At about quarter to one last night, I saved a link. A long article about the history of department store design in postwar Tokyo. It was dense, academic, probably eight thousand words, and I was absolutely not going to read the whole thing right then. But I saved it. Quietly. Privately. No announcement, no share, no comment. Just a save. Me and the link and nobody watching.

Earlier that same evening, I'd liked about fifteen things on Twitter. Retweeted one. Left a comment on a LinkedIn post. Shared a link in a group chat. All of those actions were, to varying degrees, performances. Not insincere ones, necessarily, but performances all the same. I liked the tweet partly because I liked it and partly because I wanted the person to know I liked it. I retweeted it because I wanted my followers to see that I'm the sort of person who finds that sort of thing interesting. I left the LinkedIn comment because -- well, nobody leaves LinkedIn comments for purely private reasons. Every public action online has an audience, even if the audience is small, even if you don't think about it consciously.

The save had no audience. The save was just for me.

The hierarchy of honesty

I've been thinking about this a lot since building Trove, which is essentially a product built entirely on the premise that saves are the most honest signals on the internet. And I think there's a clear hierarchy to online actions, ranked by how performative they are. From most performed to most honest, it goes something like this.

The comment is the most performed action. Nobody comments without awareness of an audience. Even a genuine, thoughtful comment is shaped by the knowledge that other people will read it. You choose your words. You consider how you'll come across. You perform.

The share is next. Sharing is identity construction. "Look at what I found" is really "look at the kind of person who finds things like this." We share things that make us look smart, interesting, funny, cultured. We almost never share things that make us look confused, basic, or lost. The share is a press release about your taste.

The like is somewhere in the middle. Less effortful than a comment, less declarative than a share, but still public. Still a signal to someone that you approved. Still, at some level, a performance of attention.

The save is the only honest action on the internet. No audience. No performance. Just you and the thing that mattered enough to keep.

And then there's the save. The bookmark. The "add to reading list." The screenshot you take of something you want to come back to. The link you drop into a note to yourself at one in the morning. This action has no audience. Nobody sees it. Nobody is impressed by it. You get no social credit, no engagement metrics, no dopamine hit from someone acknowledging that you noticed this thing. The save is pure. The save is honest. The save is the closest thing we have to a genuine signal of what someone actually cares about, stripped of every incentive to perform.

Why this matters

Fifteen years in advertising taught me one thing above all else: people lie about what they care about. Not deliberately. Not maliciously. But consistently. Ask someone in a focus group what they want and they'll tell you something aspirational. Ask them what they bought last Tuesday and you'll get the truth. The gap between what people say they value and what they actually do is the entire reason advertising exists.

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The save vs. the share: I tracked my own behaviour for a month. I shared about 30 links publicly. I saved over 200 privately. The overlap between the two lists was less than 10%. What I share and what I save are almost entirely different collections.

The entire social internet is built on the performed layer. Likes, shares, comments, follows -- all public, all shaped by the awareness of an audience. Every recommendation algorithm in the world is trained on these signals. Instagram shows you things based on what you and people like you have liked. Twitter serves you content based on what you and people like you have engaged with. The whole system runs on performed behaviour and calls it "personalisation."

But the real signal -- the honest signal, the one that tells you what someone genuinely cares about -- is sitting right there in their saves. In their bookmarks at two in the morning. In the links they dropped into a private note. In the articles they screenshotted and never told anyone about. That data exists. It's just that nobody has built around it, because it's private, and the entire business model of the internet runs on public signals.

Building on honesty

This is what Trove is about. Not bookmarking -- that's the mechanic, not the point. The point is that your saves, taken together, are the most honest portrait of your interests that exists anywhere. More honest than your social media profile. More honest than your public reading list. More honest than the things you tell people you're into at dinner parties. Your saves are the things that passed the highest bar: worth keeping, even though nobody will ever know you kept them.

When you save two hundred links over the course of a few months, patterns emerge. Not the patterns you'd expect, necessarily. Not the ones you'd claim if asked. The real ones. The ones that reveal what your brain is actually drawn to when nobody is looking. Maybe you save more about Japanese design than you'd ever admit in conversation. Maybe you save articles about career changes that you haven't told anyone you're thinking about. Maybe you save recipes, or architecture, or obscure sports, or financial models, or poetry. Whatever it is, the saves don't lie.

Your bookmarks at 2am are a more honest portrait of who you are than anything you've ever posted publicly. That's why they matter.

I remember when I first looked at my own save history properly, before building Trove. I expected to see a lot of advertising and strategy content. That's my job. That's what I'd tell people I read about. But the actual data told a different story. The biggest category, by a wide margin, was design. Visual design. Product design. Spatial design. Retail design. I was saving design content at three or four times the rate of anything else. And that was a revelation, honestly, because it forced me to confront something I already knew but hadn't articulated: I care about how things look more than how they work. That's not what a Strategy Director is supposed to say. But the saves don't negotiate with your professional identity.

The last honest space

The internet has very few honest spaces left. Almost everything we do online is shaped, to some degree, by the awareness of being watched. We post differently knowing people will see it. We like things strategically. We follow people as a signal. We curate our profiles. We perform our interests. Even the "authentic" platforms -- BeReal, the Close Friends story -- are performed authenticity, which is arguably worse than regular performance because it pretends not to be.

But nobody performs their bookmarks. Nobody curates their read-later list for an audience. Nobody saves a link at two in the morning to impress the followers they don't have on a platform nobody sees. The save is the last honest action because it's the only action with no incentive structure beyond genuine personal interest.

That's why I built Trove around saves instead of shares. Not because saves are a better feature. Because saves are a truer signal. And if you're trying to build something that helps people understand their own taste -- their real taste, not their performed taste -- you have to start with the truth. The truth, it turns out, is at two in the morning, in a browser tab nobody will ever see, when you hit save on something that matters to nobody in the world but you.