> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.

I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally.

I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity translated into a trickle of ongoing traffic, because people shared links to sites in a way they don't really do now. Links pages don't exist anymore (unless they're SEO spam). Slashdot and boingboing are just news now. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet used to be a valuable thing, and now it isn't.