I turned 33 this year and realized I’m officially homesick for a place that no longer exists.
Not a house. Not a city.
The internet of 2005–2014.
The one where you could land on a stranger’s homemade site about mechanical keyboards, spend three hours reading their 40-page treatise, find their blogroll, click the third link, and end up learning how to bake sourdough from a guy in New Zealand who also collected vintage radios.
All before dinner.
That internet felt alive, messy, opinionated, and deeply human.
Today I open an app, see the same 40 accounts, close the app, and wonder why everything tastes like cardboard.
We didn’t lose the soul because we ran out of bandwidth.
We lost it because we stopped linking, stopped sharing, and stopped caring where things lived.
When Exactly Did the Soul Leak Out?#
You can almost date it.
- 2013 → Facebook starts punishing posts with external links
- 2015 → Instagram removes clickable links from captions
- 2016 → Snapchat discovers Stories, external links become invisible
- 2018 → Twitter doubles character count but starts shadow-banning link-heavy accounts
- 2020 → TikTok goes mainstream and bans external links entirely
- 2022 → Reddit cracks down on “self-promo” (i.e. linking to your own blog)
- 2024 → Google search becomes 70 % ads + AI answers that never send you anywhere
Each change was small. Justified as “better user experience.”
Together they killed the circulatory system of the web.
Ideas stopped flowing. They started pooling inside walled gardens where the landlords could monetize every heartbeat.
The Human Cost You Feel But Can’t Name#
You know the feeling:
You read something brilliant on Twitter, want to send it to a friend, realize it’s a 41-tweet thread, screenshot it instead of linking, and both of you now have a worse version of the idea.
You find an incredible tool, bookmark it, come back six months later → 404.
You want to show someone “that article that changed everything” → you can’t remember the title, the author, or which platform it lived on.
The web turned from a public library into a series of private screening rooms where the projectionist can kick you out anytime.
We became digital sharecroppers. We create the value, they own the land, and they can burn the crops whenever the numbers look bad.
The Soul Was Never in the Platforms — It Was in the Links Between Them#
Think about the last time the internet felt magical.
It wasn’t when you got 10,000 likes.
It was when you followed a chain of links and arrived somewhere you never expected.
The soul lived in the hyperlink.
Every time we stopped linking, we amputated a piece of that soul.
Every time we screenshot instead of linking, we embalmed an idea instead of letting it breathe.
Every time we said “link in bio” or “swipe up,” we admitted defeat.
Proof the Soul Is Still Out There (If You Look)#
While the airports were being built, a tiny parallel internet kept growing in the cracks.
- Personal sites on Neocities, Bear Blog, and Blot.im
- Hand-coded directories like ooh.directory and uses.tech
- Newsletters that actually link outward (Dense Discovery, The Sample, Hacker News Daily)
- Public stashes on stashed.in with titles like “Weird Internet I Found This Week”
- Indie blogs that still update weekly because the author loves it, not because the algorithm pays
These places feel like stepping into 2008 again. No infinite scroll. No “For You” page. Just humans saying “I saw this and thought you’d love it.”
They’re proof the soul didn’t die. It went underground.
The One Habit That Brings the Soul Back (Takes 8 Seconds)#
Here’s the cheat code nobody is teaching:
Every single time you see something that gives you the old-internet butterflies, save it visually and share the link publicly.
That’s it.
Not “share the post.” Share the actual URL in a place designed for URLs.
On stashed.in that means:
- Hit share → stashed.in
- Drop it in a public stash called “Soul Food 2025” or “Internet That Still Feels Alive”
- Pick a cover image that captures the vibe
- Done
Eight seconds. Zero friction. Maximum resurrection.
Do this ten times a week and you become a one-person soul restoration project.
Why Public Visual Saving Works When Everything Else Failed#
Private bookmarks rot in darkness.
Public stashes grow in sunlight.
When you know someone might see your collection, you choose better links.
When the links have beautiful covers, people actually click them.
When people click them, the original author gets traffic.
When authors keep writing.
When authors keep writing, the open web stays alive.
It’s a tiny flywheel most people never start spinning.
I started mine in 2022. Today my public profile sends more traffic to small blogs than my Twitter account with 30× the followers ever did.
Saving links publicly is the highest-leverage altruism most of us will ever practice.
Real Stories From the Soul Restoration Front#
- A food blogger in Lisbon told me her traffic tripled after someone put her sourdough tutorial in a public stash titled “Bread That Made Me Believe in God Again.”
- A 19-year-old designer in Jakarta got his first client because I stashed his portfolio with the note “This kid is going to be huge.”
- A philosophy professor found a 2012 blog post I had stashed, emailed me, and we’ve been friends for two years.
None of these people paid for ads.
None of them optimized for SEO.
They just got linked to by someone who still believes in linking.
How to Start Your Own Soul Restoration Project Tonight#
You don’t need a manifesto. You need one stash and one rule.
Rule: Only save links that make you feel the way the old internet used to.
Steps:
- Create a public stash titled anything that feels true to you
(Mine is “Internet That Still Has Soul.” 183 links and growing.)
2 Seed it with 5–10 pieces you already love that are at risk of vanishing
3 Every day add one new find and (optional) remove one that aged poorly
4 Share the stash link exactly once — in your bio, email footer, or a quiet tweet
5 Watch what happens when you become a lighthouse instead of another airport
Do this for 90 days and you will single-handedly keep more of the internet alive than 99.9 % of users.
The Math Most People Miss#
If 100,000 people saved and shared just 20 soulful links per year in public visual collections, that’s 2 million preserved, trafficked, celebrated pages.
That’s more than the entire Wayback Machine added in 2023.
We don’t need billion-dollar nonprofits.
We need 100,000 mildly obsessive weirdos who still get goosebumps from a good hyperlink.
The Soul Is Waiting for You to Link It Back to Life#
The platforms won’t fix this. They profit from the airports.
Google won’t fix this. It profits from the ads.
The only people who can bring the soul back are the ones reading this sentence right now.
You.
Every link you save publicly is a vote.
Every stash you share is a lifeline.
Every cover image you choose is a love letter.
The internet lost its soul the day we stopped linking like we meant it.
It will get it back the day we start again.
I’ve been saving my piece of it at varun.stashed.in/soul since 2022.
Come drop yours.
Stasha keeps the lantern burning.
→ stashed.in
