Just prior to learning about Less Wrong, I read an article that discussed internet usage, hyperlinks, and reading comprehension. The focus of the article was on numerous studies showing that people's reading comprehension goes down when they are searching the web, or viewing multimedia presentations. People reading an article with straight text and no distractions were able to answer more questions about it than people viewing a page that contained the same information, but which included video and hyperlinks. Even if you don't click on the hyperlinks, every time you see one you have to consciously make the decision whether to click, which is distracting.
I will link the article at the end of my post. If you want you can go read it now.
In my personal experience, I find it not only distracting but frustrating. Each link is a tantalizing window into interesting-sounding-new-information, and I know that if I don't click on it immediately I probably won't bother to go back to it later, but that if DO click on it immediately I'm probably going to lose track of what I'm currently reading. It can be fun to link-crawl through Wikipedia, starting out with an article about prepositions, and somehow ending on an article about animal sexuality. But what's fun is not the same thing as useful for education.
Enter Less Wrong. My initial reaction was "This is Wikipedia on Crack." Not only do a lot of articles here feature a bajillion hyperlinks, but each link often goes to another lengthy article full of fascinating information that I don't know, some of which is necessary to understand the first article, but none of which is easily summarized. With Wikipedia, if I run across a new word with a hyperlink it's at least possible for me to glance at the hyperlink, get a quick sense of what it's about, then return to my original reading. On Less Wrong that is often impossible. My first foray into this website felt like drowning in amazing ideas. It was a lot of fun, I definitely learned some things, but it was very confusing and hard to focus. Eventually I realized what the Sequences were and started reading them, but even they have a fair amount of interconnectedness that makes it hard to focus. (A related issue is that oftentimes I WAS already familiar with the introductory stuff, so I skipped ahead to the later articles, and then THOSE would link to various articles that I wasn't familiar with).
I've been meaning to post about this for a while. I was particularly motivated to after the Scientific Self Help article, which was a) really interesting and important to me, and b) filled with an absurd number of hyperlinks, with varying degrees of usefulness. The problem is that even among the useful ones, I don't have time to read *all* of them and still be able to really read the original article. I think the web in general and Less Wrong in particular would benefit from a new standard technique to provide relevant information that takes advantage of the web's interconnectivity, without being as distracting. Part of that can be accomplished by including better summaries of information instead of linking entire articles. Part of it might require fundamental changes in site coding, which is more work than I am capable of doing. (And yes I'm aware of the "hey guys there this awesome idea oh by the way I don't have time to do it" issue, but I think there's legitimate work that non-programmers can contribute and I plan to if other people are interested).
Solutions?
I'm not sure what the ideal alternative is. Hyperlinks are used mainly for two reasons, both useful enough that simply saying "don't do it" isn't practical. One is to provide easy access to content the reader might not be familiar with but which is outside the purview of your article. The other is to craft a sort of joke, where the content isn't actually important, it's just funny that you pretended it was. Which isn't strictly *necessary*, and probably is overused and would easily be replaced with alternate ways to be funny or poignant, but I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand.
The main alternate approach to hyperlinks is footnotes, and those have the opposite problem: by the time I get to them, I often forget what the footnote was about. What was interesting to me about the Scientific Self Help article was that it contained a LOAD of links to amazon.com books in the middle of the article. Then at the end it had a References section which listed a lot of books but DIDN'T include links to acquire them. (There were *some* links there, but they seemed to go to actual webpages, not places where I could acquire books).
I can think of some possible browser apps/extensions that might alleviate the issue. (Maybe let you click on a hyperlink and store it, along with the surrounding context, in another window, so you can store the links you wanted to remember and then read them all after the initial piece). But forcing people to acquire a particular app isn't the best of solutions, especially when it's not clear to a visiting user that they are supposed to do so. It probably wouldn't actually solve the measurable reading comprehension problems either.
Edit: Yes, I know about tabbed browsing. But when you get ten+ hyperlinks per article, by the time you get to the end it's hard to remember the context for the pages I opened. With ten+ links it also becomes difficult to read the titles of the pages so finding the ones I'm looking for is a pain.
A fairly simple solution (for some cases) is to replace or supplement hyperlinks with mouseover text. I'm not sure if that'll actually improve the reading comprehension issues. (Probably not, so long as hyperlinks are the norm, so your brain will struggle every time it sees something that even *looks* like one). But Lesswrong could probably benefit from an established norm wherein top level posts come with a *brief* summary (no more than a paragraph) that can be easily referred to.
Facebook has a feature that goes a step further (and presumably requires some effort to program) wherein entering a link automatically grabs relevant information and attaches it to your post. This is something that works specifically in the context of Facebook though, where posts are short and you don't need to wait before reaching the end for the relevant information. I feel like there should be some way to accomplish something similar for longer posts.
That's all I have for now. I don't know if other people are as bothered by this as I am, but assuming there is interest in this issue I'll continue to think about it.
Relevant links:
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains (Wired Article)
Scientific Self Help (Example of over-hyperlinked Less Wrong article)
I'm a sequential thinker so I just don't click on hyperlinks as I read. I'm left with a nagging sense of incompletion afterwards, and if that nagging sense is strong enough I go back and check the links. Too many hyperlinks can be slightly irritating, because I have to make a mental note to go check a lot of things, as I'm reading, which feels like having to carry a very long to-do list in my head.
I think links probably make communication better on the whole. If you quote part of an article, mention an obscure concept, or cite a source, I'd rather have a link to the original than not. The ethic of linking freely prevents people from making as many unsupported claims or presenting other people's ideas as their own. In that sense, linking changes our thinking for the better. My very first internet forum had a catchphrase "No linky, no believey." I think that's a good thing.
My two pet peeves about links:
Don't use too many links to the Sequences. The "relevant" Sequences post is usually only a little relevant to the post that links to it, and linking to the Sequences becomes a complete digression.
Use "open in new tab" or "open in new window" instead of "go to." You want your readers to remember they want to finish reading your post. You raise your chances of keeping their attention if you keep open the page the post is on.