I use Ahrefs free site audit feature for this website and several others I manage. Today, the weekly email showed I was suddenly linking to a host of 4xx links, which is the HTTP code for dead links.

Why does this matter? Well, generally speaking, it’s a bad user experience to have links that go to now non-existent websites. Bad for the human experience, and you are downgraded by Google and other search engines. So how does it happen?

The short answer is it’s not my fault.

The longer answer is that the internet is a much more dynamic place than people realize. Every website is created and hosted somewhere and costs money to run, or is managed by people who change URLs and don’t add in redirect codes, and so on. That’s why if you wrote a piece even a year ago and linked to other places, less than a year later, you can find dead links everywhere and be punished by the algorithms as a result.

I don’t need to go into specifics on the various posts here and links that are now 404d, but it’s quite a lot, and on a tired Friday morning when I have other tasks to do, it really makes me question linking out much in general.

At the same time, every big tech conglomerate actively fights to keep you within their walled garden. See Google searches where 80%+ lead to an ad or a Google property like YouTube, and increasingly Gemini something or other. LinkedIn that punishes outside links; Facebook for anyone who still uses them; and so on.

AI is only exacerbating these effects. It really can feel like a majority of articles, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and all the rest are AI-generated right now, and if you go on a site like Reddit, most of the comments there are too.

Any business or individual attempting to raise their profile must confront this. I’m happy to use an RSS Feed to follow the people I want to follow, but that’s a technology that big tech actively resists, and good luck finding a non-programmer who uses it.

So where do we end up? Is it a smaller and smaller group of people writing and interacting with each other, often on Mastodon for Python/Django people? That’s comforting in a way, but misses reaching the great masses of people (and bots) who might otherwise benefit from the discovery of information.

I’ve worked on the Django Chat podcast and Django News newsletter for over seven years at this point–both reach thousands of developers–but they could reach millions. We know that’s the actual reach of Django. Even at DjangoCon conferences, I run into people who haven’t heard of either. It increasingly feels like the discovery of organic and original resources is punished by all the algorithms. And now that ChatGPT and others are going full ad-based, it is going to result in a further degradation in quality results for people.

Where is the hope? When I look at my 13-year-old daughter and her friends, they are actively hostile to most tech and AI. They know everything is tracked, monetized, ad-driven, and they look at the political environment in the U.S. right now and see what personality and moral traits are rewarded. In their own ways, kids are rejecting much of what current adults have gone along with. There is hope there, however fleeting it may feel.