I sometimes describe Instapaper as "/dev/null for web content". I reflexively share to Instapaper not to read it later, but to absolve guilt for not reading it at all. It is one of my weirdest web habits, on reflection.

OTOH, back when del.icio.us was good, I used it for roughly the same purpose.

These days, I still send links to Instapaper when they are essays or articles. I send links to Raindrop.io when they are anything else, basically anything the Instapaper text extractor would fail on. Things like repos, interactive charts/graphs, photographs, videos, etc.

I still think it is behaving roughly as /dev/null. I do sometimes think that, at least nowadays, you can ask an LLM to visit your bookmarked links and do some semantic search over them. But I guess the best use case is just saving it for later/never rather than wasting time on it now.

Instapaper has a lovely "Shuffle" sort option. I usually don't feel like reading what I saved last, and randomly picking one of the first 5 articles the Shuffle option presents ensures that I read at least something!

I tried to use various LLMs to go through my Instapaper stuff. It was probably 6-12 months ago and it didn't like any of my attempts.

However, I did still find one-off AI summaries to be very helpful in getting through the backlog to get me down to 0. I now stay at 0. If there is a long article I don't feel like reading, but want to know more than the headline, I will use the AI summary in my browser. That's usually good enough to absolve the guilt, without creating more guilt by adding something to the reading list.

> I do sometimes think that, at least nowadays, you can ask an LLM to visit your bookmarked links and do some semantic search over them. But I guess the best use case is just saving it for later/never rather than wasting time on it now.

I've been meaning to build something like this

I like the idea -- to extend yours -- all the bookmarks and pages visited (or pages dwelled on for more than a minute) get full-texted and filed to a local LLM. And you can query directly, and it has the context.

> I sometimes describe Instapaper as "/dev/null for web content"

Ha! I used Read It Later in a similar way. I thought of it as "Read It Never".