—H.L. Mencken
New research shows how many important links on the web get lost to time
The Verge [unpaywalled]: “A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team.
They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the NYT’s catalog going back to 1996, illustrating the problem of link rot and how difficult it is for context to survive on the web. The study looked at over 550,000 articles, which contained over 2.2 million links to external websites.
It found that 72 percent of those links were “deep,” or pointing to a specific page rather than a general website. Predictably, it found that, as time went on, links were more likely to be dead: 6 percent of links in 2018 articles were inaccessible, while a whopping 72 percent of links from 1998 were dead.
For a recent, widespread example of link rot in practice, just look at what happened when Twitter banned Donald Trump: all of the articles that were embedded in his tweets were littered with gray boxes. The team chose TheNew York Times in part because the paper is known for its archiving practices, but it’s not suggesting the Times is all that unusual in its link rot problems. Rather, it’s using the paper of record as an example of a phenomenon that happens all across the internet.
As time goes by, the websites that once provided valuable insight, important context, or proof of contentious claims through links will be bought and sold, or simply just stop existing, leaving the link to lead to an empty page — or worse…”
Study – Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”
Ars Technica: “Despite the risks, firms and Trump are eager to get people back into offices. Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 “high-tech and financial” firms at the S&P 500 index has found.
These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded. The paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain[PDF], comes from researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
The study, which was published in November, spotted this month by human resources (HR) publication HR Dive, and cites Ars Technica reporting, was conducted by collecting information on RTO announcements and sourcing data from LinkedIn. The researchers said they only examined companies with data available for at least two quarters before and after they issued RTO mandates. The researchers explained:
To collect employee turnover data, we follow prior literature … and obtain the employment history information of over 3 million employees of the 54 RTO firms from Revelio Labs, a leading data provider that extracts information from employee LinkedIn profiles. We manually identify employees who left a firm during each period, then calculate the firm’s turnover rate by dividing the number of departing employees by the total employee headcount at the beginning of the period. We also obtain information about employees’ gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees’ skill level…”
