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 and judgment. Humans exercise good taste and judgment. This is the source of the value you miss from enthusiastically, freely given recommendations: "Hey, look here! This is really cool!"

A human did it.

A recommendation machine like Zemanta's is attempting to do the same thing that link farms, bent SEO, etc. want to do. Zemanta's come-on is a bit more appealing, perhaps. But its goal is the same. Listen to the message in the video.

The fact that love does not scale is liberating. I do not need a million followers. Or 50. All I need is to sit and talk to my friend Roger over a cup of coffee. Or help my 8th grader gently towards understanding the mis-magic of PHP. Or say "I'm sorry" to my wife when I screw up.

Or throw a great link on my website when it makes me happy.

TL;DR

Love doesn't scale. That's why it is so valuable.

Only humans love. Machines cannot.

Be human-sized. And give love.

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.

We're complaining about the disappearance of blog-rolls? Seriously?

I think this article fundamentally misunderstands what the purpose of blog rolls was, and what has filled those niches since.

Blog rolls used to basically fill two purposes, either 1) an exercise in co-branding (which folks still do: https://svbtle.com/ ), or 2) as a list of things that folks find interesting.

1) is kind of a boring subject, and people have sensibly realized that there's a lot more that goes into consistent branding than just providing some links.

2) Is the space where a lot of special built tools have popped up, whether it's pinboard or delicious, or twitter and tumblrs for link blogging. I would argue that this is a vastly preferable circumstance to having a blog roll.

So, OP writes that "link love" is important. Sure it is. But one of the problems with link love, especially blog roll style, is that maintaining a list of links can be a pain in the ass, especially when blogs start winking out of existence.

The lack of a blog roll doesn't mean that linking has gone the way of the dodo. We've just reorganized the net and the way linking takes place. "Wasteland" is a bit much frankly.

Oh. this is to pimp a product. Nevermind. probably best just to ignore this entire conversation :P

In the days of print we managed just fine without pointers to other works. If you were very lucky you got a bucket of citations at the end, but most people skipped right over them. Somehow, we still managed to do discovery.

Are HN/reddit in danger of ceasing to fulfil their discovery functions? 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.

I've recently moved my blog to the simplest theme I could find. A typical entry has no links, not even to the homepage - I figure by now people have probably learned how to use the back button. Each entry is a simple piece of text that should live or die on its own, just like a newspaper column.

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.

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 online.

It's clear that the author of this post doesn't grok Tumblr. With Tumblr, good content discover is hard and that is the main issue with using it. However, there is TONS of high quality content in long format on Tumblr from a variety of users.

Finding quality content on blogs has always been a crap shoot. Starting your own blog and keeping it high quality is hard and nobody's blog is high quality all of the time. Linking with traditional blogs is and was NOT a good way to disseminate information, as most people have poor information literacy and do not have an easy time of finding relevant material via linking. That is why sharing links and posts via social networks is so popular, as it provided a way to generate and follow content with an easier (not necessarily easy) to understand usage model.

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.

I actually find myself using links... as they were intended, to link to whatever content I'm blogging about as a service to the reader.

I wonder if the rise of the knowledge graph will save links, where every single noun can be automatically linked to by the AI interpreting it for you.

As a company, it's the Same thing. except instead of tweets (some also use tweets, obviously) they've an actual website (which has links to mostly itself, and in rare cases, wikipedia)

It's not just bloggers. It's the whole web thing. It was based on sharing and linking. I find that it was very, very cool. Now, it's addresses to webapps.That, and social sites.

So yeah, I like the article, because even it's not 100% accurate it's still very insightful.

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.

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.

This really smells like spam, and either way, isn't HN quality.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/ [2] http://econlog.econlib.org/ [3] http://www.volokh.com/

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?

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.

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.

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

[edit] style sheets are the easiest since they can be internal to page, linked to same site, linked to external site.

Incidentally, most of Norvig's personal page is linked to content on Norvig.com, not to other sites.

[Edit] As a qualitative measure of how far Norvig.com is from the mean, imagine the comments it would draw as an "Show HN: Feedback" thread.