World wide wasteland • Hacker News Board

Re: World wide wasteland

#61

Post by progrock » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 3:52 PM UTC

darkstalker wrote: post #11

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".

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#62

Post by ryanwaggoner » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#63

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#64

Post by lmm » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 4:06 PM UTC

progrock wrote: post #60

lmm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#65

Post by CWIZO » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 4:28 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #47

Has anyone told this guy about reddit?

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

You haven't even read the article.

Re: World wide wasteland

#66

Post by progrock » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 4:49 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #64

progrock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#67

Post by languagehacker » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 4:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#68

Post by thenomad » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:43 PM UTC

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?

Re: World wide wasteland

#69

Post by thenomad » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:45 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #63

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…

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.

Re: World wide wasteland

#70

Post by rsingel » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:08 PM UTC

philiphodgen wrote: post #54

@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…

I think it's good to not confuse what we typically think of as links with recommendations, which I think both the OP and the commenter do. Zemanta's widget isn't about permalinks, it's about recommendations. The former are a human art form, the latter can be human or mechanical or some combination.

That said, the decline of the permalink bothers me deeply and I'm working to fix it.