Die, Links, Die! How Link 'Suicide' Could Save the Web

"Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand the complex networks that humanity has created. More than anything else, biological networks teach us about technological networks: how to recognize a breakpoint where growth may stop, what to do when it does, and how to manage it to success..."

Our greatest technological network to date -- the World Wide Web -- is approaching a breakpoint, at which it will shrink. If managed correctly, this is a good thing. As with all networks, the web must collapse to find equilibrium.

It must become smarter, denser, more relevant. But how? We need look no further than the brain for a roadmap. Both on the web and in the brain, links are key. And not just the number of links, but also the depth and dimensionality of those links.

If we can mimic the structure of the brain on the web, we can make it more meaningful and, ultimately, more useful.

Links are vital to the survival of a network. Each neuron in the brain links to thousands of other neurons in a tightly connected fashion. The web is already sparse by contrast: Each website is connected to an average of 60 other websites. But even more important than size and density is relevance. In the brain, if certain neuronal links aren’t used regularly, the links disappear. The irrelevant neurons selflessly commit “cellular suicide.”

That’s not the case on the web, which is part of the reason it is cluttered with things we don’t need.

We need irrelevant websites to commit cellular suicide. It’s what makes us smart, and it’s what will make the web smart -- contrary to what others may nostalgically argue about “link rot.”

Simply Changing the Way We Link Could Save the Web From Reaching Its Breaking Point

The brain has two types of links: inbound (axons) and outbound (dendrites), and sometimes two neurons are connected by both an inbound and an outbound link -- two-way links.

The brain’s software networks have similar connections. Language, for instance, is stored in memory by linking relevant information with either one-way or two-way links. The idea that a Toyota is a car creates a one-way relationship in our minds because all Toyotas are cars but not all cars are Toyotas. The idea that a car is an auto creates a two-way relationship because cars and autos are synonymous. Information is retrieved in the brain by traversing these links in a manner in which one memory activates another until the right information is located.

Two-way links are obviously more meaningful than one-way links. Adding this layer of meaning to the web will require a change in its underlying structure, but it’s not technically difficult.

For example, links are currently royal blue, indicating a connection from one page to another. It wouldn’t be hard to show a two-way link in a different color, or perhaps a different font size. The power of this minor change in structure would be immense: it would immediately give users the ability to know just how strong a link is across two websites or just how close a relationship is between two pieces of information.

Think about it this way -- if Joe’s Plumbing site is linked to the *New York Times, *that link is probably far more relevant if the *New York Times also links to Joe’s Plumbing. In the latter case, it’s less likely that Joe’s Plumbing is trying to artificially strengthen its position by linking to the authority of the New York Times. *

In the social world, this is like following someone on Twitter. I can follow Natalie Portman if I want to, and that link has some value, but not nearly as much as if she (please?) followed me as well.

When it’s a two-way link, there’s more meaning. It’s an intimate connection, an actual relationship.

It turns out that neurons also have weight to their links. In other words, there are different values to thoughts and their relationship to other thoughts. This is reflected in the relative strengths of habits and memories.

There isn’t a similar link-weighting system currently on the web, but there’s no reason we can’t eventually build this facet into the web’s very fabric.

So what dimensions should we consider for link weighting? Relevance, usefulness, significance, and prominence are some of the characteristics that we should factor in. Besides whether a link is one-way or two-way, the relevance and importance of a link needs to be demarcated. It could be a color code, where blue might represent the best links on the page, green second best, yellow third, red fourth, and so on until a link is rendered irrelevant and automatically removed.

In the beginning, site owners may choose their most important links. But ultimately the web should be allowed to evolve through natural selection by making changes dynamically.

The web could integrate how many people click on a link, how much time is spent on that page, and whether users eventually return to the original site. It could consider a user’s demographics and history to make a personalized prediction of link relevance. For example, perhaps links to locations geographically close to a user should be weighted more heavily. Past history could also play a role: if a user has clicked on a link before, or if she has spent time on other sites that also connect to that website, those are important factors.

Taken together, all of this data could allow for dynamic link-weighting based on relevance and utility. (Note, this is different from Google's techniques for filtering websites within search results.)

All of these innovations would make the web more meaningful. But the ultimate feat would be to also make it smaller.

To do this, we could allow links to automatically fade and ultimately disappear if they aren’t used after a period of time.

This could be true of unused websites as well. Of course, much of this may be untenable, as websites are governed by companies, not nature. The greater good is not always a primary business concern. Still, we can at minimum quarantine or mark as offensive those websites that make up the clutter of the web … at least until they prove to do more good than harm.

Adapted and excerpted from Breakpoint by Jeff Stibel. Copyright 2013 by the author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90