Take back the web. Make it weird again

Bob Sassone’s website is thirty years old.

Thirty years. Older than Google. Older than the word blog. Still there, still being tended, still refusing to accept the repeated announcement that blogs are dead.

Congratulations, Bob. Thirty years of keeping a patch of the web alive is no small thing.

His anniversary post reads like a memoir, but I hear a call to arms in it.

I remember those heady days of getting online for the first time. Signing up for AOL and CompuServe. Hanging out in chat rooms and forums. Sending e-mails—with the dash—and receiving replies that weren’t spam, marketing campaigns, or automated attempts to drag you into somebody’s funnel.

The web felt inhabited then.

It was scrappy, slow and frequently ugly. You learned enough HTML to build an awful-looking website, uploaded it somewhere, and waited to see who might wander through the door. Pages had visitor counters, animated GIFs, clashing colours and links to other people’s pages. You could follow those links for hours and end up somewhere you hadn’t expected to be.

That was the point.

The web wasn’t something you scrolled while an algorithm studied which version of you was easiest to agitate. It was a strange landscape made by people. You could build a little shelter there, paint the walls whatever colour you liked, and leave the door open.

Bob writes:

“When I started this site, ‘content’ was still called ‘writing.’”

Somewhere along the way, writing became content, readers became users, conversation became engagement, and websites became delivery mechanisms for adverts, tracking scripts and pop-ups asking us to subscribe before we’ve read the first sentence. We handed our homepages over to social platforms, traded the open web for the convenience of the feed, and woke up living in rented rooms whose landlords could change the locks whenever they pleased.

But the old web hasn’t disappeared. Not entirely. Bob’s thirty-year-old site is proof of that. So are the blogs still being written, the newsletters sent by actual people, the RSS feeds quietly carrying new posts from one independent site to another, the odd little corners of the internet maintained because somebody cares enough to keep turning up.

Taking back the web doesn’t mean pretending it’s 1996 again. I don’t particularly miss dial-up, broken image links, or trying to work out why an entire page had suddenly turned italic.

It means recovering something from those days: the idea that the web belongs to the people who make places on it.

Make a homepage. Write something that isn’t designed to please an algorithm. Link generously. Leave a comment. Subscribe through RSS. Visit somebody’s actual website instead of waiting for a platform to put them in your feed. Build something small, personal and slightly wonky. Let it carry your fingerprints.

The web became boring when we stopped making websites and started filling in boxes on other people’s platforms.

So yes, congratulations on thirty years, Bob.

And thanks for the reminder.

Take back the web. Make it weird again.