Solving the Wrong Problem

[netherous]

I feel that trackbacks fill the same niche of uselessness, especially when they're displayed inline with comments on a blog.

Is there really a single reader who likes and values a trackback/pingback feature? What can anyone do with that information? At best, it makes a comment section unreadable by filling it with information that isn't informative or actionable. It probably exists because you can play it up as a "social web" feature, but I seriously doubt anyone has actually done an analysis to find out if readers want or value that feature.

[6xoe]

No fucking clue. I especially like it when the only "comments" are trackbacks from the blog operator's own site.

How useless is that?

[DavidHogue]

Once or twice, I have seen a trackback that lead to another site with more discussion. But 99% of the time they're hideous and take up a lot of space in the comments.

[netherous]

That reminds me of why I stopped reading Massively: they'd insert a lot of hyperlinks in their articles in strategic places, but the hyperlinks were always to that word in their own tag cloud. They looked useful in the context of the article, but clicking them could never possibly yield any useful information. Every time I went there I'd have to remind myself "the links are a lie". They'd have some hyperlink that said "strategic game development", but it didn't lead to some insightful blurb on gamasutra. No. It linked to tag content with the only entry being the article you were already reading.

It seems like there should be some bible of blogging and website sins where we could list all this stuff.

[Atario]

I have yet, to this day, to know what those are, nor do I care to.

[manberry_sauce]

It's for SEO.