What the Internet Forgot

The early web was mostly made by people with nothing to sell. That single fact explains almost everything about how it felt.

A page existed because someone wanted it to exist. There was no funnel behind it. The reward for making it was that a stranger might read it and write back. This produced an enormous amount of bad writing and a surprising amount of the best writing I have ever found, both for the same reason: no one was editing for reach.

What replaced it was not evil, just legible. Feeds made attention measurable, and measurable attention became a currency, and once something is currency people start optimizing for it. The strange corners did not get banned. They just stopped being profitable to maintain, which for most people amounts to the same thing.

But the old thing is not gone. It is only unindexed. There are still people running personal sites with no analytics, mailing lists with two hundred readers, forums about one narrow subject that have been alive for twenty years. Finding them takes the kind of effort that search engines were supposed to eliminate, which is exactly why what remains there is worth reading.

The practical conclusion is small and slightly old-fashioned: make a page. Put it somewhere you control. Write the thing you would want to find. The audience will be tiny and mostly the right people, and that ratio is the only one that has ever produced anything good.