An Age of Link Fatigue

We now have an abundance of blogs, news, podcasts, wikis—we have way too much really. Links constantly materialize before your very eyes. Who would even begin, in 2018, to click on Yahoo!'s “Social Science” header and plumb its depths?

Strangely enough, even Wikipedia has a full directory of itself, tucked in a corner. (Even better, there’s a human-edited one hidden in there! Edit: Whoa! And the vital articles page!) These massive directories are totally overwhelming and, thus, become more of an oddity for taking a stroll. (But even that—one usually begins a stroll through Wikipedia with a Google search, don’t they?)

The all-encompassing directory found another way: through link-sharing sites like Del.icio.us and Pinboard. If I visit Pinboard’s botany tag, I can see the latest links—plant of the week the “Night Blooming Cereus” and photos of Mount Ka’ala in Hawaii. Was that what I was looking for? Well at least I didn’t have to find my way through a giant hierarchy.

Where directories have truly found their places is in small topic-based communities. Creepypasta and fan site wikis have kept the directory alive. Although, hold up—much like Reddit’s sub-based wikis—these mostly store their own content. The Boushh page mostly links back to the wiki itself, not to the myriad of essay, fan arts and video cosplays that must exist for this squeaky bounty hunter.

Besides—what if a directory wasn’t topic-based? What if, like Yahoo!, the directory attempted to tackle the Whole Web, but from a specific viewpoint?

Craft Librarians on the Web

You see this in bookstores: staff recommendations. This is the store’s window into an infinite catalog of books. And it works. The system is: here are our favorites. Then, venturing further into the store: this is what we happen to have.

“But I want what I want,” you mutter to yourself as you disgustedly flip through a chapbook reeking of hipster.

Well, of course. You’re not familiar with this store. But when I visit Green Apple in San Francisco, I know the store. I trust the store. I want to look through its directory.

This has manifested itself in simple ways like the blogroll. Two good examples would be the Linkage page on Fogus.me, which gives short summaries, reminiscent of the brief index cards with frantic marker all over them. This is the staff recommendation style blogroll.

Another variation would be Colin Walker’s Directory, which collects all blogs that have sent a Webmention^[1]. This serves a type of “neighborhood” directory.^[2]

What I want to explore now is the possibility of expanding the blogroll into a new kind of directory.

Social Linking

Likes, upvotes, replies, friending. What if it’s all just linking? In fact, what if linking is actually more meaningful!

When I friend you and you disappear into the number twenty-three—my small collection of twenty-three friends—you are but a generic human, a friendly one, maybe with a tiny picture of you holding a fishing rod. With any luck, the little avatar is big enough that I can discern the fishing rod, because otherwise, you’re just a friendly human. And I’m not going to even attempt to assign a pronoun with a pic that small.

It’s time for me to repeat this phrase: Social Linking. Yes, I think it could be a movement! Just a small one between you and I.

It began with an ‘href hunt’: simply asking anyone out there for links and compiling an initial flat directory of these new friends. (Compare in your mind this kind of treatment of ‘friends’ to the raw name dumps we see on Facebook, et al.) How would you want to be linked to?

Now let’s turn to categories. A small directory doesn’t need a full-blown hierachy—the hierarchy shouldn’t dwarf the collection. But I want more than tags.

---
Link Title
url://something/something
*topic/subtopic format time-depth
Markdown-formatted *description* goes here.

Ok, consider the above categorization structure. I’m trying to be practical but multi-faceted.

• topic/subtopic is a two-level ad-hoc categorization similar to a tag. A blog may cover multiple categories, but I’m not sure if I’ll tackle that. I’m actually thinking this answers the question, “Why do I visit this site? What is it giving me?” So a category might be supernatural/ghosts if I go there to get my fix of ghosts; or, it could be writing/essays for a blog I visit to get a variety of longform. An asterisk would indicate that the blog is a current feature among this topic (and this designation will change periodically.)
• format could be: ‘blog’, ‘podcast’, ‘homepage’, a single ‘pdf’ or ‘image’, etc.
• time-depth indicates the length one can expect to spend at this link. It could be an image that only requires a single second. It could be a decade worth of blog entries that is practically limitless.

The other items: author, url and description—these are simply metadata that would be collected.

The directory would then allow discovery by any of these angles. You could go down by topic or you could view by ‘time depth’. I may even nest these structures so that you could find links that were of short time depth under supernatural/ghosts.

The key distinct between this directory and any other would be: this is not a collection of the “best” links on the Web—or anywhere near an exhaustive set of links. But simply my links that I have discovered and that I want to link to.

I don’t know why, but I think there is great promise here. Not in a return to the old ways. Just: if anyone is here on the Web, let’s discover them.

Did Google’s killing Reader kill the web? Or did Reader at least do some initial trial strangling?

We had been bitten too deeply by Myspace—its many glittery backgrounds and flame-filled Lightning McQueen backgrounds, golden cash symbol backgrounds and spinning Cool Ranch chip backgrounds. (Incidentally, some of this made a return with Subreddit style; 4chan and creepypastas never left the Old Web.)

Actual Home

I always wondered if the term “blog” was supposed make the term “home page” sound cooler. They both empitomize the idyllic Early Internet. Maybe the idea of “home” just IS corny—you only ever see it cross-stitched.

We moved on to a cosmopolitan empire, where we’re all living in the street. My house is full of your shit. And my uncles’ and aunts’ shit. And The Donald’s, of course, and the sad, desperate slideshows that Facebook makes for me in its spare time—it’s been basking in my shit again, trying to find some meaning in those three pictures I posted of a metal chair I spray-painted. It turns them over and fades them out again and again to try to stir some vital force. It all ends too quick—I’m trying here, but you’re not yet worth a slideshow, kid.

Gah, how I miss a good arm’s length. Between myself and all those people, bots and algorithms analyzing me for the little fractions of a second I might get. But what am I talking about? I have a blog and you’re standing on it right now! Or maybe you’re not. It gets lonely out here and I’m talking to myself again. The handful of devoted Baidubots, who quietly read the journals I leave on the stoop, look up but don’t even want to admit they’re there.

Reddit helped this situation so much. You could have a blog AND have a public place to leave a card!

The trouble is that Reddit has become the Big Blog. You are welcome to post your stuff there. But it’s usually in gray and white with a little blue—so that I lose a sense of who I’m reading exactly, who they are and where they call home. Reddit isn’t keen on a link to your blog without an acceptable amount of foreplay. You’re not yourself, you’re a Redditor—ten to twelve letters with a little bit of flair, maybe a cake, maybe a gold star. Could I be so lucky?

This might be reaching: I think an actual home—a blog or a home page—gave people time to represent themselves. In a stream of faces, you have to leap up from the river and shout HEY, throw a stick before the current pushes on. That picture has to have all of you in there.

Twitter has done well with this. You can find yourself reading someone’s history there. But Facebook, Instagram, Reddit—these all leave you crammed in the subway.

The Web—Old Web and The Now—it’s all a public place. Every page is an exhibition. Maybe Reddit has it right. By draining away the individual to a few letters, it becomes all about the message that they post. It hearkens back to mailing lists, when all you knew was a person’s From field. Though there were signatures, too, I suppose.

I think this has blossomed into a nice devotion to their community, because a Redditor’s works are tied up there. Do Redditors ever wish their stuff was home—where they could style it, save it, share it elsewhere?

$0.00 Got You Something

I was recently impressed by something in the FAQ for a service called Bridgy:

How much does it cost?

Nothing! We have great day jobs, and Bridgy is small, so thanks to App Engine, it doesn’t cost much to run. We don’t need donations, promise.

This too felt very Old Web. Part of the tension in the modern Web is that we expect free in a billions-dollar industry.

When one company is taking on everyone’s blogs and pictures and witty repasts, that takes a toll. But the cottage tilde blogs of yesteryear came with your Internet connection.

The Effort All Around

It was an age of building things. Mostly little communities that had to be sought out. You had your phpBBs out there and blogs for different topics that acted like subreddits, but weren’t definitive. You built your own brick in this.

It sounds like I’m asking for the suburbs back. We built the ideal metropolis—now move back to the suburbs? What for? The Arcade Fire once sang a song about how much that sucks!

I think it’s more like a grassroots community thing vs. a corporate complex we can all live in. You can see the advantage in a community like BoardGameGeek, which hasn’t found its equivalent in Facebook and Reddit and so on. It houses a community tailored to its topic—every board game has its rules questions and its variants, so forums are tailored to this. You can search through the tree of associations—who designed what game and what other games and expansions did they produce?

Yes, it’s gray and white with a LOT of blue. It’s graceless in a way. But it’s managed to stay alive and independent. And it coexists with Reddit. They link back and forth and have a grand old time. (BGG also encourages posting on a forum rather than on your blog.)

It feels like there’s still building to do. No BGG isn’t ideal—but what does it become? Communities can still build out their facilities. I wonder what happened with the maker community. Hackaday seems to link mostly to YouTube and Instructables. Top notch work is still posted there and all around us (and at /r/diy.) It just seems that the will to “make” your web has left this crowd.

I guess this brings us to the Indieweb where you can probably still call each other Netizens and bemoan the death of RSS. Even though it’s been around since 2013, I see a spark of hope in this ragtag group of HTMLists. (Why isn’t “ragtag” some kind of microformat for the homeless?)

Now, certainly the Old Web had its spam and trolls and barriers. Discovering each other from across the Web has always been difficult. At least millions of people can get on Twitter and attempt to flag down Robert Downey Jr. in realtime. I just wonder if the little builders of the Web out there can start to reconnect.

Tender Shoots

I see a few projects out there that are in the vein of what I mean.

Webmentions.
At first I thought these were very odd. Reading some one’s comment on your blog from their web page seemed… a mess. But, after tinkering for a bit, I’m sold! Yes, blogs are forced to conform if they want to participate—this is both a troublesome barrier to entry and perhaps a too forceful structuring of a blog. It works for me; for some others. If not for you, that’s fine.

The dat:// Project.
Dat transmits your blog from your actual home. We all want decentralized, right? I don’t think we need to be peer-to-peer to be decentralized. However, I’m impressed at the robustness of this network—and the quality of the Beaker Browser.

I do think this protocol directly addresses the point about the $0.00 blog.

Jekyll, Metalsmith, etc.
Static sites still seem pretty crucial. The hosting fees are low. You can handle high traffic in spurts. And you can publish anywhere without needing to set up a bunch of software. So much innovation could still happen here!

Why am I not excited by Mastodon? Or Secure Scuttlebutt? Or micro.blog?

These seem like great projects. My main issue with them is that everything posted is, once again, reduced to gray and white with a bit o’ blue. (In Mastodon’s case, invert those colors.) They address decentralization, but not the other bits.

Now, just let me know you’re out there. If I link to you and you link to me, that’s a pretty good start I’d say.