All you need is links

design as a quest to discover a simple set of primitives, a small alphabet for generating a system. To paraphrase Gall’s Law: Simple rules produce complex behavior. Complex rules produce stupid behavior.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Herbert Simon

Social media, search, spam, recommendations — when faced with an abundance of information, we often find ourselves needing to separate wheat from the chaff. Many systems reach for stars, hearts, upvotes, and downvotes as quick fixes for user-generated quality signals. But what if we just used links?

It is my belief that this new ability to represent ideas in the fullness of their interconnections will lead to easier and better writing, easier and better learning, and a far greater ability to share and communicate the interconnections among tomorrows ideas and problems. Hypertext can represent all the interconnections an author can think of, an... See more