Charlie's Angles: Why rickrolling is bad for the link economy | Technology | guardian.c... - 0 views
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Once you start rickrolling people, and more importantly get a reputation for it, you're heading towards being the Zimbabwean dollar in the link economy: it doesn't matter how many you offer, people just aren't going to buy them.
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If your Facebook page's principal URL said "click here for more about me!" and then linked to a Rick Astley video, what would people think of you? That you liked a practical joke, perhaps. This could be useful for them to know. But they wouldn't have learnt anything about you, apart from that fact. As we become simultaneously more promiscuous in making our online personalities visible, and therefore more likely to come across people without any other context than their own representation of themselves, there's less and less time to make an impression.
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Without links, the web doesn't really work. You can't go anywhere. And if your fear is that the next link someone offers on will take you essentially nowhere — they get marked. On services where you can't see the full link — most URLs passed on Twitter are shortened via link-shortening services, to fit them into its 140-character limit — or where the link doesn't tell you much (as with any YouTube URL), it's all about trust. The pound or dollar in your pocket is a form of trust: you trust whoever you trade with to redeem a pound's worth of value from it. Same with links.