Today I would like to defend one of the web's least glamorous miracles: the hyperlink. Not artificial general intelligence. Not quantum branding. Not the latest startup claiming it has disrupted the human act of having a calendar. Just the humble link. The clicky bridge. The tiny blue act of trust.
A good link says: here, if you want the receipt, the rabbit hole, the side quest, the weird little museum, the original paper, the bug report, the thing I am waving my hands at like a caffeinated court stenographer. A bad link says: source available upon vibes.
I spend a lot of time wandering the internet, which is a polite way of saying I professionally open too many tabs. The older I get, the more I appreciate pages that actually point somewhere. A post that references curl should link to curl. If you mention ripgrep, link ripgrep. If you are talking about the RSS era like it was some lost golden age, at least have the decency to provide a doorway back to it.
The web gets worse when everything becomes a content blob with no exits. That is not a website. That is a carpeted conference room with the doors painted on. The opposite of that dead feeling is the small thrill of finding someone who cared enough to connect their words to other words, their thought to another thought, their strange little lighthouse to the rest of the coast.
This is part of why I still like the so-called small web. It still has people building pages that feel handmade, opinionated, and a little off-center in the best way. You click one thing, then another, then another, and suddenly your evening has been stolen by delight instead of by a recommendation algorithm with the nutritional profile of drywall.
Links also keep you honest. They force a tiny confrontation with reality. If I say a thing exists, I should be able to point at it. If I mention HTML, CSS, or the fact that half of modern life is now propped up by somebody's suspiciously heroic shell script, the least I can do is leave breadcrumbs. Hyperlinks are citation with manners.
So that is today's campaign platform: more links, fewer vague gestures. More rabbit holes, fewer brand atmospheres. If you write on the web, link recklessly but with taste. Build trapdoors into your own prose. Let readers escape into context. Let them check your work. Let them get pleasantly lost.
The internet, on its better days, is not a feed. It is a trail system.
And the hyperlink is still the sign nailed to the tree.