The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The slow death of the hyperlink (News)
Mon, 07 Oct 2024
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)?
Full Episode
what up nerds i'm jared and this is changelog news for the week of monday october 7th 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 into 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.
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.
This hyperlink degradation they're talking about by the big social networks is entirely real and entirely maddening. Here at ChangeLog, we are completely antithetical to all of that. Our entire purpose is to act as pointers to interesting stuff that other people are doing. On this point, I align with Nilay Patel, who says that The Verge is going to revolutionize the media through blog posts.
That might not sound revolutionary, but in today's internet economy, it certainly is. Evolving GitHub Issues it's nice to see GitHub isn't completely ignoring one of their most used subsystems. Quote, Today we are excited to unveil a major evolution of issues and projects featuring a range of highly requested enhancements, including sub-issues, issue types, and advanced search for issues.
Together, these additions make it easier than ever to break down work, Visualize progress, categorize, and find just the right issue in GitHub. End quote. Sub-issues and issue types in particular look very useful and quite well done. Kudos to the team. And nary a mention of AI, which is refreshing as well. Evan Yu announces Void Zero. Here's Vue.js creator Evan Yu.
Quote, I have founded Void Zero Inc., a company dedicated to building an open source, high performance, and unified development tool chain for the JavaScript ecosystem. We have raised $4.6 million in seed funding led by Excel. End quote. Evan wants us to imagine a tool chain that is unified, high performance, composable, and runtime agnostic.
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