Beyond the link tax: journalism and the changing nature of the internet - Halifax Examiner

I commented on linking on my blog in May:

Two decades ago when I started publishing on the web I would have never guessed that linking to websites, with no URL redirection or tracking tags, would feel almost subversive now. I now find myself delighting in adding even more links to blog posts. Creating the web I want!

I think I was slow to pick up on this trend. Most (all?) of the major social platforms have largely pushed the hyperlink, what I would suggest is the most fundamental thing about the web, out. They tune their algorithms to not surface links. And some of them, I’m looking at you LinkedIn, even intercept the user with a warning that they are about to go somewhere else, and are they really sure they want to do that?

Why is this? It is simple. If you have an attention business that generates revenue from surveillance the worst thing that can happen is that people leave your site. You lose their attention and cannot profit from their time.

The simple hyperlink is an existential threat. It must be stopped.

Pearce said he had "an epiphany" about this. It's an argument that hearkens back to an earlier internet, where you looked things up on a search engine and clicked on links. Sure, you may still do that, but the tech companies are successfully working to kill that internet and keep us within their enclosures. And AI search is only going to accelerate that process.

Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink, which makes arguments that taxing Google and Meta is tantamount to taxing links irrelevant.

I like how Pearce put it here:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It's something that's kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That's why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well…

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that's out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal… That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, "My God, you'll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works." I'm like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.

First let's clarify some things. The word Internet is being interchangeably used with World Wide Web, the Web, in ways that I think could confuse later topics. The link is a function of the web, there is nothing in the Internet that depends on a link. At least one reason I think this is important is to consider the App economy that Apple created and most of us spend a significant amount of time with. The App economy doesn't natively have a concept of a hyperlink. Instagram for example was born as an app and, as far as I know since I’m not a user, only has a utility kind of capability on the web.

So the argument here is not so much about destroying the Internet, as it is hurting and destroying the web. And for me at least, there is another aspect of this that is about limiting expression. I'm not going to pull freedom of speech here because I don't believe that applies. But when you create content on these platforms your ability to express yourself is limited by their treatment of links. That extends to other simple things like bolding or underlining text. Your little text box gets less and less functionality, making your data easier to manage by machine learning, and to capture into their attention system.

I’m not suggesting that these platforms should be forced to support links. They can and should do as they please. I find it interesting that while the App economy initially had no support for links they were so desired by users and developers that the community created a linking protocol on their own to get around it. And even in these social platforms the fact that many afford you a single, precious link has powered the growth of services link Linktree.

I do however think this is a sign we need to learn to identify in a service. I've written in the past about identifying addictive patterns in software so that we can be aware of these tricks. Perhaps we need to also identify other characteristics that tell us about the interests of the service we are using.

If a service does not support direct hyperlinking, without some scary warning, then we should understand that this is not a service that sees the web as a friend. Do we care about that with Instagram? Perhaps no. Do we care about that for a search engine? I would say yes. Do I care about that for where I publish content? For me it is non-negotiable.