Once A Year, I Get To Be Scrooge

I am currently building a tutorial on how to create a Linktree style page using WordPress. This is practical, useful, and will almost certainly help people. Halfway through recording it, a thought arrived uninvited and refused to leave.

Why does this need to exist at all?

Linktree is clever in the same way that putting a bucket under a leaking ceiling is clever. It works. It is quick. It stops water landing directly on your head. It does not address the fact that the roof is broken.

The reason Linktree exists is not because the web needed a page full of buttons. It exists because large platforms decided you should have exactly one link and you should be grateful for it. You want to point people to your site, your shop, your newsletter, your latest thing, and your older thing that still matters? Choose one. Or build a small digital escape hatch whose sole job is to get people out.

So we all dutifully built houses on someone else’s land.

We did not own the land. We did not set the rules. We just built anyway, hoping the landlord would not suddenly decide that links are now a premium feature, or that your house violates a policy written by an intern at 2am.

Linktree is a symptom of something having gone badly wrong, even if it is also a pragmatic response. It is the internet equivalent of constructing an entire housing estate on a floodplain because the view is nice and that is where everyone else already lives.

The point is not Linktree itself, but what it reveals.

We keep patching over structural issues instead of fixing them. We build workarounds on top of compromises. We normalise inconvenience and call it innovation.

Linktree fits perfectly into this tradition. It is useful. It is clever. It is also a quiet admission that we surrendered something important. The open web used to let you link freely, contextually, generously. Now we funnel everything through a single button like digital cattle.

This is not a small or temporary shift. The tension between the closed web and the open web is likely to be one of the main battlegrounds of the next decade. On one side are platforms that benefit from enclosure, control, and friction disguised as simplicity. On the other is a web that was designed to be interconnected, owned by its participants, and difficult to fence in.

If we do nothing, the closed version wins by default. Convenience always does. But the open web does not survive on nostalgia alone. It survives because people actively build on it, defend it, and choose it, even when it is slightly less shiny or slightly more work.

The irony, of course, is that I will still finish the tutorial. People need it. Reality exists. Audiences are where they are. Buckets are sometimes necessary when the roof is leaking.

But it is worth occasionally looking up, pointing at the hole, and saying this is not great.

Christmas seems like a reasonable time to do that.