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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

It's in violation of the sacred law of the attention economy:

Never link outside your garden.

For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided, because it's seen as "leaving your site". In a store front, I can see that making sense. In a site to provide information... not so much.

News sites aren't just providing information: they're trading reporting for ad impressions.

It's a stretch to call many many of the stories these sites produce "reporting," I'm thinking in particular about the "Someone posted to Twitter and other people posted angrily to Twitter in response" genre

Serious question: are paywalled news articles better at outlinking and do they have no ads?

The Atlantic seems to have no problem linking to multiple outside sources in seemingly every article I read.

The Atlantic is bankrolled by Steve Jobs wife and historically is more of a “think tank” outlet than a journalistic enterprise

The Financial Times is also good about this.

Lately I think I've been seeing more science news sites linking to source articles, with DOIs usually abstracts-only are viewable) and Arxiv (often with PDFs) for example..

Every FT article is paywalled

iirc they are soft-walled, or at least they were the last time i checked, about a year ago. I forgot how exactly you could bypass the wall, i think something with cookies and private browsing, and ip-addresses.

Or you could just pay for it. It's expensive but totally worth it (IME, obviously).

NYT will often outlink or if they're talking about a report, will provide a PDF of the report.

Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-c...

in my experience of i pay a sub it removes ads from the site at least, although not sponsored content

No, not in my experience. They usually have less external ads but a lot of other cruft is still there.

Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is getting so bad, I'd be willing to pay for sites that actually work. So far, paywall offers are just to remove external ads and that's only part of what I want. The rest of what I want is for the fucking site to actually work. For example, both Google and Amazon search have been seriously degraded and de-featured in recent years and it's been done very intentionally and systematically to optimize for their ad or sales revenue.

I suspect this degradation has crept deeper into their stacks than just at the top layer where it could be easily turned off with a flag and sold as a paywall upgrade.

  > For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided

Because people don't understand metrics other than "optimize this". So they take social media metrics and apply them where they don't belong.

To me fair, news is probably pretty hard to measure. Since the real value is in quality. People want information, quickly available, but accurate and easily readable. I mean isn't a big function of the news to explain complex topics more simply? I don't think there are any half way decent metrics for quality in really any domain.

If You leave the website, your eyes won't catch a headline that's on the side that you might also click, spending more time on your website. Which translates to more money.

They aren’t there to provide information, they are there to trap/collect eyeballs.

As a culture we don't value primary sources.

This is actually my quickest rule of thumb for any internet article. If it's got links and some actually leave the site, I'll be immediately more invested and read through it. Otherwise I'll barely glance at it and go back to whatever got me to the article in the first place.

Good old metric hacking.

People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly.

It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time on page/site, number of academic citations, whatever. They're meaningless at face value. A good example is time on site. That's great for social media like YouTube where it generally correlates strongly to "using the website for what the website does" but even then it can be "scrolled for 20 minutes looking for something to watch, gave up. But on a news site, no one fucking cares about that. Your job is to provide information, so time on {page, site} might actually be a negative because it doesn't necessarily mean people are reading that whole time but they might be struggling to find the information they are looking for. A confusing UX also optimizes time on site.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Enshittification is a good thing for the business people.

No it isn't, but it looks like it is. The same is also true with (abusive) monopolies. They make less money stagnating. The difference in both is that it's easier to be poorer. But you give up a lot of value for easy money, and let's be real, when you're that rich it's no longer about the (utility of) money but the power and high score/bragging rights.

(Markets can work with monopolies, even efficiently, but it's the problem of benevolent dictators. They're never benevolent and eventually abuse their power. Competition is good for everyone involved because a stagnating monopoly is just one overtaken by bureaucrats who don't know how to make money, i.e. it is already dying)

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