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Comment by tyrabound | Hacker News Reader

Is there evidence that is the actual reasoning, because I find it ridiculous. People who don’t care about the primary source are not going to follow a link to, e.g., a court ruling, government report, fed minutes, a leaked document, a research paper, etc; but those who are interested are going to immediately leave the site and likely not come back for a long while.

Am I missing something?

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You're looking for evidence that providing external links might lead to users visiting those external links? I'm not sure what you're doubting here, it's a pretty typical "web user behavior", if you've ran a website before. Any exit points you provide leads to more users leaving at those points.

The KPIs these websites use to measure "how good an article is" is (among other things) how long time people "spend" on the article. Remove all external links, and it'll at least look like people engage for longer with the content. Does it make sense? No, but won't stop the people who run the business to believe so.

> The KPIs these websites use to measure "how good an article is" is (among other things) how long time people "spend" on the article

The Times earns most of its revenue from subscriptions. And knowing a few folks on their tech team, I can tell you dwell is far from their North Star.

And how many people could actually understand that paper? Anyone who could would find it easily enough.

That's not a reason for omitting the link to the original source. If anything, it would help illustrate the value of science journalism/reporting.

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