(2022-01-22) Brander All You Need Is Links

Gordon Brander: All you need is links. When Tim Berners Lee talks about how he designed the web, he uses an analogy from physics, describing his process as a quest to find “fundamental laws” which can generate a desired system: "The art was to define the few basic, common rules of “protocol” that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, no break down.:

To paraphrase Gall’s Law: Simple rules produce complex behavior. Complex rules produce stupid behavior.

What if we applied this lens to designing tools for thought?

I’d like to put forward one candidate… Links.

A surprising number of other features can be expressed in terms of links.

You don’t need tags, you just need links (WikiWord As Tag)

Tags are just backlinks to pages that don’t exist.

You don’t need folders, you just need links

You don’t need stars, hearts, upvotes, downvotes, you just need links

Many systems reach for stars, hearts, upvotes, and downvotes as quick fixes for user-generated quality signals. But what if we just used links?

Inbound links can be used as a signal of quality.

This is the key insight behind Google Pagerank.

Comments are one of the core interaction primitives of today’s web.

If we implement some form of transclusion, we can express comments in terms of links. In fact, WordPress already does this with Pingbacks.

You don’t need outliners, you just need links

but what is an outliner? What is its structure? What is its function? An outliner lets you break a document up into discrete nodes, nest those nodes under other nodes, hide branches, focus in on branches. The structure formed by an outliner is a tree, with parent and child nodes.

We can express an outliner in terms of links by nesting inbound links underneath the document they point to. So an outliner could be thought of as one view over a network of linked documents.

You don’t need semantic triples, you just need links. (triple store)

The basic idea is to construct a network made up of: Subject - Predicate - Object

Triples allow computers to do complex automated reasoning

Triples are often expressed in terms of special formal languages like TURTLE or Datalog.

This can get old fast

You don’t need topic modeling, you just need links

Links are a good idea

A hyperlink is a triple where the subject is the page, the predicate is the link text, and the object is the thing being linked to.

I hope to keep Subconscious app simple. Few features, a small alphabet with wide expressive range of motion. Before reaching for features, my goal is to explore, to the fullest extent, the creative potential of plain old links.