ARCHIVED LINKEDIN RANT :: 2026-08-10 ==================================== The Web turned 35, and I think we need to admit something: We have absolutely abused the hell out of it. The Web was supposed to be a place where people built things. Not just "content." Not just feeds. Not just another vertical stream of rectangles where everything you make gets dumped into somebody else's database and presented in exactly the same format as everything everybody else made. I miss WEB SITES. Actual websites. Hypertext. Weird navigation. Interactive environments. Little corners of the Internet that felt like places you could explore. A website could be an art project. A radio station. A game. A journal. A museum. A laboratory. A clubhouse. A fictional universe. A business. A ridiculous experiment somebody stayed up until 3 AM building because they thought it would be cool. Now we seem obsessed with reducing the entire Internet to POST, SCROLL, LIKE, SCROLL, ADVERTISEMENT, SCROLL, RECOMMENDED FOR YOU, SCROLL. Feeds are stupid. They are an incredibly boring way to experience what may be the most flexible communications medium humanity has ever invented. And somehow we let a handful of giant platforms convince us that "having an Internet presence" means maintaining profiles inside their websites. Screw that. Buy a domain. Make something weird. Break the navigation rules. Put an unnecessary button somewhere. Make a page that plays sounds. Build a giant clickable map. Make an online gallery that doesn't look like Instagram. Make a fake TV station. Make an interactive story. Make something that takes ten minutes to explore instead of three seconds to scroll past. Link to other people's weird stuff. That was the whole freaking point of hypertext. We do not need another platform. We need people making websites again. Not "content creators." WEBMASTERS. Bring back the weird Web.