Suck's great rhetorical sleight of hand was this: whereas every other Web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reader experience, Suck saw it as an opportunity to withhold information, to keep the reader at bay.

Suck's best hook all along -- its most original contribution to Web culture -- has been the style of hypertext link it pioneered. Suck's writers use links not as informational resources or aids to site navigation but as a rhetorical device, a kind of subtextual shorthand. A link from a Suck article, far from illustrating a point, more often than not undercuts it. A Suck link's highlight is often a warning: Irony Ahead -- do not take these words at face value. Feed's Steven Johnson analyzes it in his new book, "Interface Culture," as a kind of associative slang: "They buried their links mid-sentence, like riddles, like clues. You had to trek out after them to make the sentence cohere."