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.