Web Responsibilities

Earlier today I stumbled on an old tweet from Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO, if you don’t know who he is) and that led me to an interesting article titled “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech”. That got me thinking about what my responsibilities are as a person who has a site and shares content online.

One subject particularly dear to me is personal sites and human connections. Personal sites are a window into other people’s mind and can be the gateway to very meaningful human interactions. Those interactions can then evolve into genuine friendships, even across the globe. That’s something worth celebrating.

But right now, the internet is set up in a way that doesn’t encourage you—or even discourage you—to send people away from your site and towards other people's sites. And that's because there's too much emphasis put on quantifiable metrics.

If you run a site, people will tell you that you want your bounce rate to be low. I think that's a mistake. If you land on a page on my site, my goal should be to provide you with both compelling content and links for you to explore to learn more about whatever I'm writing about.

And today I realised I'm currently terrible at that. My posts contain very few links and that goes against the spirit of the web. Connections should be celebrated, exploration should be encouraged.