[lmm]

You know, I always hated the echo-chamber many blogs became, blogging endlessly about what other people had blogged and not giving any thought to producing original content. I mostly steered clear of twitter, because my impression is it's even worse there. And I don't think I've ever in my life followed a "related stories" link.

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.

[Swizec]

I think the real solution lies somewhere between not doing anything and just mindlessly peppering related articles at the bottom.

Something along the lines of how iA suggests publishers start using twitter[1] - the idea being you should make references to other works as part of your content, rather than an after thought.

I've recently started doing this with my own posts where I will link phrases to other posts (my own or others') that explain the concept in greater detail.

Traditional print does that by way of literary reference. Read any piece of fiction or good journalism and it will likely be peppered with plenty of references to other works. They just won't be something you can click because technology.

[1]http://informationarchitects.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/

[davedx]

> 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.

How can a discovery solution not provide pointers to the thing you're discovering?

[lmm]

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.

[progrock]

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.

[lmm]

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.

[progrock]

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.

[DanBC]

If you have a product you need a link to that product from your blog.

[jwhite]

Link to homepage is a nice convenience to people who land on your site somewhere other than the homepage (e.g. via a search result).