This was definitely an intentional choice, since one of the most common experiences we’ve encountered during the original sequences was that people seemed overwhelmed by the links, and that they couldn’t really parse the text at all because of all the links.
It might be that I erred too much on the side of subtle underlines. When I tried giving them full underlines it did break the flow of the reading experience quite a bit, but I might try it again with either an off-black underline, or with some additional subtle highlighting of the text itself when it is part of a link.
Interesting. Was this a visual thing, where so many visible links caused some sort of overload in their brains? Was it that they felt the need to click on all the links if they hadn’t already read them? Or was it something else?
This seems like an important thing to get right in deciding how to link things, not only in deciding how to display them. Displaying them ‘quietly’ solves some problems but could even make others worse, and as we write we need to decide how much to link. If I’m over-linking, even after cutting drastically down on joke-linking at Raymond’s suggestion, then I need to adjust. I feel like other people might be reading posts on the internet quite differently than I do, and as this is not frequently discussed, wide variance is likely (as per Ozy’s point recently).
Another thing to think about is whether green-linking would change this calculus when we get it. I found arbital green-links not distracting at all and very helpful, but if others pay a higher cost for normal links, it is possible they also pay a higher cost for green links than I would expect.
This was definitely an intentional choice, since one of the most common experiences we’ve encountered during the original sequences was that people seemed overwhelmed by the links, and that they couldn’t really parse the text at all because of all the links.
It might be that I erred too much on the side of subtle underlines. When I tried giving them full underlines it did break the flow of the reading experience quite a bit, but I might try it again with either an off-black underline, or with some additional subtle highlighting of the text itself when it is part of a link.
Interesting. Was this a visual thing, where so many visible links caused some sort of overload in their brains? Was it that they felt the need to click on all the links if they hadn’t already read them? Or was it something else?
This seems like an important thing to get right in deciding how to link things, not only in deciding how to display them. Displaying them ‘quietly’ solves some problems but could even make others worse, and as we write we need to decide how much to link. If I’m over-linking, even after cutting drastically down on joke-linking at Raymond’s suggestion, then I need to adjust. I feel like other people might be reading posts on the internet quite differently than I do, and as this is not frequently discussed, wide variance is likely (as per Ozy’s point recently).
Another thing to think about is whether green-linking would change this calculus when we get it. I found arbital green-links not distracting at all and very helpful, but if others pay a higher cost for normal links, it is possible they also pay a higher cost for green links than I would expect.