World wide wasteland

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".

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

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.

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".

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.