not a replacement for the platforms - they're too powerful and too entrenched for that. But an alternative layer. A way of finding, saving, and sharing information that respects your intelligence, rewards your curiosity, and treats your attention as something valuable rather than something to be harvested.
The link economy will be rebuilt. Not by the platforms - they had their chance and chose engagement over usefulness. Not by venture-backed startups optimising for growth metrics - they end up becoming the platforms they set out to replace. By independent builders who care about curation, taste, and making the internet useful again. Builders who use the tools they're building, who feel the problem they're solving, who would build these things even if nobody else ever used them.
That is the job. That is the work. One link at a time.
