Comment by MyPasswordSucks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MyPasswordSucks | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

MyPasswordSucks

In the old days - back before smartphones, back before widescreen monitors, back before broadband - the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on. If one were to visualize the concept, they might well say that this formed a "web" of sorts.

The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died.

Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story.

This devastates the large publishers' traffic.

I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...

I think the conclusion is that changing your business model in a reactive way to internet developments is a bad idea if you want to have a stable business. If you want to run your business that way, you better be on top of everything and you better be lucky. They rode the social media wave and lost, and now they are going to try to ride the AI wave because they don't have anything to fall back on. They are going to lose.

Legacy media grew fat off of TV and local news. Captive attention markets did not teach them how to entice people's attention, they took it for granted. They are not equipped to compete with youtube and tiktok and reddit and they will lose. Trending news from the AP wire is not unique or in depth enough for anyone to want to read more than the AI summary of your article.

What should they do? What they are good at, and what they were always good at: journalism. Write in-depth articles that take time to research and talent to write. Hire real journalists, pay them to find stories that take time to write, and publish those stories. People will pay for it.

> People will pay for it.

I would love it if it were true, but sadly, the data doesn't support this. A lot of local newspapers did real journalism relevant to their communities. However, the local newspapers were the hardest hit by the social media wave and few remain today. Fast forward to now, you cannot get any real local news easily.

The avg person never really valued real journalism to begin with and the hyper targeting/polarization of social media and closed echo chambers has made it worse.

There generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.

I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.

This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/

People get sick of it. Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time. We would rather have a shared notion of truth and a common bond. You can't predict the next 'thing' but you can usually count on it not being more of the same. Something new is going to take hold, and I would like it to involve substance and critique of narratives.

> Most people don't like living in a constant state of anger, ready to get into an argument all the time

They may not like it, but that does not mean they are motivated to break away from it. I do not think they are aware why they feel like that - they are more likely to blame the other people than the platform.

There is also an addictive element to it.

I don't think it is social media though. It started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers.

> started to go downhill for newspapers when they put their news on the internet for free subsidized by their papers

To bolster this argument, the local papers that hard paywalled seem to have done just fine.

>People will pay for it.

I'm willing to pay, but not by individual subscriptions per news organization. I'm more interested in following journalists than news organizations.

Sounds like the Substack model?

Potentially, yes. However, the same problem I have with current subscription models also exists with Substack. I added up all the subscriptions necessary to bypass paywalls I encountered every month, and it came to roughly $3,000 a year. I'll have to do the same thing with Substack subscriptions. I expect they'll be like $50 a year for the basic subscription, so it would probably only be a few hundred to a thousand per year.

> ... the "Links" section was always a key part of any site. After spending time on a site, a visitor could find links to other pages - some of them on the same topic, some of them simply enjoyed by the creator of the site they were on.

Don't know how useful these are, but here are some links pages on a couple of websites I put together a while ago:

https://b79.net/fields/about

https://earthdirections.org/links/

Just personal non-commercial handcrafted sites. One day I'd like to figure out some tooling to manage / prune / update links, etc.

A recent article on HN was about small sites being destroyed in traffic, not large sites. And not just small, but small with essential human-written info.

The gemini web (smolweb) has no effective search engine, and therefore links also play a crutial role in content discovery...

They were called webrings.

Nah, Webrings were an extension of the link page ... but not the same thing.

The Link page was curated by the site operator and usually a linear list. IT's main goal was to say "Hey, this is cool, too".

A webring was more like a collective, whereas individual webring members did not necessarily know or agree with every other site in the ring. And it usually was not a list either, but more of a mini topical directory, often with a token-ring-style "Visit the next / random / prev site" navigation you could add to your own page. Webrings were already geared to increasing visitor numbers to your own page ("Others will link to me").

Oh, those were easier times.

What was the organisation of a webbing like? Did you have to email two people to arrange to insert yourself as a node at the same time to avoid breaking the ring? Or iframe'd in from a central point?

Webrings were usually a centralized and automated entity. You'd add your site to the index (either through a webform or by emailing the maintainer), then link to http:// web-ring.tld /cgi-bin/ring?site=currentsitename&action=next or something similar, which would then redirect to the actual next site in the ring.

In their heyday, there'd also be "start your own webring" sites, so you didn't need cgi-bin access on your GeoShitties or AngelFucker or TriPoop or xoom [1] site in order to start up a webring.

[1] The dry and square history books will claim that the most exciting thing about xoom was its large storage allocation (10mb at launch! 25 soon after! You could upload an entire three minute mp3 at 128CBR "CD-Quality" bitrate and still have tons of space left over for two-frame .gifs!) or its simple members.xoom. com/username URL, but the true soldiers of those bygone battledays will know it was xoom's resiliency to childish renaming-mockery.

Active webrings still exist surprisingly:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Webring

The publishers were just chasing traffic just like everyone else. Link pages were replaced by inline links which were preferred by both search engines and users. The goal was to provide relevant resources on relevant context rather in one big bucket dump no one's going to dig through anyway.

Well, the "links" part was an early SEO, mutual back scratching.

Early Google PageRank was notorious for how much additional trust a given page had based on many links back to it existed. It was why certain bloggers had massive ranks early on, because they would be in big webs of conversations with lots of high quality links out and back in.

Early SEO did weaponize that and broke it for everyone.

The ”not perfect” part really kind of ruins it for me. I can’t trust the LLM search’s answers and have to go find the source anyway, so what’s the point?

I’m seeing people in chats post stuff like “hey I didn’t know this word also means this!” when it really doesn’t, and invariably they have just asked an LLM and believed it.

You can't blindly trust sources, either. Or, sometimes, you ability to understand the sources correctly.

I think of LLMs as bookworm friends who know a little bit about everything and are a little too overconfident about the depth of their understanding. They tend to repeat what they have heard uncritically, just like so many other people do.

If you don't expect them to be the ultimate arbitrer of truth, they can be pretty useful.

Dictionary.com isn’t likely to just outright make up word meanings. There is such a thing as a trustworthy source, even if you can’t “blindly” trust it. You can still trust it and quote it and cite it. You can’t do any of those things so far with an LLM.

You're gloating about the hardship which editors, journalists, writers, our informational institutions are facing because... sites stopped having a Links page in 1998? What the fuck, man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com