The Internet I Miss

There used to be a part of the internet that felt like wandering through a neighborhood. You’d find someone’s homepage — usually a little ugly, always personal — and at the bottom there’d be a list of links to their friends’ sites. You’d follow one. Then another. Hours later you’d surfaced in some corner of the web you never knew existed, having read about someone’s obsession with Victorian letter-writing practices or their ongoing attempt to catalog every variation of a regional folk song.

That’s mostly gone now.

What replaced it

Platforms happened. And platforms are efficient at one thing: keeping you inside them. The economics work out to a feed of content optimized for engagement, which turns out to mean content optimized for mild outrage, mild aspiration, or mild nostalgia. Nothing too unfamiliar. Nothing that sends you somewhere else.

The blogroll — a list of other sites you actually read, links that led outward — was structurally incompatible with platform logic. So it disappeared.

What’s still out there

The quiet web didn’t vanish, it just became harder to stumble into. It’s still there: people still maintain personal sites, still write at length about narrow obsessions, still link generously to other people’s work. You just have to go looking.

A few things I’ve found useful: following people who link to things rather than just saying things. Subscribing to email newsletters that feel like letters. Treating search engines as the last resort rather than the first step.

What I’m still working out

I’m still thinking about what it means to build something on the web that has the texture of that older internet — exploratory, outward-facing, a little indifferent to whether anyone shows up. This site is partly an attempt at that. I’m not sure I’ve gotten it right yet.