LinkGaslighting? - For several months now I’ve continued my project where every day I go back through my archives and clean up broken links in old posts. If something is broken and I can find it in the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/), I replace the link. Lately I’m noticing something new and insidious. Of course there’s a lot of linkrot, where stuff is just gone. (In my archives, Yahoo News and Make’s Craftzine are the two biggest offenders.) Then there’s stuff that’s gone, but the domain has been repurposed by someone else. Sometimes it’s obvious (porn and gambling ahoy!) and other times they create a plausible looking site filled with SEO glurge. And then there’s this third dark pattern I don’t even have a name for yet, where the same entity is still in control of the domain and the link goes to a plausible looking URL, but it’s NOT the page I linked to originally.

Here’s an example. In 2001 I wrote a post (https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/554) about Jenna Bush, saying I sympathised with her and that she was just acting like a college student. In it, I linked to a Salon.com article (http://www.salon.com/mwt/wire/2001/05/30/jenna_bush/index.html) about her. If you follow that link now, you are silently redirected to an article about her beliefs about safe sex (https://www.salon.com/2007/09/25/jenna_bush/). If you don’t look closely, you might miss the fact that the safe sex article is from 2007. If you go to the Wayback Machine, you’ll see that the actual article I linked to was about her buying booze (https://web.archive.org/web/20010605091134/http://www.salon.com/mwt/wire/2001/05/30/jenna_bush/index.html). I’ve now found several other Salon.com links to that redirect to posts about the same general topic of the post, but aren’t the actual one I linked to.

Another example. In 2013 I linked to (https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/11354) a Serious Eats recipe for “tobacco cookies” (http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/05/tobacco-cookies-recipe.html). If you click that link now, you’re redirected to a recipe for Chocolate Dipped Tuile “Cigarettes” (https://www.seriouseats.com/chocolate-dipped-tuile-cigarettes-cookies-recipe). That one gave me pause. Is that what I originally linked to? If that’s what the recipe is called, why did I call it something else? Here’s the Wayback Machine to the rescue again, confirming that there really used to be a recipe for tobacco cookies (http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/05/tobacco-cookies-recipe.html). WTF.

I’m not clear on why or how this is happening. Maybe some sort of custom 404 logic that picks out a keyword and sends you to a likely recent link? It’s infuriating though that they don’t give you any warning that it might not be the page you’re looking for. It makes finding broken links that much harder, because they’re actively trying to gaslight me. Links are a contract and a promise. Silently redirecting https://www.web-goddess.org/archive/77747