The hyperlink is the internet’s foundational act. Click this, go there. It’s how the web was designed to work — a distributed system of connected documents, navigable by anyone, owned by no single platform.
Platforms have spent the last decade quietly dismantling it.
Instagram has never allowed clickable links in captions. Facebook’s algorithm visibly suppresses posts that contain outbound URLs, reducing their reach compared to native content. LinkedIn does the same. X (formerly Twitter) added friction to link previews in 2023, stripping images from posts that link out. TikTok offers no in-video links at all. The message from every major platform is consistent: leave, and you’ll be penalised.
The reasoning is straightforward. Platforms earn money from time spent on-platform. A link is an exit. Every click that takes a user to an external site is a lost impression, a lost ad view, a lost engagement signal. The incentive to discourage outbound links is structural, not incidental. Platforms didn’t set out to break the web — they set out to maximise retention, and the effect is the same.
The result is an internet that increasingly folds in on itself. Content that was once a doorway — an article, a study, a creator’s work — gets summarised, screenshot, reposted, and stripped of its source. Attribution becomes optional. Nuance travels poorly. The viral screenshot replaces the link to the actual piece, and most people never read beyond what fits in a phone screen.
This matters for reasons beyond inconvenience. The web’s original architecture assumed that information could be traced back to its source. Fact-checking depends on it. Credit depends on it. The entire model of journalism, research, and independent publishing depends on people being able to follow a link to the thing itself, not a secondhand version of it. When that chain breaks, accuracy degrades and sources get erased.
What’s emerging instead is a closed-loop information environment. Platforms reward content that keeps users in place: native video, native carousels, native text posts. The creators who thrive are those who master the platform’s preferred format, not those who do the most interesting work elsewhere on the web. Substance migrates to wherever the algorithm punishes it least.
Some pushback exists. Newsletter platforms like Substack are explicitly built around the link — the email itself is a link to the full piece. Podcast show notes remain one of the last link-dense formats online. Personal blogs never stopped linking. But these are niches. The traffic and attention overwhelmingly flows through platforms that treat the link as a liability.
The internet still technically runs on hyperlinks. But the experience of using it increasingly doesn’t.
When the exit becomes punishable, staying stops feeling like a choice.
