I have 5919 bookmarks in there. But.. of course, it's just structured data, I could import it to other services and use it fine.

The real loss here is how you can use it to analyze other people's bookmarks. Almost every page of any merit is tagged and in their system, just because Delicious is/was the biggest game in town.

Wanna find HN links about Java? Try http://www.delicious.com/tag/hn+java .. want a tutorial about making a game in Ruby? http://www.delicious.com/tag/ruby+tutorial+game .. This is absurdly useful even though so few people know about it. It's been my secret weapon for 6 years now because I've always been able to find anything I could even partially remember just by coming up with the tags that might describe it :-(

The other loss is how you can use it to discover other people interested in the same incredibly esoteric things as you. It was a like an asynchronous, organized version of twitter, 3? years early.

Delicious as a search engine is far superior to google for many types of content.

Delicious is my bookmarking mechanism. I use it probably 20 times per day. Bummer about this.

Same here. Instapaper is another one but I visit it once in a blue moon.

I was in the same group as you guys but lately I've started using Instapaper's Kindle export feature to read long articles (NYT, etc) on my Kindle. It's a really good experience. Try it out.

There are a few starting points for solving the black hole problem. It's amazing how much Yahoo allowed it to atrophy.

I use mine to keep track of tech links mostly. I do refer back when I need to find something I know I've bookmarked, especially if I can't remember how to Google for it.

I find this happening to myself as well. I think it's the nature of tags vs a more visual paradigm.