Monday greetings and here I reach into my bag of many interesting sightings on the web to share here tagged monday-connect This week I had too many to choose from! I hope someone else finds this as curious as I did.
If you saw this in text, and this is pretty much what will be consumed to be integrated to the full range of Large Language Models. Text is interesting, perhaps (?)
At the bottom of the ocean, several kilometres down, is the abyssal seafloor.
The pressure is crushing, the temperature is two to three degrees Celsius.
The darkness is absolute: no light means no nutrients, and thus almost no life.
Except when a whale falls.
When whales die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean. And death brings life.
Whale falls are the dark inverse of coral reefs.
To me, the writing makes me a little curious. But compare the text a machine sees to what you as a human can experience reading this full story (I refrain from including a screenshot to not give anything away).
https://primerand.co/primerstories/1/osedax.html
Those who have been around the web for a while maybe recognized this as a style of long form web journalism that in late 2012 broke new ground on the web as an online artile published by the New York Times as Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek (a rare link you can read from the NY Times without a paywall).
At the time this was a revolution in web publishing, with it even being labeled as “snowfall style”. My good friend Bryan Alexander and I still email each other examples of it done in 2026, often branded as “scrollytelling”
The site I found the whale fall story on hosts a whole series of these as Primer Stories, for example [You Can’t Get Away With it Twice] or(0043 // "You Can't Get Away With It Twice: Alphonse Bertillon's Taxonomy of the Damned") or The Chair as an Engine of Thinking.
Other examples include the climate change article Something is Happening in Norway or an exploration of science fiction from The Pudding.
Have you seen examples of interesting articles done in this style? Please share. Does it speak to you as perhaps a way of bringing curiosity to understanding complex topics?
The means to make these have long been complex, though tools appear and of course there’s a raft of AI sites that seem to offer it. The New York Times was very guarded in sharing how they built Snowfall type stories, which I recall took a team of developers. I also remember (and had bookmarked) a story when a web developer named Cody Brown reverse engineered and managed to redo the original story in less than an hour (earning him a cease and desist order). He later built a tool called ScrollKit eventually bought by WordPress and who knows where it went.
That’s already a lot of me writing a long scroll to talk about this, but I have to say despite the doomsday proclamations, I find more than I can share if interesting things on the open web. But I seek more, let me know of any I should consider for a future monday-connect
