It Was Delicious

by David Moore

Welcome to 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.