“Link In Bio” is a slow knife - Anil Dash

I've honestly never thought of the link as anything other than a simple utility feature of the web. But maybe it is much more. Maybe it is one of the primary ways to express yourself on the web, not requiring any permission or special access to connect things together wherever you want.

Links represent a threat to closed systems.

Yes! Really aren't links the most fundamentally open thing about the web?

But killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don't abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

Links take us to places where we can make choices that Instagram never would.

I want to give a hallelujah to that! 🙌

But I do think coercive methods of controlling people are a danger, and some of the most insidious techniques are when a platform subtly erases empowering opportunities for its users.

I just love everything about what Dash is putting down here. When I look at the sanitized and commercialized interface of every social media platform out there and the controls they put on your ability to express yourself with formatting, links, images, etc it is absolutely a form of control. It makes you fit into the little boxes in their user interface. You can’t naturally express what you are saying because then they cannot make it neutralized and equalized with everything else.

Is it possible that outrage is so common on social platforms because people have been robbed of other forms of expression — you can’t even bold text — that they have to stand out in other ways to attract the algorithm?

And if we wish to continue to believe this idea that social platforms represent freedom of speech (which they do not, they are a commercial space with none of that), or that they are the town square (a position they put forward to alleviate themselves of accountability and seem more important) pause for a moment that none of them allow any links to be published. Even the links do allow you to add are transformed into internal links that they will decide if they want to allow people to go to or not.

Related: How wild is it that we are letting our AI LLM's access the web via links, but social platforms don't let their users share links with other people.