Most of the advice about writing for the internet is actually advice about getting people to click. The headline frameworks, the opening hooks, the injunctions to front-load your point — these are techniques for capturing attention in a feed, not for writing well.
They are not wrong, exactly. They are incomplete.
Writing for the internet is writing for a reader who has other options immediately available. That is different from writing for a reader who has already opened the magazine and settled in. The writer’s job in that environment is not just to capture attention but to justify continuing to hold it — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.
This requires the same things good writing has always required: a clear sense of what you are trying to say, sufficient respect for the reader to say it directly, and enough craft to make the reading experience worth the time.
The format changes what is possible. Long pieces work online now in ways they did not in 2005. Short pieces still need the same proportion of thought to words. The medium is different. The practice is not.
I write for the internet almost exclusively. I have found no reliable shortcut. The sentences still have to be good.