I’ll keep playing here while the rest of you flirt with apps. I’ll be here when you come back. I know it’s going to happen. Here’s why.

Linking.

Dave Winer - 2011

The web has a lot going for it. We coined the term SLICE (Secure, Linkable, Indexable, Composable, and Ephemeral) to describe its benefits, but at its purest essence the hyperlink is the thing that makes the web the web. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s why I fell in love with the Web. Click. Something new! It’s why I still love the web and it’s the thing that is unique to the medium because the web platform in a lot of cases has a thing at the end of it, yes there is link-rot, but you don’t have to install anything to get it running.

But there’s something bugging me. It’s the over-confidence of the industry that the web will weather any storm. “The web will always win” is often quoted whenever someone poses that there is an existential threat to the web and the other side doesn’t think any of the proposals to address the challenge are needed.

Mobile and the rise of native apps was one of those challenges that I believe was a potential extinction-level event for the web. The web as experienced by people didn’t work well on mobile and people looked for Apps (they were told it, “There’s an app for that”). At the same time billions of people were getting their first computing experience through a mobile device and the web wasn’t something they had grown up around, it just didn’t even occur to them as a thing that they should do.

Yes, Apple through Safari introduced many technologies that would let the web work well on mobile (e.g viewports, touch, multi-touch, media queries are probably the biggest innovations at the time) but web developers just didn’t shift to match the expectation people had from their mobile devices.

We needed a change in how we thought about the web and how it should be used it for this new context. From my own personal experience, it wasn’t until a Google “mobile-first” push in 2015 that you really started to see a change in how the web was experienced on mobile.

As I look at my own usage of LLMs today, there is a change in how I use the web and I am uneasy, but it wasn’t until recently that I was able to put my finger on it. Yes, as the cost of creating content drops because people use LLMs it enables a lot more low-quality content to be created and at the same time it is also enabling a lot of good experiences to be easily created (the structure of this very blog was made using an LLM), but the only way you get to discover and experience content is if you can navigate to it.

I was chatting with a colleague about the intersection of AI tooling and the web and the following thought popped into my mind “If you had a machine that could instantly recall or create any facet of information, do you need a link?”

It’s the link that I am worried about and I now think about this constantly.

The way that we — the people who build sites — create links is as a way of saying “I think this is important”. “I think this is related or has more context”. “I think you should look at this”. And what we know as a hyperlink, a thin blue line underneath some text made by wrapping it in an <a> tag connecting two documents together via a directed graph structure is just a construct of the technology that renders web pages.

What I am experiencing doesn’t feel a million miles away from the original definition of hypertext. The idea that you could have a machine that could recall any piece of information and then connect it with any other piece of text. Specifically, Transclusions feel pretty close to where I see LLMs going.

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user.[1] The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.

Emphasis mine — Transclusions

It feels like the directed edge that defines a link in this massive directed graph that we know as the web is changing as LLM’s seem to be able to connect concepts across many documents and just merge them into the response.

This directed graph nature of the web has been fundamental to how we experience the web. It enables things like Page Rank to exist, which to my understanding has the link imply some level of authority. Its unclear to me if this is of any importance to a LLM. Is the link just a way to point a web-crawler to another page so it can be ingested? If so, then is the only way to have an LLM not ingest your content is to make it undiscoverable? Maybe it’s to put it behind a login wall. This feels like a big step backwards on both fronts, however with things like Substack and Medium, the latter seems to be the ways it’s going.

The link can still point to content in the open or content that is private behind a login and enable instant access to any experience. So we still have that for now, but in is a world where LLMs become the super app because they can recall and generate content and functionality in an instant, then what next?

I’m not sure if it’s a technology problem (i.e, links need to change) or if like the mobile-first push we just need to work out where the web fits in the grand scheme of things, but I don’t believe that the “Web will always win” is a good enough answer.

Maybe we always just need to ask LLMs to include citations. Maybe we need to redefine what a link is. Maybe we need to rethink the capabilities of the platform. Maybe we need to create more incentives for putting content on the open web and linking to it directly.

This is something that I want to explore more in the future and I don’t want to sit idly by and be react in 5 years like we did with mobile. I want to be proactive and help shape the future of the web.