The web ran on addresses. Most of what we make online now doesn't have one.
The web's original bargain was that everything had a URL — any page, any image, any spot in a document. You could point at it, hand the pointer to someone, and they'd land in the same place. Linking wasn't a feature, it was the substrate.
That's mostly gone, and it went without an argument. Try linking to a specific message in most chat apps, or the exact state of a dashboard, or one card three columns deep in some project tool. You end up sending a screenshot, or "scroll to the part about X," because the thing has no address. You can see it. You just can't point at it.
This isn't link rot — a URL that worked and now 404s. Here the URL never existed. The content was born unaddressable, trapped in an app view or a client-rendered state the address bar never learned about. Rot is a preservation problem; this is an architecture choice, and usually a business one. A thing you can deep-link into is a thing people reach without passing your front door and your metrics.
What gets me is how little anyone minds. The screenshot became the universal fallback — and that's the tell, because a screenshot is what you send when a link should exist and doesn't.
So: fair price for richer apps, and I'm just nostalgic for a document-shaped web? Or did we give up something load-bearing and only feel it in the daily "ugh, let me just screenshot it"?
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