There’s something about the web and lists. At a baseline, the web is a growing compendium of knowledge and information, which requires a bit of indexing to keep straight.

It’s an impulse that’s been with us since at least the time of antiquity, and followed all through the earliest periods of modernity. Which is where the web has its roots in technologies that sought to gather knowledge in this way.

Paul Otlet’s Universal Bibliography, a mid-20th century take on the Library of Alexandria, had a huge influence on the development of hypertext. Built in the 20th century, it was limited by physical space. But that didn’t stop Otlet from developing a classification system to organize millions of index cards that connected researchers to their queries. A big list that helped to find information, a familiar context for the eventual web.

Vanneaver Bush’s Memex had similar ambitions when he designed it after World War II. Later on, Tim Berners-Lee would acknowledge a debt to Bush’s Memex design. It imagined a system of microfilm that could be used by scientists to collect and collate research notes and discoveries into a list that was accessible to all.

And so it’s no surprise that lists are so important on the web. There’s good reason for that.

But first, we have to get the listicle out of the way, because it clouds the subject.

The rise and fall of the listicle

Starting in the early 2000’s, some online publications began to publish more editorials in the form of numbered lists, often taking a somewhat controversial and subjective point of view on some topic, which became known as listicles. We don’t know exactly who published the first one, but by October of 2004, a new entry for listicle was added to the Double Toungued Dictionary, which keeps track of those kinds of things.

The format was perfected in no small part by Buzzfeed, which took the listicle from its roots as an editorial outlier in magazines and online publications, and made it into something of a centerpiece on their site. This ramped up in the early 2010’s, so that by 2015, over a quarter of all articles published to their site were listicles. There were tens of thousands of them, and many more tens of thousands on the wider web.

Propagated through a growing field of social media and churned out at a ludicrous pace, listicles dominated the web’s editorial landscape for a few years. There are lots of reasons people gave for why the list format was so popular, from the scientific to the banal. Never mind the to this day unanswered questions about attribution and copyright and feeding off our short attention spans.

But mostly it was about the eyeballs. For a while, people just seemed to love a good list.

There are cynical reasons for why as well. At it’s worst, the listicle is a cheap psychological hack to take advantage of our own inability to miss out on something, and to make things digestible for the post-modern chaotic brain, and play off our innate desire to agree or disagree.

As time when on, the format only cheapened more in an attempt to keep the embers of virality forever lit. But they did, eventually, burn out.

The listicle, for all its flaws, represented something pretty fundamental about the web. Somewhere along the way, it got lost. But it really was just a way to organize things. The web is a fantastic place to do that. Even with the listicle fading, the list lives on.

The need to organize

About a decade ago, I started reading comic books again, something I hadn’t done consistently since my childhood. It was tough to know where to start. I went in search of a good list that would help guide me and soon stumbled on the perfect one, the Complete Marvel Reading Order, or CMRO.

For what must be over a decade now, the site’s owner has been going through Marvel comics, and putting them in different story orders, according to different universes and contexts (complete, essential, ultimate, etc), tagged with metadata, characters, and story arcs. Each week, he adds a bit more to the lists and updates the forums with what’s new, often with some discussion about what changes could be made.

It is exhaustive in detail, incredible in scope, and enduring over time. There is no real motivation, other than a few bucks the site’s creator collects through some small ads and subscriptions. But otherwise, it’s merely the desire to see a complete list of Marvel chronology that keeps the site going. A compendium of obscure knowledge that the world can benefit from.

To me, it’s a perfect representation about what the web is about. Stewart Brand once said that “information wants to be free,” a maxim that motivated the creation of the web. But in order to be free, information must first be collected. Lists help us do that.

They serve another purpose. Lists help us quickly discover new things in a way that only a globally interconnected hypertext system can. Writing about the early list site DigitalDreamDoor, which organizes music according to different categories and across genres, and periods of time (it’s not at all uncommon for the site to pit Randy Newman against Velvet Underground, or Jay Z against Leonard Cohen), one writer stresses the importance of this discovery.

For me, browsing DigitalDreamDoor dredges up the sense memories of when the web still seemed like a portal to endless potential discovery — before “discovery” became just another buzzword used by every startup with an algorithm to hawk.

The site’s lists are built by a group of editors, but very much informed by its most frequented users, who hash things out the lists in an online forum. The lists have a bit of subjectivity and personality to them, of course. But it’s also without an ulterior motive. Lists for lists sake, so to speak.

In that subjectivity is something deeply personal. As lists bring together a community, they act as a connective tissue for our personal quests of discovery. There is maybe no more perfect use case for the web.

The Internet is lists, all the way down

It turns out, the web was even kind of invented for the purposes of building a list.

Tim Berners-Lee worked for the particle physics lab CERN, and he built the initial prototype for the web with their backing. CERN is based in Switzerland, but has researchers spread out all around the world. So when Berners-Lee and his boss pitched their idea for an Internet-powered hypertext system to the higher ups, their proposed utility for it was a giant directory of names of everybody that worked at or with CERN. A big list of phone numbers, updated frequently, and accessible anywhere. That was enough to get buy-in for the first version of the web.

And as the web started moving out into academic communities and college dorm rooms, a lot of people used it to just collect things. Lists of links like Justin’s links from the underground. Or collections of errata like Rajit’s HTTP playground. Or blogrolls. Or mailing lists. Or digital gardens. And so on.

And ever since, lists have been really foundational for the transmission of information. Writing in New York Mag, Kyle Chakra explores how Wikipedia, in some ways a logical extension of Otlet’s original idea for a a Universal Bibliography, has even gone as far as creating meta “lists of lists,” which help organize and rearrange the lists of information. There’s even a lists of lists of lists.

Chakra recognizes that rather be seen as a distraction, these lists are the bedrock of the world wide web.

Nothing is very obscure on the Internet, but these lists on lists must be among the least-accessed pages. It’s not because they’re not useful, it’s more because on the Internet, we’re used to traveling directly to the object we’re seeking rather than navigating so many layers. But we are able to do that precisely because the Internet is made of so many lists, indices that tell us which websites are important, which software is appropriate, and which data we’ve already consumed. Actual lists, well beyond the tired archetype of the viral listicle, are unsung heroes of the Web.

The web would be nothing without its lists. Let’s celebrate that.