I have two use cases. The first is to keep track of interesting articles I find and plausibly want to refer back to in the future. A 3rd party browser extension and mobile app make saving very easy, and then I tag each item with a high-level category. This is also pretty painless, and brings a lot of value (otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful). An example is my 'long reads' tag https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/. The 'unread' feature is also useful here - I've got >10 long reads banked for when I'm looking for things to do.
The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.
The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.