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Comment by braiamp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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

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...

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.

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

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).

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

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

  > 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.

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