World wide wasteland | Hacker News Reader

World wide wasteland

zemanta.com

232 pointsigzebedze77 comments

@Swizec, too bad your message was negated by the video pimping Zemanta at the end. Outbound links to cool stuff generated by a machine? That's exactly what you were mourning.

Love cannot be automated. Certain battery-operated appliances have been invented to attempt this (I've heard), but they can't replicate the real thing.

Links to good stuff cannot be automated. Selecting good stuff to link to requires good taste and judgment. Humans exercise good taste and judgment. This is the source of the value you miss from enthusiastically, freely given recommendations: "Hey, look here! This is really cool!"

A human did it.

A recommendation machine like Zemanta's is attempting to do the same thing that link farms, bent SEO, etc. want to do. Zemanta's come-on is a bit more appealing, perhaps. But its goal is the same. Listen to the message in the video.

The fact that love does not scale is liberating. I do not need a million followers. Or 50. All I need is to sit and talk to my friend Roger over a cup of coffee. Or help my 8th grader gently towards understanding the mis-magic of PHP. Or say "I'm sorry" to my wife when I screw up.

Or throw a great link on my website when it makes me happy.

TL;DR

Love doesn't scale. That's why it is so valuable.

Only humans love. Machines cannot.

Be human-sized. And give love.

I think it's good to not confuse what we typically think of as links with recommendations, which I think both the OP and the commenter do. Zemanta's widget isn't about permalinks, it's about recommendations. The former are a human art form, the latter can be human or mechanical or some combination.

That said, the decline of the permalink bothers me deeply and I'm working to fix it.

This Zemanta thing reminds me of the Alexa toolbar—I think that’s what it was, I’m going back as much as a decade here—that shows you links related to the page you are currently already on. Back in the day people were really excited about the Alexa toolbar for some reason.

Well Zemanta tries to help the author instead of reader. That might sound like a small difference, but it actually is a huge shift - author is a human filter and things that the end reader see are not computer-recommendations, but human selected ones.

As far as I understand the link love direction Zemanta is taking, it's more about helping a user to use their judgement and good taste when recommending links to their readers.

That's how I use it anyway (albeit somewhat lazily at times).

What a karma-whoring red herring. But I'll bite. There's nothing fundamentally special about humans. There's also nothing fundamentally special about love. Not even if you use the word "love" to mean three different things in a single comment.

APOLOGY ABOUT THE SUBSCRIBE POPUP: I am the author of the piece, I did not know popups existed on this blog (I usually write on /fruitblog).

If I knew about this, I would insist on posting on the other blog. Stern words are being said right after I find whomever's responsible.

You have my apologies.

edit: it's been turned off.

What?

We're complaining about the disappearance of blog-rolls? Seriously?

I think this article fundamentally misunderstands what the purpose of blog rolls was, and what has filled those niches since.

Blog rolls used to basically fill two purposes, either 1) an exercise in co-branding (which folks still do: https://svbtle.com/ ), or 2) as a list of things that folks find interesting.

1) is kind of a boring subject, and people have sensibly realized that there's a lot more that goes into consistent branding than just providing some links.

2) Is the space where a lot of special built tools have popped up, whether it's pinboard or delicious, or twitter and tumblrs for link blogging. I would argue that this is a vastly preferable circumstance to having a blog roll.

So, OP writes that "link love" is important. Sure it is. But one of the problems with link love, especially blog roll style, is that maintaining a list of links can be a pain in the ass, especially when blogs start winking out of existence.

The lack of a blog roll doesn't mean that linking has gone the way of the dodo. We've just reorganized the net and the way linking takes place. "Wasteland" is a bit much frankly.

Oh. this is to pimp a product. Nevermind. probably best just to ignore this entire conversation :P

You know, I always hated the echo-chamber many blogs became, blogging endlessly about what other people had blogged and not giving any thought to producing original content. I mostly steered clear of twitter, because my impression is it's even worse there. And I don't think I've ever in my life followed a "related stories" link.

In the days of print we managed just fine without pointers to other works. If you were very lucky you got a bucket of citations at the end, but most people skipped right over them. Somehow, we still managed to do discovery.

Are HN/reddit in danger of ceasing to fulfil their discovery functions? Maybe, and maybe we need a better discovery solution. But I don't think peppering our actual content with pointers away from it is the solution.

I've recently moved my blog to the simplest theme I could find. A typical entry has no links, not even to the homepage - I figure by now people have probably learned how to use the back button. Each entry is a simple piece of text that should live or die on its own, just like a newspaper column.

> Maybe, and maybe we need a better discovery solution. But I don't think peppering our actual content with pointers away from it is the solution.

How can a discovery solution not provide pointers to the thing you're discovering?

The discovery solution needs to have the pointers. But the actual content doesn't. I'm advocating keeping discovery on dedicated discovery sites (which would of course be full of links), rather than mixing it in amongst the content.

More value in inbound links than outbound links?

The environment sets the context of the content. But your content may appear different when viewed from a different aspect (under a different context.)

A piece of content barely stands on it's own, that's the charm of the web. It's an endless task trying to atomise it.

A piece of content has to stand on its own (at least on a physical level; obviously works are embedded in their cultures), because reading is still a fundamentally linear activity (and watching a video more so). Displaying a composite piece of content derived from multiple sources is a rainbow people have been chasing since before the web (see xanadu), but it still looks as far away as ever.

I don't know why I said barely - should have said 'doesn't solely stand on it's own.' But of course ideally it would be nice if it had meaning all by itself.

I think the real solution lies somewhere between not doing anything and just mindlessly peppering related articles at the bottom.

Something along the lines of how iA suggests publishers start using twitter[1] - the idea being you should make references to other works as part of your content, rather than an after thought.

I've recently started doing this with my own posts where I will link phrases to other posts (my own or others') that explain the concept in greater detail.

Traditional print does that by way of literary reference. Read any piece of fiction or good journalism and it will likely be peppered with plenty of references to other works. They just won't be something you can click because technology.

[1]http://informationarchitects.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/

If you have a product you need a link to that product from your blog.

Link to homepage is a nice convenience to people who land on your site somewhere other than the homepage (e.g. via a search result).

Someone [1] out there is also shaking down the smaller web sites by scaring them. We (blekko.com) get requests from website owners or their representative saying they've been told their ratings in Google are harmed by all the links to their site so please remove any links we have to their site (and then they give a URL which is a search for their site on our search engine). I assure them that Google does not use our results to adjust their ranking algorithms.

But the meta comment is that more folks than ever are putting content on the web with no idea about how the web works or is worked. That's kind of sad, not entirely unexpected, but sad.

[1] I always ask who told them this but so far no answers to that question.

Unfortunately, post-Google's Penguin update, there is very strong evidence that some types of links can indeed harm people's ranks in Google.

That's such a fundemental change to the way that SEO works that it's had people running scared for a while now.

That is a very serious claim. Do you have any data/evidence to support this, or is it all strongly worded opinion? If that were actually true, it would be grounds for regulatory action under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Many companies other than Google depend on the interconnectedness of the web, as represented by, among other things, inter-site linkages.

Data Directly from from Google -

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-s...

If you go the black hat way or even get links the black hat way, that could get you into trouble.

Its scary because sometimes this is all that is needed by your competitor for some one to kick you out of the search engine. Specially when you are just starting up and you have very few white hat links (genuine links) and some one just blasts you with the black hat links.

Matt Cutts confirms that some links can harm your site here - http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-reco...

Here's an example of a site which recovered from a Penguin penalty by removing external links - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-pe...?

And here's some more general data analysis - http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-is...

The problem with the utopian vision of the linked web is that links to meaningful content elsewhere on the web die.

In November of 1994, I created a personal web page. I linked the one image (the logo of the university where I intended to go to go to grad school). By March, the link was broken. The school had redone its website.

The world wide web broke the social contract implicit in Gopher. Geocities is no longer online.

This is what HTTP redirects are for:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

That isn't very useful if you are not sysop of the site the old content links to.

Of course. The responsibility for maintaining a link lies with the linked to site. My point is there are mechanisms that allow the links on the web to change without breaking it.

This reminds me of the words of Tim Berners-Lee: Cool URIs don't change!

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

And at the same time info hoarding for the sake of it is pretty awful too. How do you wade through the vast amount of dirge that is out there in the sea of bits? How do you avoid feedback loops that occur from search engine lookups? How can I actually find a bit of useful information these days? I'm sure it used to be faster than it is now... At least we used to have website circles, that would filter some of the wheat from the chaff.

The problems with hyperlinks are not a bad way to explain dynamic linking, static linking, and app bundles to a non or beginning programmer. Particularly when you throw in the example of a linked website replacing the image you're linking to with another image.

[edit] style sheets are the easiest since they can be internal to page, linked to same site, linked to external site.

Linkrot is a real problem, but it's nowhere near as harmful as PageRank was.

Once links have commercial value, people don't want to give them away for free. Serious publishers quit making links to outside sites and soon other people got out of the linking habit.

I don't think page rank really plays as much of a role as the fact that it is easier to replace a webpage than to remodel it. See the "More" button at the bottom of this page.

This problem has been solved 7 years ago. In 2005, Google introduced nofollow:

  <a href="..." rel="nofollow">...</a>

I believe that nofollow was mainly introduced to fight against guest book spam, so links in comments wouldn't be accounted by the PageRank algorithm, thus removing the incentive for that nasty spam.

However, you can also use nofollow to link to your competitors without increasing their page rank.

that's indirection and psychological warefare on the part of Google.

in the big picture you give them data and they process it as they wish; "nofollow" is just a suggestion. for instance, they can compute metrics of it such as the ratio of follow/nofollow links pointing to a site and feed it into their scoring system

good links do get passed around in comments (this is the blog post you really should read about this) that shouldn't be nofollowed, while other webmasters are stingy and nofollow everything they link. so who knows what Google or bing does with this.

What is clear is that if you play it safe and give no link, Google won't give them any credit.

That was one of the major challenges Ted Nelson's 70s/80s Xanadu project though would need to be addressed in order to produce a deployable hypertext system. It seems like they were wrong on that front: the web won out by just deploying without addressing it.

Ah, good ol' WorseIsBetter.

The web has gone too commercial. People cares more about the Ad revenue than offering valuable content. Most sites don't freely share information withouth being filled with Ads/analytics, and most of the time that content is just a repost from elsewhere. From that perspective, linking things outside it's not a good thing to do, they're a way to "leak customers".

I think a lot of is down to user-generated content powering large swathes of the web (the part people still visit). People still link to stuff all the time, but they do it in the context of larger websites / webapps, such as social media or news aggregators.

Indeed the commercialisation of the web is tawdry. I'm surrounded by a sea of bullshitters too. The scientific aspect of the web - it's honesty and naivity have been lost.

I still think there is room for the semantic web, to put right these wrongs - not sure about how you actually achieve that though.

The irony in this post kills me. As 'parktheredcar' mentioned, there is no 'blogroll' (or 'link love', as he calls it) on the site, and the first thing that happened to me when I went to the site was an annoying subscribe pop-up. That alone is the exact answer to why this problem exists. As others have mentioned, people are far too greedy and want all the traffic to themselves. You are never going to get back to a linking web when, at the end of the day, you are just losing "customers".

There's actually a bunch of link love in the post. I made sure to link stuff that seemed relevant.

As for the popup, stern words will be said to whomever turned that on. I didn't know it even existed.

Interesting. I actually still see lots of posts that have lots of links throughout the article. Especially when an article is referencing other code, projects, plugins, articles, etc. I assumed you meant more about the death of 'blogrolls' that has occurred over the past few years because that IS what has died out, in my opinion (and for reasons I stated above).

"No, Tumblr doesn’t count. When was the last time somebody re-tumbled anything more substantial than a picture with two lines of text? And where have all the blog-spanning debates gone anyway?"

It's clear that the author of this post doesn't grok Tumblr. With Tumblr, good content discover is hard and that is the main issue with using it. However, there is TONS of high quality content in long format on Tumblr from a variety of users.

Finding quality content on blogs has always been a crap shoot. Starting your own blog and keeping it high quality is hard and nobody's blog is high quality all of the time. Linking with traditional blogs is and was NOT a good way to disseminate information, as most people have poor information literacy and do not have an easy time of finding relevant material via linking. That is why sharing links and posts via social networks is so popular, as it provided a way to generate and follow content with an easier (not necessarily easy) to understand usage model.

I am (in part) attempting to address this discovery issue with http://hubski.com. It is a de-centralized aggregator in that submissions are public, but there are no shared pages. You get the content posted by people you follow, but also the content that they decide to share with you (not unlike a retweet). Instead of votes, posts propagate via shares.

There are also tags, which may be followed as well that are usually topical. That helps 'outside my feed' discovery. Also, you can select a certain amount of external posts to filter into your feed for some serendipity. Finally, you can ignore specific users and tags to control for what type of external posts filter in.

We aren't huge, but we've got a pretty eclectic range of content.

Using this model, bloggers and content creators can post their own links. If people aren't interested, they simply won't see them. -There are no community pages to be polluted. IMHO shared feeds are key to the decline of these types of communities.

Are links dead?

I actually find myself using links... as they were intended, to link to whatever content I'm blogging about as a service to the reader.

I wonder if the rise of the knowledge graph will save links, where every single noun can be automatically linked to by the AI interpreting it for you.

If every second word on site was a link, nobody would bother to click them. People would just be frustrated by all that blue words.

Hmm, maybe that's argument for making different categories of links. Like blue links for things you suggest to read, light blue for things that are relevant, but not that important for most readers, and gray for links to definition of a word, source of the data, such things, that most people would ignore.

As a user, you don't link. You re-tweet. Hoping people will follow you. Because if you have many followers, you have value (being monetizable, or just ego).

As a company, it's the Same thing. except instead of tweets (some also use tweets, obviously) they've an actual website (which has links to mostly itself, and in rare cases, wikipedia)

It's not just bloggers. It's the whole web thing. It was based on sharing and linking. I find that it was very, very cool. Now, it's addresses to webapps.That, and social sites.

So yeah, I like the article, because even it's not 100% accurate it's still very insightful.

That's an interesting perspective to maintain without any data to back it up. I click on links from blog to blog all the time. I read blogosphere-level conversations all the time. I also think it's worth bearing in mind that the leading crawlers know the context of a given set of links, and a bunch of links with minimal context all in the same div (e.g. "class='blogroll'") aren't even going to provide the kind of "link juice" a contextualized link in a large body of text would gain. So that's why a "links" section on a given post or as a page on a site provides minimal value to the recipients of those links.

If you want to complain about something, complain about the decline of contextualized discussion in the blogosphere. Oh wait 00 you can't, because that's not actually a problem.

There is no 'blogroll' on this very blog. All I got was a popup asking me to subscribe to something.

This exact thing made me crack up in embarrassment for them. The irony that this post alone has, is ridiculous.

I once complained to a blogger that he did not use a single link in his article about a new site. His response was that if I wouldn't manage to find the site via Google, I'm too dumb to be using it anyway. So much for links.

I still have lots of external links on my personal website, and I still put up external links almost any time I comment on Hacker News. I write FAQ documents on a few dozen subjects that are set up with links that work by copy-and-paste into emails or on most forums that aren't programmed to actively suppress active links. (Thus those FAQ documents work fine here on Hacker News.)

Links do sometimes break, and the most recent time I submitted a link here on Hacker News that had been changed by the site owner (grrr), another Hacker News user quickly discovered the changed link, and let me know about it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467428

Of course, now I have fixed that in my offline FAQ document. My all-time favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment, the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has been alive and well for years with the same URL since I first discovered it. You could safely include it on your website without much fear that it would ever go dead before your own site did.

I link out to other quality websites because linking out to other quality websites is a reliable way to share more information with more of my friends than typing it all out myself. I can't count on everyone actually following and reading the links I put in comments here (which means that some people replying to me here have missed more of my point and the evidence for my point, especially on controversial issues, than is good for informed discussion on HN), but links still help curious readers learn more, and informed readers make for better interaction with your site and almost any site.

There are means to prevent link rot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

and it's worthwhile to use them. It's more worthwhile to provide external links that to your best knowledge and belief still work than to avoid external links entirely.

EDIT AFTER FIRST KIND REPLY RECEIVED HERE:

Peter Norvig is definitely good about linking to other pages on his own site from each page he puts there, at least by putting a home page link unobtrusively at the bottom, as in the link I submitted, but he does link out to other good stuff by other authors (as he especially does in the link I first put in this comment, my favorite online article of his). As an example of the Peter Norvig article with the most INBOUND links from other sites, his most-read page, I should also post here the link to his "The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation,"

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

which is laugh-out-loud funny for anyone who has ever had to sit through a PowerPoint presentation by someone who uses too many of the default settings on PowerPoint.

I would say that Norvig is an edge case both because he is in academia in general and computer science in particular. On the one hand, his website reflects research which has largely been dead-tree published, and on the other, he understands the importance of controlling the database where his information is stored as well as maintaining the integrity of that database.

Incidentally, most of Norvig's personal page is linked to content on Norvig.com, not to other sites.

[Edit] As a qualitative measure of how far Norvig.com is from the mean, imagine the comments it would draw as an "Show HN: Feedback" thread.

Trigger warning: This blog has a popup that appears after several seconds, hiding the content.

"Right now hacker news and reddit are top notch. But they too will die eventually." Scary thought but aren't these two built on top of what's dyeing. Which are links, "as in nobody links to other websites anymore". You are right no one links to interesting content in their blog posts anymore which is quite sad. But so long as HN and reddit users keep posting links that they find interesting the future is all good.

So lots of people gather on HN because it is so good and soon enough someone realizes that posting links on HN is a good way to gather page hits. It's downhill from there. People begin to post not only about others startups they find interesting, but about their own ones too for fun and profit. Intentionally or unintentionally astro turfing. Then genuinely intersting links also gets accused of being link bait or of promoting some business.

Not before long you'll find shady ads on various forums selling links on HN: "tons of karma, 2yr acnt, $20$/ppost" Not a single site built on user submitted content have been able to withstand that plague.

Google has a hand in this, too. PageRank and derivative algorithms stop making sense when the primary driver of traffic and therefore links is the algorithms themselves. Small differences get wildly exaggerated because whatever shows up first gets all the links, so there if you're a purely cynical actor the best route seems to be to try to write something as it's trendy and pray for a linkstorm miracle.

Exactly, one might think that Google is trying to monopolize links by punishing sites with outgoing links.

One well-known climate blogger, Prof. Judith Curry of Climate Etc., NEVER allows trackbacks. Reprehensible. This is the worst case of a self-involved academic who thinks nothing of exploiting the time, energy and hard work of others to enhance her reputation. (I refuse to link to her information sink of a site here.)

Flagged for the really obnoxious "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up (that apparently is more important than the content on the page, since it hides the content as you get a few sentences in), and, as others pointed out, for committing the same crime it's ranting about.

This really smells like spam, and either way, isn't HN quality.

I would unflag it if I was in your place, because it's been fixed[1], and I don't know what triggers losing flag rights.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4479147

Hey man, I spent 8 hours working on that post. It's most definitely not spam!

I'm not sure what blogging niches of the web this author is referring to, but the economic/political blogs that I frequent share links all the time, and they all have blogrolls, too (Ex. [1][2][3]). I even picked up links from a bunch of them on my amateur econ/pol blog a few months ago when I pointed out a mistake in a graph a bunch of them were sharing. So linking is not completely dead from where I sit. It's not even dying. YMMV.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/ [2] http://econlog.econlib.org/ [3] http://www.volokh.com/

The "no-linking" phenomenon is definitely happening, but it's niche-related.

In the world of Internet Marketing, very few people ever link any more. I actually killed a business idea earlier this year because in its first month, the scale of the problem became apparent. No-one links.

In the world of games blogging, by contrast, people link all the time. I run a fairly successful website whose sole function is to provide manually curated links - and people link back to it all the time. Discussions fly around the gaming blogosphere and the blogroll is very much alive.

I'm not sure what the status of the link is in the tech community. Anyone?

Smaller websites and even bloggers caught on, those that remained, stopped linking to cool things. Screw you cool young startup! Not only am I providing free advertising for you, you’re harming my search results! However will the five hundred readers I have find me?

Ugh, how condescending. Guess what: most startups aren't doing anything very "cool" and my 500 readers, though small in number to you, are really important to me.

Linkrot is a serious issue. Just looking back at the top stories from Hacker News in the past for my http://waybackletter.com project is depressing at times. I need to compute some real stats one of these days, but I would say about 20% of links are dead. That is just the popular articles (by votes), I imagine if you go down the long tail it just gets higher.

Revisiting my comment from a couple of weeks ago, "mass media, which includes Google, however they may try to deny it, lives by the numbers, which means adapting to the lowest common denominator. Just think, as the Internet spreads, Google will evolve (devolve) closer and closer to broadcast TV!"

Just substitute "the Web" for "Google"; the Web is becoming television!!

Totally agree. But unlike traditional media, on the Web you can be a broadcaster too without any permission.

The problem is the "mass" part. While I agree that not needed approvals is a good thing, from the point of view of "massification", mass broadcasting just makes it go faster. You have the lowest-common-denominator on both ends of the communication channel. It strengthens the old joke about calling the TV an "idiot box": It has an idiot on both sides.

The reason the internet won't actually get as bad as TV is the lack of approvals, and relatively low cost even for good quality production. The problem is that it gets harder to find amongst all the bleep. Search engines help, but I have found some useful sites, by following links, that apparently aren't indexed by Google or DuckDuckGo.

If you browse around jwz's site, you really get a sense of what a hypertext site can be. I like it a lot. :-)

I've had an idea for an 'autolink' took for a while - it'll go through your HTML-base and generate links to other pages based on a statistical likelihood that your word is related to the other page(s).

Yes tumblr does too count, n-levels deep screen spanning reblogs are common in the parts I frequent. Perhaps you need to hang out in the less cat-picture focused parts of tumblr, it's a very "small world" type system.

Am I the only one who smirked while reading the title of the blog after clicking through, only to see a site-overlay popup?

'Subscribe to our newsletter' No thanks. closes site

It's a recognisable problem, but for me the blatant self-promotion at the end left me feeling that I'd just been duped into viewing an advert.

Automation strikes again, or any system that relies on buttons being pushed will eventually have those buttons automatically pushed.

i call this bs. theres never been more links on "personal" sites & blogs than now. it's an information desert because a huge amount of the links are dead or simply garbage.

github, google+. No seriously.

Has anyone told this guy about reddit?

>>Right now HackerNews and Reddit are top notch. But they too will die eventually.

You haven't even read the article.

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