Today is my third day after clearing my Pocket account, and I want to share my thoughts on read-later software.

Before I cleared it, there were over 2,500 articles stored. If I didn’t take action and abandon my superficial reading habits, Pocket would become an even worse garbage dump, and I would gain nothing - becoming a complete information hoarding clown in this era of information explosion.

Since September 2022 when I started optimizing my information sources, Pocket became my main read-later app, primarily for storing articles I found decent on the internet. But “decent” here only means passing grade - it doesn’t mean the article is very helpful to me, just that it sparked a tiny bit of interest.

During my graduate school exam preparation, the craziest moment of each day was collecting a bunch of newly discovered articles, but due to time constraints, I wouldn’t read any of them.

Alt+S is the shortcut I set for the Pocket extension in Chrome. My daily routine was: first check various information sources, open a bunch of tabs, then frantically use Alt+S to save interesting articles to Pocket. If the platform had a favorites feature, I’d save the content there - like a potentially good video on Bilibili would go into my default favorites; after saving from one webpage, I’d use Ctrl+W to close that browser tab.

I collected information from various channels across the internet. The favorites on various platforms are the strongest evidence.

Currently, the content in favorites across major platforms and various read-later apps has almost all been cleared by me. For sites that don’t support clearing favorites, I’ve abandoned those accounts. For example, on V2EX where I had saved over 700 posts, unfortunately V2EX doesn’t support clearing favorites, nor does it have an account deletion option. So I had to use a temporarily generated email to replace my own email in the V2EX account, then log out and completely distance myself from that damn account.

In my view, read-later apps are suitable for friends who clear their inbox daily. If you really don’t have time one day, at least clear it weekly. If you can’t manage weekly clearing, then sorry, I don’t recommend using read-later apps. When facing content you want to read but don’t have time for, decisively giving up might be a wise choice.

Human energy is limited. Don’t waste your limited energy on collecting - that’s extremely foolish behavior. Collecting doesn’t equal learning, collecting doesn’t equal absorbing. Always maintain respect for your favorites folder - if you can avoid touching it, don’t touch it; if you can resolve something immediately, definitely resolve it immediately. Otherwise, someday when you feel like browsing your favorites, facing that garbage dump, you’ll most likely retreat, and whatever remaining desire to read will be shattered by reality.

I quite appreciate Bilibili’s “Watch Later” feature limiting to only 100 videos - this limit serves as a warning to users. But as someone who’s been through it, I know some users won’t take it seriously and might just throw videos into their default favorites instead.

Actually, content on the internet, especially on social media, is meant for immediate consumption - not for slowly savoring and rereading. Content I read on social media generally won’t be revisited, unless something really piques my interest and I might come back after a while. But such cases are rare; most of the time it’s one-and-done, like some unremarkable news I saw one day - the next day, I have no memory of it.

Additionally, try to read content that’s meaningful and valuable to you, and read less or none of the content that’s useless to you. Undoubtedly, the internet has promoted human society’s development, but as it became widespread, the internet has gotten worse - various content scrapers run rampant, duplicate content spreads across platforms, and it’s increasingly hard to find eye-opening content.

Regularly filter your information sources, try to unfollow sources that provide no value to you. By doing this, your life will become more fulfilling, and you’ll have more energy for activities that improve yourself.

Only by breaking the bad habit of saving without reading will our souls ascend.