It's great timing for this question for me. I've recently made a change in how I use bookmarks, and I've become very curious about how other people deal with them.

Some history. I've used bookmarks like anyone else since before IE6 days. When Chrome 1.0 came out, I've switched to it and been using it as my primary browser since. When Chrome added ability to sync (bookmarks and other things), I've started using that.

So for the last 5+ years, I've had all my bookmarks synced between my main computers and mobile devices.

There were 3 stages of how I used bookmarks.

First stage was me trying to organize things into folders, based on content. It seemed to make sense, but didn't really scale well. I ended up not liking my bookmarks after a while because I never actually used existing ones, only added new ones.

The problem with organizing by folders is that they're exclusive. If I run into a new blog I want to bookmark, it would normally go under Blogs. But if it's game related, I have a Game Dev folder that has Blogs inside that.

I feel like labels would work better, since then you can just apply multiple labels to bookmarks and be able to find them more logically.

Eventually, I gave up on that, but realized that I mostly cared about bookmarking things "just in case" and so that they'd show up in Chrome's omnibar when I type or search for things.

So I changed my "add a bookmark" strategy to a simpler one. I created a top-level folder called Stream (inspired by Photo Stream from Apple devices), and it would be just a single place to dump all bookmarks, based on time. Latest ones always end up on the bottom. No trying to organize by content, because organizing by "when this bookmark was added" was actually more meaningful and helpful, but primarily easier.

That worked for a while, but even so, over the last few years I realized I didn't like my bookmark situation. I had hundreds of bookmarks from last few years, and I had forgotten about most of them. It felt like baggage, mental overhead.

So, just a few weeks ago, I set a goal to go through all my bookmarks and delete them. For any bookmark I couldn't delete, I added it to a text file and just organized that in an free form way.

I ended up removing 90% of useless bookmarks. They were either 404, no longer useful or relevant, out of date, or easily findable via Google when I need to look that topic up.

The 10% remaining were high quality things that I actually cared enough to want to keep in a .txt file for now.

So, I went from http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/12tdxyh7suc7h.html from last few years, to just http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/1f2drzhc3w3hk.txt.

Feeling good about that so far. I'll put the .txt file with my other .txt files for now, and see if there's anything more I wanna do with it later. But for now, it works well enough, and I'm feeling a huge sense of relief from no longer having those bookmarks in my browser.

As a bonus, I now feel better about being able to switch browser I use, and not have to worry about importing/exporting bookmarks. I just don't want to have my bookmarks tied so tightly with the browser I use, it makes sense to keep them externally.

I really like the observation someone here made about bookmarks usually being used as "TODO" items. Articles to read, interesting blog posts to consider going through, etc. I think that really makes sense why it feels bad to have so many unused bookmarks accumulating.