Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.

We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.

Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.

That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.

> My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first.

Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.

Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".

I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.

The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.

But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.

(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")

Was I actually the only kid who liked cleaning up toys and sorting Knex and Lego and stuff?

i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.

As an alternative to Gmail can I recommend Hotmail? I recently created an account and a nice feature is that all new email goes into the Junk folder by default. It was obviously designed by a misanthropic hermit, but the benefit is that your emails drop to almost zero. It's a bit of a bummer if you had a job opportunity or a friend tries to contact you, but on the other hand, fewer distractions.

Crazy times.

It all went wrong when writing was introduced, the lazy kids became addicted to letting the technology take place of their natural human memory.

I'm curious about the history - what would you use a list of gas fill ups for? Price tracking?