In Praise of Links

[osteophage]

Hyperlinks deserve more recognition in light of all the ways their value has been sidelined and denied. From deliberate corporate link suppression to link-shy site cultures on social media to the dysfunctional state of deteriorating search engines, the web has changed a lot over the years since the days of early link-based web logs, and a familiarity with the importance of links can no longer be taken for granted. It needs to be expressly advocated.

To that end, I present a link compilation in praise of links. It includes things I agree with entirely and things I don't, spanning from the 2020s to the early 2000s, to supply a tapestry of perspectives, context, and examples on the value and importance of links. Links may have their downsides, challenges, and vulnerabilities, but my hope is that this compilation will (re)invigorate your appreciation for linking as a technology and a social practice, all the better to understand what's at stake when links are discarded and devalued.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.

 

Every Site Needs a Links Page / Why Linking Matters (2022) by Melon

A strongly-worded manifesto on the significance of linking as a prosocial act.

There's a simple test you can do to tell if a website is a positive citizen of the web, or a negative one. Go to the website and look for their links; do they have any? Does the website link to other websites made by other people? Or do they just link to their own social media? How many outbound links do they have?

In short; is the website a dead end?

The Subversive Hyperlink (2024), The Humble Link (2024), & The Power of the Link (2021) by Jim Nielsen

 A handful of short posts about how major corporations have positioned themselves at odds with links. For example, certain social media companies have been known to suppress posts with links in them, whether in general or specifically targeting their competitors.

 

A Linkless Internet (2024) by Collin Jennings

An extensive media history, a warning, and a meditation on the nature of consciousness itself, kicked off by concerns about chatbot summaries replacing the practice of curating and clicking on links.

Links reveal a creative process that tends to stay hidden in the writer's mind – the process of connecting ideas and constructing something bigger: arguments, stories and even poems. Bush and Nelson posited that links exhibit natural patterns of thought – the ways the mind leaps from one idea to another – but also patterns of how we read and write. We read a passage, and it sparks connections with five other things we've previously encountered. […]

When we navigate the web via links, we are in a sense travelling through the series of connections made by someone else, not unlike reading something they wrote.

 

Long Live Hypertext! (2024) by Tracy Durnell

A call to embrace linking in response to large language models and automated decontextualization.

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

 

"Link in Bio" Is the Worst Thing About Instagram (2016) by Alyssa Bereznak

 No longer the worst thing about Instagram, but definitely worth noting as part of how links have been unduly constrained.

The "link in bio" loophole is semi-functional, at best. Instagram's photo feed is no longer chronological. So when a news post says "story link in bio," that very well could not even be true anymore! It could be a different link, or no there could be no link at all. [...]

The real reason the "link in bio" phenomenon has persisted is because Instagram is clingy. The company knows exactly the kind of endless scrolling its app encourages, and doesn't want to interrupt its captive audience with pesky distractions that encourage people to venture outside its ecosystem. It doesn't trust that we will come back.

 

The Web is Fantastic (2023) by Robb Knight

The real web is built on links. Hyper ones, in fact. Links you can share on your website. Links you can send to your mates. Links to pages that can be indexed by search engines so you can find things again (in theory).

 

The New Yahoo (2024) & (2023) by Lori

 A call to action in response to the declining utility of search engines, inviting us to save and share what we can through manual curation.

As I've posted a million times, search is irreparably broken. Finding solid information about a topic is harder and harder. I think the only way we can fix this is to go back to relying on human curation. [...]

So my proposal was, and still is, simple. Do you have a personal website? Or just anywhere you can share some links? Make a page full of links to resources for things you care about. Even better, include dead links if they can be accessed via Wayback, because a search engine sure as hell won't give you those, and information is information. Then link to other people's lists of links.

 Not a complete replacement for what search engines once were, naturally, but let it be remembered, link lists are how we searched before search.

 

About AntiSearch by David Buchanan

Another call to respond to problems with search engines by sharing manually curated links. While the framing here may be idealistic, I agree that it's worth cultivating and publishing lists of links. You can find one of mine at my Useful Links page.

 

Save Your Links; Archive Everything (2025) by Mike Sass

A short post calling for us to save URLs, share links, and even directly download any material we want to save.

If you find something on the web you like, bookmark or otherwise save that link straight away, preferably with some sort of commentary/tags/context so you can search for it when the time comes for you to access it again. Seeing how search engines are rapidly becoming useless, it's no longer a given that you can re-find things after you've lost them. [...]

Better yet, given the rampant global censorship wave and general digital book/site burning that's goin' on these days, you'd probably be best-off to archive an offline copy of whatever you find that you want for later.

Note that most simple text-based webpages are easy to download and re-open directly from your browser. Once you save the file, that file can then be opened again even if you lose internet access or the site itself goes down.

 

Bukmark Club by Tom

A directory of indie sites with links pages, which allow you to browse the internet from site to site without needing the middleman of a search engine. A person's choice of what to include in a links page can be seen as a form of self-expression, too. What topics do they choose to focus on? What are their priorities? Try browsing the directory for some examples, and see what you can glean about a person from their links.

 

Following Links (2024) by Jim Nielsen

A reflection on the exploratory delight of following links as a means of surfing the web.

Discovering things via links is way more fun than most algorithmically-driven discovery — in my humble opinion.

As an analogy, it’s kind of like going on vacation to a new place and staying/living amongst the locals vs. staying at a manicured 5-star hotel that gives you no reason to leave. Can you really say you visited the location if you never left the hotel?

 

Click Around, Find Out (2024) by John Hoare

A call to participate in indie web practices by cultivating the habit of exploratory clicking.

You don't necessarily have to write, or create, or even curate.

Click around. Or tap around. Or do whatever you need to do in the browser of your choice. If we want the indie web to flourish, the very first thing people need to get used to is actually browsing the web again.

 

Hypertext, the Memex, and Collaboration as Socialization (2024) by Reilly Spitzfaden

A reflection and an invitation to consider doing more with links.

While both the Fediverse and IndieWeb tend to value hyperlinks much more than e.g., Twitter or Facebook (which want to keep users on the platform), links still rarely form shareable associative webs, and are more likely to be used as a means of saying "hey, this is cool." What would it look like to incorporate at least some of this associative and nonlinear nature (and maybe even the collaborative knowledge-building, and the sharing of knowledge webs) into interactions with people on the Internet?

 

WikiGalaxy: Explore Wikipedia in 3D (2014) by Owen Cornec

A data visualizer for the links between Wikipedia articles, tailor made to entice you into going down a rabbit hole. While getting lost in the process of following one citation to another may be nothing new, the wiki format is uniquely suited to enabling these experiences — all thanks to the groundbreaking technology that is the link.

 

Weblogs: A History And Perspective (2000) by Rebecca Blood

An early-era retrospective with a preferential focus on link-focused "filter-style" blogs over more personal "journal-style" blogs, which are presented as more of a subsequent development.

The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. [...] Weblog editors sometimes contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with an article on a related subject; each article, considered in the light of the other, may take on additional meaning, or even draw the reader to conclusions contrary to the implicit aim of each.

 

On Permalinks and Paradigms (2003) by Tom Coates

A short reflection on the invention of the "permalink," or permanent link to a specific blogpost.

It added history to weblogs as well – before you'd link to a site's front page if you wanted to reference something they were talking about – that link would become worthless within days, but that didn't matter because your own content was equally disposable. The creation of the permalink built-in memory – links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later.

 

Missing Links (2002) by John C. Dvorak

A piece of criticism against bad linking practices.

The opposite extreme of overlinking is not underlinking: It's no linking whatsoever. This was practiced by almost all the newspapers in the world and is still employed as a technique to keep people on a site. It's almost laughable. Even if the article is a rebuttal to someone else's commentary, there's no link to the source or to the original commentary, as though the Web material were on the printed page and linking were impossible. Not understanding that the Web is a different medium than ink and paper shows a lack of understanding of the nature of media and is somewhat insulting to the reader.

 

Where Are The Citations? (2011) & Tumblr is Terrible (2012) by Siggy

A pair of objections against witholding links, which apparently became common practice on Tumblr. Strange to think that these two posts are already over a decade old.

[On Tumblr] there is a culture of no citations. Last year I talked about how it is good to cite your opponents. Because for all we know you're making up opponents, or mischaracterizing your opponents. Also, some of us may want to respond to your opponents as well? But on tumblr, I've been shocked at all the blatant omitting of citations.

 

Hammer, Nail: How Blogging Software Reshaped the Online Community (2004) by Rebecca Blood

A summary of early blogging history, including the history of trackback links.

Back then, weblogs were about links. When Jorn Barger, editor of one of the original weblogs, Robot Wisdom coined the term 'weblog' in 1997, he defined it as "a webpage where a weblogger 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting." […]

Trackback, introduced by Movable Type in 2001, automated crossblog talk itself. Trackback allows a blogger to ping another weblog, placing a reciprocal link - a "trackback" - in the entry he has just referenced. Previously, bloggers scoured referrer logs to discover references to their sites. Trackback has made these formerly invisible connections visible, inviting instant response.

 

Plebmention by mordecai

An explanation of the submission boxes that invite you to send in where you've linked the site.

why do i want this? pure nosiness aside, i want to plug you. i think it strengthens our communities to mutually promote our ideas. one reason a lot of alterhumans are reluctant to write more high-effort pieces is because what if nobody reads them? but if you got inspired by something i said and decided to build on it, i want to reward that. i will read it, and i'll use whatever the hell kind of platform i have here to make sure other people read it too.

 

Signals (2022) by Robin Rendle

A personal reflection on the excitement of getting linked.

There's this punch-to-the-gut when someone links to my work or points back at a note somewhere in the ol' archives and it's nothing short of exhilarating. There's no higher honor, no kind of thanks giving better. [...]

When someone writes a blog post about my work, or sends me a kind email, or—on the rarest of occasions—when someone riffs on my work and remixes those ideas then, THEN, I feel as if my work matters. That it was all worthwhile. Even when someone is disagreeing with me, I get this warm, cuddly feeling that all of my work is connected into a bigger thing, an enormous hyperlinked tapestry that we’re (sorry in advance) weaving together.

 

A Personal Coda: 

Back when I first started blogging on Wordpress years and years ago, discovering the pingback feature was revelatory because it gave me an incentive to start using more links. Each link generated an outbound notification, and so links text became socially rewarding, raising the chance of striking up a conversation. Combined with the formative influence of bloggers like Queenie, that blogging environment helped me develop a more conscious appreciation for using links, both as a writer and as a reader.

Following hand-crafted links as a way of navigating the web offers so much potential for discovery. Clicking around, sniffing your way along a trail, investigating to see where it takes you — at its best, it can feel like a textual adventure. Even when other people's links don't lead me anywhere new, I like seeing what examples they use, who they choose to cite, and all the little traces that reveal their frame of reference, the better to understand what they pay attention to and where they're coming from.

For all these reasons and more, linking is in a league of its own. Through links we can move backwards, forwards, and sideways in time to explore and illuminate a discussion by directly accessing its context. No other medium of communication can operate like this. It's a kind of magic that anyone can learn, and there's nothing else like it in the world.

P.S. Looking for more links to browse? Try these:

• Hyperspacelink Travel: A Love Letter to Links, a post by Mike Sass
• The Internet Used To Be Fun, a link compilation by Rachel J. Kwon
• Surfing the (Human-Made) Internet, a post by Mike Grindle

 

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