Why Hyperlinks are Not Great
The history of hyperlinks is fascinating and it goes much deeper back in time that one can expect. Long before the advent of internet, or even a modern computer was invented, people started to conceptualise an idea of linking two data points electronically. Linking documents to other documents.
Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term “hypertext” and later “hyperlink” back in 1960s.
Tim Berners-Lee together with colleagues at CERN developed with WWW, HTML and URI specs on 1990, which is how the modern hyperlinks were born.
Today, links are the bedrock of The Web, in sense links are The Web.
It used to be exciting to see all the links everywhere while surfing the web. So much information, so much to learn and have fun!
However, after being a user of the internet for most of my life and having seen and followed thousands of links I came to a recent realisation that today links are more of a hindrance.
Links are:
- Draining energy since they present yet another small decision to be made (save it for later? how? where?)
- Adding visual distraction - they are immediately visible on any page across any form of text
- Adding false sense of credibility (sometimes). We are more likely to trust the source if we see links, especially if the post is a journalistic peace of work. Yet, most of us don’t check the sources and the circular referencing between the news outlets is quite common.
So I thought about links on this blog.
I have been journaling for years and all my daily logs are interconnected with all the other notes I create. In fact, the link creation is automated, which makes it super fun for me, since every note has a bidirectional link to the journal entry of the date when the note was created.
However, public journaling and blog writing are two completely different formats. Writing publicly means structuring thoughts in clear, comprehensible manner for oneself and the others.
But to consume the thoughts of others equally requires clarity. Hyperlinks can be an obstacle to this clarity, which is why it feels that it is best to make them less of a hindrance.
Luckily, books and academic papers have a fitting solution for this - footnotes.
So, all hyperlinks on this blog - go into footnotes. Footnote section is a single place where more context is given to every link and yes, this context, I believe is allowed to be distracting.
A post becomes a self-contained peace of information and perceived as a single unit of knowledge without the need of opening any links and reading additional posts.
Footnotes, on the other hand can be perceived as additional, not always completely relevant links to other units of knowledge.
Perhaps this way, thoughts can be produced and consumed clearer, and, perhaps, less energy is drained on deciding what to do with links.
More signal, less noise.
📶