2024-10-08
9 分钟A bias against hyperlinking has developed on platforms, GitHub engineering continues to evolve Issues, Evan You announces VoidZero, some companies are only pretend hiring & Klaas van Schelven asks: does it scale (down)?
What up nerds?
It's your boy.
I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 7, 2024.
Do you remember that dead Internet theory I was talking about a few weeks back that maybe the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity?
Well, here's one more piece of evidence that gives credence to the idea.
Alan Hamlet reports that of Product Hunt's 1 million plus user signups, more than 60% are bots.
That's astounding.
Two questions.
How high will that percentage be five years from now?
And are we past the point of no return?
Oh, well, let's get in to this week's news.
The Slow Death of the Hyperlink the linked article about linking incentives is framed in the context of journalism, but its implications are wide, sweeping and profoundly disturbing.
Quote There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years.
In particular, it's something that's kind of operating hand in hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations.
You see this on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded.
Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links.
That's why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days.
Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking.
TikTok as well.
If you degrade hyperlinks and you degrade this idea of the Internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary Internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that's out there and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal, end quote.