
World wide wasteland - igzebedze
http://www.zemanta.com/blog/world-wide-wasteland/
======
philiphodgen
@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.

~~~
olliesaunders
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.

~~~
andraz
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.

------
Swizec
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.

------
knowtheory
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

------
lmm
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.

~~~
davedx
> 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?

~~~
lmm
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.

~~~
progrock
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.

~~~
lmm
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.

~~~
progrock
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
thenomad
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.

~~~
guimarin
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.

~~~
thenomad
Matt Cutts confirms that some links can harm your site here -
[http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-
reco...](http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-
negative-seo-120463)

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...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-
update)?

And here's some more general data analysis -
[http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-
is...](http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-isnt-dead-
but-you-need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/)

------
brudgers
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.

~~~
PaulHoule
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.

~~~
vog
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.

~~~
PaulHoule
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.

------
darkstalker
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".

~~~
progrock
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.

------
bluetidepro
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".

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
bluetidepro
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).

------
king_jester
"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.

------
markkat
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.

------
coopdog
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.

~~~
ajuc
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.

------
zobzu
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.

------
languagehacker
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.

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

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

------
webjunkie
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.

------
tokenadult
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.

~~~
brudgers
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.

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

------
capdiz
"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.

~~~
bjourne
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.

------
patmcguire
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.

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

------
ChristianMarks
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.)

------
thaumaturgy
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.

~~~
alter8
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>

------
joshuahedlund
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/>

------
thenomad
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?

------
ryanwaggoner
_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_.

------
duck
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.

------
billswift
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!!

~~~
julius707
Totally agree. But unlike traditional media, on the Web you can be a
broadcaster too without any permission.

~~~
billswift
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.

------
pnathan
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).

------
JulianMorrison
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.

------
danielhunt
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_

------
motters
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.

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

------
n0mad01
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.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
github, google+. No seriously.

------
debacle
Has anyone told this guy about reddit?

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

You haven't even read the article.

