 Elliott P. [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Flickr
Today: David Moore, co-founder of Sludge; and Moh Telbani, a writer living in Egypt.
Issue No. 160It Was Delicious
David Moore One Woman in Gaza
Moh Telbani
It Was DeliciousThis story is part of The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past.
Before the well-lit galleries of Pinterest, before the sprawling specialist forums of Reddit, there was Delicious, the “social bookmarking” service with its signature bare-bones design. For dedicated surfers in the internet’s earlier years, Delicious was the purest expression of sharing on the World Wide Web, the archetype of the form. Founded in 2003, Delicious allowed users to save and tag links and online documents, creating a vast taxonomic engine whereby more than a billion URLs were bookmarked. It was an organic magnifier for human attention. The site’s key innovation was the humble “tag” for saved links, forming a folksonomy, enabling focused searches and Wikipedia-style deep dives all over the exploding internet. There was a willful optimism, in the Web 2.0 years, a belief in a dawning human-driven internet that would filter up the highest-quality information and render legible oceans of data about the world to anyone, anywhere. Starting in 2005, when I began working in open-source web tools, I cannot emphasize enough how common it was for project managers to ponder treatises with titles like “Tagging: people-powered metadata for the social web.” By the end of 2008, Delicious had 5.3 million users. What I found marvelous about Delicious was how, in its generic utility, annotating links turned casual internet users into makers, explorers curating their own found artifacts and ephemera. Delicious was an early demonstration of the rewards that might be found in a more self-directed online platform, one less optimized for “likes” on posts—in stark contrast to the sour, impersonal, algorithmic social media deluge to come. Dubbed the “darling of Web 2.0,” Delicious was one of a number of social sharing services that rapidly attracted a huge user base, only to shutter years later, following the familiar arc of popularity, then acquisition, then absorption into Silicon Valley’s unfeeling corporate culture.
Bookmarking a link on Delicious might mean anything from “Check this out” to “This is underappreciated" to "This is my taste" to "These are my obsessions." A random selection of “recent / popular” links in 2006 included “Deep Blue Morocco—an Underworld lyrics site” and “Ten reasons why you should never accept a diamond ring.” As related by Delicious co-founder Joshua Schachter in a tell-all to New York magazine, the then-31-year-old was overwhelmed by the wild popularity of the service. He sold it in 2005 for a sum reported to be in the $10 - $15 million range, a part of Yahoo’s Web 2.0 acquisition spree which included Flickr and Upcoming. The founder struggled with Yahoo!’s bureaucracy as his company floundered. “It was a miserable environment,” Schachter said in 2005. “Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide.” Schachter left Yahoo in 2008, before the delayed launch of a “Delicious 2.0” and a rewritten, supposedly faster codebase. Still, he said, he had no regrets. But Yahoo couldn’t figure out a way to integrate its Web 2.0 pickups and put the site up for sale. Delicious would be sold four more times, fumbled through a series of owners: by the end, in 2017, it was shunted off for a mere $35,000 to entrepreneur Maciej Cegłowski of rival bookmarking service Pinboard, who later effectively discontinued the service he'd once called his “nemesis.” “Pinboard is not a social site, and it has always been about archiving, not sharing,” Cegłowski wrote in 2011. The superficial similarities between Delicious and Pinboard—saved links, user-generated tags, popularity rankings—highlight the value that Delicious had created, of users bringing new and interesting information to one another for their own different reasons. My own fondness for Delicious comes not from its minimalist design, its tag “clouds” formed by internet obsessives, or the pre-Twitter notes contributed by readers of, say, blog posts on The Awl or The Classical. What I appreciated most about it was that during its heyday, for me around 2004-06, the site’s vast user base and its built-in personal RSS feeds offered an unassuming, low-stakes place for more of my friends to start link blogs. Using Delicious as a microblog was a simple hack, repurposing a social web tool for idiosyncratic ends, somewhat in public but mostly anonymously in the crowd. A music critic’s blog post, a baffling scientific diagram, a weird gif, an un-licensable rap mixtape, a cute animal photo, a glitched-out mp3. Clicking the Delicious bookmarklet to save these things would populate them in your Delicious feed—received lightly in your friends’ RSS readers at their desks, perhaps over morning coffee. There was an ease to online communication back then. The magic of the RSS open standard guaranteed you wouldn’t miss any links from your friends in a churning algorithm; their discoveries would sit quietly in place, ready for you to open when you wanted. Link-blogging via Delicious was less of a personal statement than posting on Facebook and Twitter accounts would soon become, with their eternal, forever looming pressure of likes and potentially unpleasant replies. Delicious was the platform of choice for a wave of net artists who traded their work on Blogspot and showcased found gems, inconspicuously, and in public. Looking back at one link blog, the digital arts organization Rhizome wrote in its project the Net Art Anthology: “Emerging out of collaborations between the founding artists on the social link-sharing site del. icio .us, Nasty Nets reflected a particular emphasis on sharing decontextualized found media as an artistic practice.” As with so many other lost artworks, the Nasty Nets site collapsed and was taken over by porn-esque spam content, though an archived copy with sound—and some dubious-looking file downloads—is available to the brave via the Net Art Anthology. The sudden launch of Facebook’s News Feed in 2006 precipitated a social media era that would devour much of the traffic that had previously gone to blogs. News sites saw their traffic cratered, too, by Facebook’s adtech centralization. And we may be staring down yet another ice age in online discovery, with Google, the company that holds 90 percent market share in online search, now rolling out AI-fueled chum in its results. In DIY spirit, Delicious’s sale to Yahoo drove the creators of Are.na to develop new curation software, for people to assemble and share collections of links, media, and notes in their own channels. Their site runs with support from paid members, and cultivates a transparency and responsiveness to its users that could never have existed at Yahoo. The aura of Are.na is a reminder of technology’s resiliency in the hands of people committed to “slow and steady” growth. After all, the demise of Delicious and Google Reader didn’t mean the end of link-blogging and RSS; those ways of sharing just became quieter. But they’re still humming, available for attention.
THE HYDRA FUNDRAISER APPROACHES
One Woman in GazaWomen in Gaza had a lot of dreams, which were lost during the war. They were assigned instead a tough task: spending their days cleaning, trying to obtain decent food and a bottle of pure water, and searching for a safe place to move to. Repeated displacements have prevented Gazan women from being able to maintain their privacy, with the crowding and lack of bathrooms; this also has led to chaos in their daily lives and affected their psychological health. The United Nations confirmed in March that 180 babies have been born in the Gaza strip each day during the war, and that more than 52,000 pregnant women in Gaza were at risk due to the collapse of the healthcare system. This led to a tripling of the abortion rate. Pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza are facing severe malnutrition, which in its turn is affecting their children.
Nada is 27 years old. She was a project coordinator at an organization for the protection of women and children in Gaza, taking care of about 70 people with various diseases and health conditions, helping them organize their lives and maintain a healthy lifestyle. She was also pursuing her master’s degree in epidemiology. On October 7, Nada was living with her family in a recently built six-story building in Jabaliba, in North Gaza. They were happy there, and comfortable, planning a vacation to Egypt in March. Nada had completed the first part of her research. Her father was happy for her, saying, “This is my daughter who completed the master’s degree.” But she did not finish the master’s degree, and her father did not survive, he was murdered. May God bless him. On the morning of October 7, all of Gaza woke up to the sound of missile attacks. We all were so shocked. The war continued much longer than everyone expected. At first we were saying it would be over in a week or two, but then everything started to deteriorate. Nada's new family home in Jabaliba was bombed, and she and her family had to evacuate to her brother’s house, with 12 people living in a small space; they soon relocated to her other brother’s house, where 17 people were living. They had to move to yet another relative’s house, and then to a school next to the Al-Shifa hospital area, which was attacked; in the end they were forced to return to her original home, which by now had been largely destroyed. During this last trip, one of Nada’s brothers was arrested while the family was in the Al-Shifa hospital area. Their father decided to go to Belaya, in North Gaza, after hearing people saying that the army was leaving that area. Nada and her family were afraid, but her father told them, “Calm down, I will go and come back two days from now.” But Nada’s father never came back. This is not normal. This is called a nightmare, a nightmare. After her father was killed, Nada tried to return to work, providing psychological support to children and trying to study and write, but the communication blackout made work difficult for her. In addition, she and her family were facing death and hunger, every single day. They had nothing to eat. Today Nada lives with her sister and her husband’s sister—twelve people in all. Their life is depressed and dull, with no positive feelings in it. They have lost all hope and passion. The whole family wakes up each day and talks about it, and how life will in time be good. They wake up and sleep and thank God that they are all still alive. It’s not yet the end and I hope and pray that this nightmare will end soon.
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