Answer · word for word

Yes — both are documented manifestations of digital hoarding, and they are arguably purer examples than file or photo saving, because the rationalization is weaker and the dysfunction is more visible. They map onto two distinct mechanisms.

Open tabs ("tab hoarding"). This is widely discussed, though more in practitioner and popular-psychology literature than in peer-reviewed work. The behavior is the same avoidance of a discard decision you have seen throughout: each open tab represents an unfinished intention — something to read, to act on, to not lose — and closing it feels like discarding the intention itself, or admitting it will never be completed. The tab is held as externalized intention and memory: keeping it open offloads the obligation onto the browser rather than deciding to either do it or let it go. The mechanism is precisely status quo bias plus the discard-distress: closing requires an active decision and produces a small loss-feeling, so the default — leaving it open — wins, and tabs accumulate by non-decision. There is usually an explicit "I'll get to it" belief (future usefulness) and often genuine anxiety attached to closing, which is the marker that distinguishes it from simple untidiness.

It is worth noting a partial functional defense, as with version control: a modest set of open tabs is a legitimate working set, and some people use tabs deliberately as an active task list. It becomes dysfunctional on the same criterion as everything else — when the count grows past any possibility of return, when the tabs are never revisited, when closing them produces distress, and when their presence itself becomes a source of low-grade stress or degrades the person's ability to actually find the tab they need. Browser makers have effectively conceded the pattern's prevalence by building features around it (tab groups, "save all tabs," vertical tab lists, suspending inactive tabs to recover memory) — the digital analog of buying more storage bins.

Bookmarking everything but never organizing it. This is the more diagnostically telling of the two, and the disorganization is the key signal. Recall the earlier distinction between collecting and hoarding: collecting is organized, curated, and retrievable; hoarding is indiscriminate accumulation in disarray. Indiscriminate, unorganized bookmarking is acquisition without curation — it satisfies the saving impulse (the small reward of capture, the relief of not losing something) while never performing the categorization and decision work that would make the archive useful. That split is the essence of the pattern: the rewarding act (save) is completed; the effortful act (sort, decide, prune, retrieve) is indefinitely deferred.

This connects directly to two mechanisms you have already built up. The categorization deficit is central — the same difficulty grouping items into categories that defines physical and digital hoarding is exactly what is being avoided when bookmarks are saved into one undifferentiated pile. And the never-revisited quality exposes the underlying function: the bookmark is rarely saved in order to be retrieved later; it is saved to discharge the anxiety of potential loss in the present. The act of bookmarking resolves the discomfort of "I might lose this," and once that feeling is resolved, the motivation to ever return — or to organize for return — disappears. The archive is functionally write-only. This is the clearest tell that the behavior is about managing a feeling rather than building a resource, and it is the same dynamic as the unopened purchase that goes straight onto the pile.

The boundary, restated for these cases. Neither behavior is pathological by volume. A hundred bookmarks in tidy folders that you actually use is a resource; a thousand in a single undifferentiated heap you never open is closer to hoarding — and the second is worse than the first even though "organize your bookmarks" sounds like trivial advice, because the disorganization is not laziness but the avoided decision-work that is the core of the condition. As before, the operative question is function versus dysfunction and the presence of distress, not the count. And the same near-zero friction caveat applies with full force: tabs and bookmarks cost nothing to keep and require a deliberate act to remove, so the natural brake never engages, and accumulation is the default outcome rather than a sign of anything pathological in itself.

If it would be useful, these two — tab hoarding and write-only bookmarking — are clean additions to the digital-hoarding section of the handoff summary or either webpage, since they illustrate the externalized-intention and acquisition-without-curation mechanisms more legibly than the file/photo examples do.