World wide wasteland

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.

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

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/

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.