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
World wide wasteland
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: World wide wasteland
#22Flagged 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.
Re: World wide wasteland
#23The 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 li…
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.
Re: World wide wasteland
#24APOLOGY 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.
Re: World wide wasteland
#25Revisiting 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!!
Re: World wide wasteland
#26The 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 li…
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).
Re: World wide wasteland
#27I 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.
Re: World wide wasteland
#28The 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 o…
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.
Re: World wide wasteland
#29The 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 o…
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.
Re: World wide wasteland
#30You 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 ve…
> 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.