Delicious was one of the earliest large-scale social bookmarking systems. Millions of users used it to store and organize links to articles, research, tools, and websites.
Delicious did not store the content itself. It stored references: URLs, tags, and metadata created by users.
For many users, Delicious became a personal and collective memory of the web.
In 2011, Yahoo shut down Delicious.
Although the database was eventually transferred and partially preserved, continuity was broken. Many users lost access to their curated link collections. Tags, relationships, and organizational structure were degraded or lost.
The links themselves still existed.
But the structure connecting them disappeared.
What was lost was not the information, but the infrastructure that preserved its relationships.
Without persistent infrastructure, references remain isolated. The memory layer that connected them does not persist.
Sources Wikipedia — Delicious The Guardian — Yahoo and Delicious