6 ms·

>When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. [...] When someone follows a link and it breaks, they g

by jasode 5y ago

>When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. [...] When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. With 2+ decades to look back on after this was written, it turns out the author was wrong about this. Web surfers often get 404 errors or invalid deep links get automatically redirected to the main landing page -- and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. Broken links to old NYTimes articles or Microsoft blog posts don't shake the public's confidence in those well-known companies. Link rot caused by companies reorganizing their web content is just accepted as a fact of life. This was the 2013 deep link I had to USA Treasury rates: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/RI/OFNtebnd http://www.treasurydirect.gov/RI/OFNtebnd ... and the link is broken now in 2021. I don't think that broken link shakes the public's confidence in the US government. Instead, people just use Google/Bing to find it.

bartread 5y ago
> and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. No, but some of us do get incredibly pissed off with them. It's unendingly tiresome to find that some piece of content has disappeared from the web, or been moved without a redirect. Often archive.org can help but there's plenty of stuff that's just ... gone. I don't necessarily run into this problem every day, but anything up to two or three times a week depending on what I'm looking for.
- gwoplock 5y ago
  I swear this happens every time I visit a form. Either the 1 image I need has been purged or every post links to some other dead form. I've had pretty bad luck with archive.org for these things.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I see this just as how ads are perceived to be annoying. People can complain all the time but this annoyance, or in this case distrust, just doesn't seem to affect anything.
  - parafactual 5y ago
    Gwern found that placing banner ads on his site significantly decreased traffic: https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads
    - gwern 5y ago
      It's a good comparison. An effect can be real, and people just not notice it, ever. Let's round off the ad effect to 10% loss of users. How do you notice that? You can simulate out traffic, and decrease the mean 10% at some random point and draw time-series: it's actually quite hard to see, particularly with any kind of momentum or autocorrelation trends. And that's with website traffic where you can quantify it. How do you measure the impact on something more intangible? If people can not notice that effect of ads, they can certainly not notice subtler effects like the long-term harm of casually breaking links... Is <10% worth caring about? It's certainly not the difference between life and death for almost everyone; no successful business or website is going to shut down because they had ads, or because they broke old URLs. On the other hand, <10% is hardly trivial, people work hard for things that gain a lot less than that, and really, is defining redirects that hard?
      - parafactual 5y ago
        This principle seems like it extends far beyond site traffic, especially since something like life satisfaction is much harder to measure.
        gwern 5y ago
        Yes, it's a kind of slippery slope: as typically set up, changes are biased towards degrading quality. If you run a normal significance test and your null is leaving it unchanged, then you will only ever ratchet downwards in quality: you either leave it unchanged, or you have a possibly erroneous choice which trades off quality for degradation, and your errors will accumulate over many tests in a sorites. I discuss this in the footnote about Schlitz - to stop this, you need a built-in bias towards quality, to neutralize the bias of your procedures, or to explicitly consider the long-term costs of mistakes and to also test quality improvements as well. (Then you will be the same on average, only taking tradeoffs as they genuinely pay for themselves, and potentially increasing quality rather than degrading it.)
nfriedly 5y ago
I disagree. In your example, it doesn't cause me to loose faith in the US treasury itself, but I am less confident that they can reliability and correctly run a website.
sacado2 5y ago
Yes, because the examples you give already have a solid reputation. You can get away with it when you are "the government .gov", but if you are "small start-up.com" and I want to invest in your risky stocks and all I get is an "Oops page" when I want to know a little more about your dividend policy, I'm gone.
- organsnyder 5y ago
  For me it depends on where the link originated. If it's a 404 within your own site, that shows sloppiness that will make me question your ability to run a business. However, if I get a 404 on a link from an external site, I'll assume things have been reorganized and try to find the new location myself (while wondering why it was moved). Changing URIs without setting up forwarding is so common I wouldn't give it much thought.
tialaramex 5y ago
> people do not lose confidence in the site owner I don't agree. I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft solutions because that's going to make my life easier. Any link to Microsoft documentation that doesn't both go via aka.ms and have a significant user community to ensure the aka.ms link stays correct will decay until it's useless. So by the time you read this https://aka.ms/trustcertpartners https://aka.ms/trustcertpartners may point at a page which is now styled as a wiki or a blog post or a video, but it will get you the list of CAs trusted by Microsoft's products. However links from that page (e.g. to previous lists) are internal Microsoft links and so, unsurprisingly, they've completely decayed and are already worthless. For the US Treasury, just like Congress or the Air Force, I don't have some alternative choice, so it doesn't really matter whether I think they're good or bad at this. But Microsoft is, to some extent at least, actually in a competitive business and I can just direct people elsewhere.
- Spare_account 5y ago
  >I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft Do the other providers that you recommend in place of Microsoft have a better record of not changing/removing URIs on their website?
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Yes. You might be underestimating just how bad Microsoft are at this. I was originally going to say that although the links on the Microsoft page currently work they can't be expected to stay working. They had worked when I last needed them after all. But that was at least a year ago and so I followed one, and sure enough meanwhile Microsoft had once again re-organised everything and broke them all ... Even the link to their current list as XML (on Microsoft's site) from this page is broken, it gives you some XML, as promised, but I happen to know the correct answer and it's not in that XML. Fortunately the page has off-site links to the CCADB and the CCADB can't be torched by somebody in a completely different department who wants to show their boss that they are an innovator so the data in there is correct. Microsoft provides customer facing updates for this work by the way. The current page about that assures you that updates happen once per month except December, and tell you about January and February's changes. Were there changes in March, April, or May? Actually I know there were, because Rob Stradling (not a Microsoft employee) mirrors crucial changes to a GitHub repository. Are they documented somewhere new that I couldn't find? Maybe.
aqsalose 5y ago
It is more like, I lose confidence in whatever claims (if any) the links were meant to support and confidence that the linked-to site can be linked to as a source.
robertlagrant 5y ago
The people who have to navigate the MS documentation are not generally the same people who choose to use MS as a supplier. If you're that big and rich you will have totally separate engagements with different layers of a business. For most suppliers that's not the case, and documentation is a competitive advantage.
c22 5y ago
Consumers will accept a lot of abuse before their faith is completely shaken, especially with large companies. There's still nothing cool about it.
seniorThrowaway 5y ago
I've seen some crazy stuff driven by the fear of broken links. One place I worked had all the traffic for their main landing page hitting a redirect on a subsystem because the subsystem had a url that was higher in google etc. I worked on the subsystem and rather then fix things in DNS and the search engines they preferred to expect us to keep our webservers up at all times to serve the redirect. We were on physical hardware in those days and while we had redundancy it was all in one location, made for some fun times.
npteljes 5y ago
I agree. It matters a lot more if the content is (re)discoverable.
nitwit005 5y ago
I suspect it depends on what the existing reputation is. I recall a discussion here on Hacker News where someone asked why people weren't using Google+ for software blog posts anymore, and the response was that they'd broken all the links. I'm sure that wouldn't have been an issue if it was super popular and respected, but it was already fading away at that point.
la_fayette 5y ago
Yes I agree to the point, that I wouldn't lose confidence in the company. However, it is extremly annoying and it happend to me just recently with Microsoft, when I researched PWAs... I had bookmarked a link to their description on how PWAs are integrated into Microsoft Store. I could only find it on archive.org...
_greim_ 5y ago
I don't know. If I consistently see 404s, I eventually associate that domain with "broken" and start avoiding it. Especially in search scenarios where there's lots of links to choose from.
bee_rider 5y ago
Well, the claim is that people "generally lose confidence," which I'd interpret as a decrease in confidence, not a total destruction of confidence. Microsoft and the US treasury have some dead links, sure, but they run big sites. Most the vast majority of links that you'd encounter through normal browsing lead to reasonable places.
kbenson 5y ago
> Web surfers often get 404 errors or invalid deep links get automatically redirected to the main landing page -- and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. I do, to a degree. When I follow some old link to a site and realize they've changed their structure and provided no capability to find the original article if it's still available but at a new URI, I lose confidence. Not in them overall, but in their ability to run a site that's easy to find what you want and that's usefulness over time isn't constantly undermined. I lose confidence in their ability to do that, which affects how I view their site. > ... and the link is broken now in 2021. I don't think that broken link shakes the public's confidence in the US government. Maybe not the Govt itself, but in their ability to provide information through a website usefully and in a way that's easy to understand and retains its value? I'm not sure most people had the confidence to begin with required for them to lose it.

by jasode 5y ago

bartread 5y ago

> and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. No, but some of us do get incredibly pissed off with them. It's unendingly tiresome to find that some piece of content has disappeared from the web, or been moved without a redirect. Often archive.org can help but there's plenty of stuff that's just ... gone. I don't necessarily run into this problem every day, but anything up to two or three times a week depending on what I'm looking for.

gwoplock 5y ago
I swear this happens every time I visit a form. Either the 1 image I need has been purged or every post links to some other dead form. I've had pretty bad luck with archive.org for these things.
npteljes 5y ago
I see this just as how ads are perceived to be annoying. People can complain all the time but this annoyance, or in this case distrust, just doesn't seem to affect anything.
- parafactual 5y ago
  Gwern found that placing banner ads on his site significantly decreased traffic: https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads
  - gwern 5y ago
    It's a good comparison. An effect can be real, and people just not notice it, ever. Let's round off the ad effect to 10% loss of users. How do you notice that? You can simulate out traffic, and decrease the mean 10% at some random point and draw time-series: it's actually quite hard to see, particularly with any kind of momentum or autocorrelation trends. And that's with website traffic where you can quantify it. How do you measure the impact on something more intangible? If people can not notice that effect of ads, they can certainly not notice subtler effects like the long-term harm of casually breaking links... Is <10% worth caring about? It's certainly not the difference between life and death for almost everyone; no successful business or website is going to shut down because they had ads, or because they broke old URLs. On the other hand, <10% is hardly trivial, people work hard for things that gain a lot less than that, and really, is defining redirects that hard?
    - parafactual 5y ago
      This principle seems like it extends far beyond site traffic, especially since something like life satisfaction is much harder to measure.
      - gwern 5y ago
        Yes, it's a kind of slippery slope: as typically set up, changes are biased towards degrading quality. If you run a normal significance test and your null is leaving it unchanged, then you will only ever ratchet downwards in quality: you either leave it unchanged, or you have a possibly erroneous choice which trades off quality for degradation, and your errors will accumulate over many tests in a sorites. I discuss this in the footnote about Schlitz - to stop this, you need a built-in bias towards quality, to neutralize the bias of your procedures, or to explicitly consider the long-term costs of mistakes and to also test quality improvements as well. (Then you will be the same on average, only taking tradeoffs as they genuinely pay for themselves, and potentially increasing quality rather than degrading it.)

nfriedly 5y ago

I disagree. In your example, it doesn't cause me to loose faith in the US treasury itself, but I am less confident that they can reliability and correctly run a website.

sacado2 5y ago

Yes, because the examples you give already have a solid reputation. You can get away with it when you are "the government .gov", but if you are "small start-up.com" and I want to invest in your risky stocks and all I get is an "Oops page" when I want to know a little more about your dividend policy, I'm gone.

organsnyder 5y ago
For me it depends on where the link originated. If it's a 404 within your own site, that shows sloppiness that will make me question your ability to run a business. However, if I get a 404 on a link from an external site, I'll assume things have been reorganized and try to find the new location myself (while wondering why it was moved). Changing URIs without setting up forwarding is so common I wouldn't give it much thought.

tialaramex 5y ago

> people do not lose confidence in the site owner I don't agree. I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft solutions because that's going to make my life easier. Any link to Microsoft documentation that doesn't both go via aka.ms and have a significant user community to ensure the aka.ms link stays correct will decay until it's useless. So by the time you read this https://aka.ms/trustcertpartners https://aka.ms/trustcertpartners may point at a page which is now styled as a wiki or a blog post or a video, but it will get you the list of CAs trusted by Microsoft's products. However links from that page (e.g. to previous lists) are internal Microsoft links and so, unsurprisingly, they've completely decayed and are already worthless. For the US Treasury, just like Congress or the Air Force, I don't have some alternative choice, so it doesn't really matter whether I think they're good or bad at this. But Microsoft is, to some extent at least, actually in a competitive business and I can just direct people elsewhere.

Spare_account 5y ago
>I know Microsoft will move or even outright delete important content because chasing shiny new ideas will get somebody promoted. And so I direct people away from Microsoft Do the other providers that you recommend in place of Microsoft have a better record of not changing/removing URIs on their website?
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Yes. You might be underestimating just how bad Microsoft are at this. I was originally going to say that although the links on the Microsoft page currently work they can't be expected to stay working. They had worked when I last needed them after all. But that was at least a year ago and so I followed one, and sure enough meanwhile Microsoft had once again re-organised everything and broke them all ... Even the link to their current list as XML (on Microsoft's site) from this page is broken, it gives you some XML, as promised, but I happen to know the correct answer and it's not in that XML. Fortunately the page has off-site links to the CCADB and the CCADB can't be torched by somebody in a completely different department who wants to show their boss that they are an innovator so the data in there is correct. Microsoft provides customer facing updates for this work by the way. The current page about that assures you that updates happen once per month except December, and tell you about January and February's changes. Were there changes in March, April, or May? Actually I know there were, because Rob Stradling (not a Microsoft employee) mirrors crucial changes to a GitHub repository. Are they documented somewhere new that I couldn't find? Maybe.

aqsalose 5y ago

It is more like, I lose confidence in whatever claims (if any) the links were meant to support and confidence that the linked-to site can be linked to as a source.

robertlagrant 5y ago

The people who have to navigate the MS documentation are not generally the same people who choose to use MS as a supplier. If you're that big and rich you will have totally separate engagements with different layers of a business. For most suppliers that's not the case, and documentation is a competitive advantage.

c22 5y ago

Consumers will accept a lot of abuse before their faith is completely shaken, especially with large companies. There's still nothing cool about it.

seniorThrowaway 5y ago

I've seen some crazy stuff driven by the fear of broken links. One place I worked had all the traffic for their main landing page hitting a redirect on a subsystem because the subsystem had a url that was higher in google etc. I worked on the subsystem and rather then fix things in DNS and the search engines they preferred to expect us to keep our webservers up at all times to serve the redirect. We were on physical hardware in those days and while we had redundancy it was all in one location, made for some fun times.

npteljes 5y ago

I agree. It matters a lot more if the content is (re)discoverable.

nitwit005 5y ago

I suspect it depends on what the existing reputation is. I recall a discussion here on Hacker News where someone asked why people weren't using Google+ for software blog posts anymore, and the response was that they'd broken all the links. I'm sure that wouldn't have been an issue if it was super popular and respected, but it was already fading away at that point.

la_fayette 5y ago

Yes I agree to the point, that I wouldn't lose confidence in the company. However, it is extremly annoying and it happend to me just recently with Microsoft, when I researched PWAs... I had bookmarked a link to their description on how PWAs are integrated into Microsoft Store. I could only find it on archive.org...

_greim_ 5y ago

I don't know. If I consistently see 404s, I eventually associate that domain with "broken" and start avoiding it. Especially in search scenarios where there's lots of links to choose from.

bee_rider 5y ago

Well, the claim is that people "generally lose confidence," which I'd interpret as a decrease in confidence, not a total destruction of confidence. Microsoft and the US treasury have some dead links, sure, but they run big sites. Most the vast majority of links that you'd encounter through normal browsing lead to reasonable places.

kbenson 5y ago

> Web surfers often get 404 errors or invalid deep links get automatically redirected to the main landing page -- and people do not lose confidence in the site owner. I do, to a degree. When I follow some old link to a site and realize they've changed their structure and provided no capability to find the original article if it's still available but at a new URI, I lose confidence. Not in them overall, but in their ability to run a site that's easy to find what you want and that's usefulness over time isn't constantly undermined. I lose confidence in their ability to do that, which affects how I view their site. > ... and the link is broken now in 2021. I don't think that broken link shakes the public's confidence in the US government. Maybe not the Govt itself, but in their ability to provide information through a website usefully and in a way that's easy to understand and retains its value? I'm not sure most people had the confidence to begin with required for them to lose it.