Everyone is a creator now. The tools are free, the platforms are open, and the barriers to publishing have never been lower. You can write a newsletter, record a podcast, film a documentary on your phone, and ship a product before lunch. Creation has been democratised so thoroughly that the act of making something is no longer remarkable in itself. When everyone can create, creation alone stops being a signal of anything meaningful.
But there is another act that has become quietly more interesting, more revealing, and more undervalued: the act of saving. Not creating. Not sharing. Saving. The deliberate, often private decision to take something you have encountered in the world and choose to keep it. To bookmark it, pin it, star it, screenshot it, add it to a folder, drop it into a note. That act -- repeated hundreds of times over months and years -- tells a story about you that no amount of content creation ever could.
What you save is who you are. And almost nobody is paying attention.
The algorithm knows what you click. Your saves know who you are.
There is a fundamental difference between passive consumption and active saving that the entire tech industry has largely ignored. Your feed knows what you clicked on. It knows what held your attention for eleven seconds versus three. It knows what made you pause while scrolling. But all of that data describes behaviour, not identity. It captures what the algorithm served you and what you reacted to. It is a map of stimulus and response.
Your saves are something else entirely. When you bookmark an article, you are not reacting. You are choosing. You are making a micro-decision that says: this matters to me. Not right now, not in this moment of boredom or curiosity, but in some deeper, more permanent way. This is worth keeping. This belongs in the collection of things I have decided represent something about how I see the world.
The feed is a record of what happened to you. Your saves are a record of who you decided to be.
Think about the difference between what someone likes on social media and what they save to a private folder. The likes are performative, even when they are genuine. They exist in a social context. They are visible to others, shaped by what you want to signal. But the saves? The saves are just for you. Nobody is watching. Nobody is counting. The saves are where you are honest about what actually resonates.
Saves as signal
Every bookmark is a micro-decision about identity. This is not an exaggeration. When someone saves a piece of architecture, a typeface specimen, an essay about Japanese joinery, a recipe for miso ramen, and a profile of a sneaker designer -- all in the same week -- they are not filing information. They are drawing a self-portrait. Each save is a data point in a pattern that, given enough time and enough saves, becomes unmistakable. It becomes taste.
Brands should be paying far more attention to what people save than what they like or share. A like is cheap. A share is social currency. But a save is intent. It is someone saying: I want to come back to this. I want this to be part of my world. When someone saves your product page, your campaign image, your brand story -- that is a qualitatively different signal than an impression or even an engagement. It is the closest thing to genuine desire that digital behaviour can express.
The advertising industry has spent two decades optimising for attention. Impressions, clicks, views, time on page. All of it measures what happened in front of someone. None of it measures what someone decided to hold onto. The save is the most undervalued metric in digital marketing, and the reason is simple: it is hard to monetise something private. But the signal it carries is orders of magnitude stronger than anything in the engagement funnel.
Instagram understood this intuitively when they added the save button. Pinterest built an entire platform around it. But even these tools treat the save as a feature, not as the foundation. They let you save, but they do not help you understand what your saves mean. They give you a folder. They do not give you a mirror.
The curation gap
Here is the gap that nobody has properly addressed: the distance between saving something and understanding why you saved it. Every bookmarking tool ever built has treated saves as files. Things to be organised, tagged, sorted into folders, maybe searched later. The metaphor is the filing cabinet. Neat, efficient, and completely wrong.
Saves are not files. They are signals. Each one carries information about what you value, what you aspire to, what patterns your mind is drawn to, what aesthetic sensibility runs beneath your conscious decisions. A thousand bookmarks, taken together, are not a library. They are a psychological profile. They are a taste fingerprint. And no tool on the market treats them that way.
The problem is not that people do not save enough. Power users save constantly -- articles, images, products, threads, references. The problem is that the accumulated weight of those saves goes nowhere. It sits in folders that become graveyards. It lives in browser bookmarks that number in the thousands and serve no purpose beyond guilt. The act of saving felt meaningful in the moment. But the saves themselves, as a collection, remain inert. Unanalysed. Unconnected. A pile of signals with no interpreter.
What would it look like if a tool actually took your saves seriously? Not as files to organise, but as data to interpret? What if, after six months of saving things, a tool could tell you: here is what you consistently notice. Here are the aesthetic threads that connect your saves. Here is the pattern you did not know you were drawing. Here is your taste, reflected back to you in a way you have never seen before.
That is a fundamentally different product from a bookmarking app. That is a taste engine.
Building for savers
This line of thinking is what led to building Trove. Not as a bookmarking tool -- the world does not need another one of those -- but as something that treats every save as a signal worth interpreting. The core insight was strategic, not technical: there is an entire audience of people who are underserved by the current product landscape. People who are not primarily creators and not purely passive consumers. People who sit in between. The finders. The evaluators. The keepers.
These people are everywhere. They are the ones whose group chats are full of links. They are the ones who always know about the thing before everyone else. They are the ones whose Instagram saved folders are meticulously organised and never shown to anyone. They are curators by instinct, collectors by nature, and they have been treated as an afterthought by every major platform.
The creator economy gave tools to people who make things. The attention economy gave tools to people who consume things. Nobody built properly for the people who find things -- who scan the noise, identify the signal, and decide what is worth keeping. That is not consumption. That is not creation. It is something in between, and it might be the most valuable skill of the next decade.
Your autobiography in other people's work
There is a beautiful paradox at the heart of curation: you express yourself most clearly through things you did not make. Your bookmarks are your autobiography written in other people's work. The articles you saved, the images you kept, the products you bookmarked, the ideas you could not let go of -- together, they compose a portrait more honest than any bio you could write or any personal brand you could construct.
Because you cannot fake a save. You can fake a post. You can perform an aesthetic on social media. You can curate a public-facing identity that bears little resemblance to what actually moves you. But in the private act of saving -- when nobody is watching, when there is no audience, when it is just you and the thing and the decision to keep it -- you are being as honest as you will ever be online.
In a world that increasingly rewards performance, the save is the last honest act. And in an age where everyone can create, what you choose to keep might be the truest expression of who you are.
So pay attention to what you save. Not what you post, not what you share, not what you create for the world to see. Pay attention to the quiet folder. The private board. The bookmarks bar that got out of control years ago. That is not clutter. That is not disorganisation. That is your taste, speaking in a language you have not yet learned to read.
The tools will catch up eventually. Until they do, your saves are waiting to tell you something.
