Pocket's shutdown and future of links

Welcome to a summerized world

Mozilla said last week that it plans to shut down the read-it-later app Pocket in the next few months. Pocket was a popular app, going by the reactions on X/Twitter. But Mozilla didn’t think it made sense to allocate resources to it.

The company said:

“Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

In another blog, Mozilla said that it will build discovery and curation in Firefox.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Pocket is one of the apps that I have been using for countless years. Saving articles to Pocket became a habit of mind. It was an app that let you hoard articles that you might never even read. It was akin to hoarding books that you would never get to reading, but only cheaper.

The beauty of it was that it made it easy for you to save links from anywhere through apps, extensions, shortcuts, and widgets.

Pocket’s shutdown is another signal of a shifting landscape in the link-based web. Social platforms were already pushing users to post “original” content — content without links.

On top of that, AI chatbots are now increasingly making a dent in search volumes. A side effect of chatbots providing ready answers is that people are not going to certain websites to read articles. They are rather relying on chatbots to summarize everything for them.

Multiple studies say that Google’s AI overviews feature, which summarizes information for certain queries, has an adverse effect on people clicking links to websites. Just today, a travel website owner wrote a letter to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) highlighting how Google’s new search efforts have been detrimental to his site.

The media industry has also seen widespread layoffs, with some publishers happy to let AI write content. This means there will be more AI slop and less content written by humans who have developed skills in writing.

In this scenario, discovery becomes important. However, companies will opt to let AI also handle discovery rather than rely on human curation.

Pocket’s role on the internet was to become a tool for people to build libraries. Along the way, the company also flirted with discovery. We can only speculate the core reason behind the app’s shutdown, but Mozilla likely saw signs that people were not using the app for discovery. Heck, if AI is summarizing everything for you, why do you need to discover articles anyway?

There are plenty of Pocket alternatives for users who still want a reading library of blogs and articles. But in this age of the internet, their future is also not secure.