I’d like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.

We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you’d share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web’s link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn’t, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.