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But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: they are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at an

But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: they are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage – and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web. More or less all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: it is more empowering. When a powerful website – say Google or Facebook – gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it , it brings it into existence; gives it life. Without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind, and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page. Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. Best part of the piece, imo.

personjerry 11y ago
But there are links both to and from social media sites, aren't there?
- soheil 11y ago
  As he also mentioned Instagram for instance doesn't allow links in posts.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Try keeping up with newspaper comments that are driven by Facebook. It's a nightmare to follow conversations.
- amirmansour 11y ago
  Yes, but I also think you have to consider how those links are presented and interacted with. It's not just a link, it's got "like" button. What you see is people posting and even crafting links to optimize for that "number of likes" metric. That's how you end up with the stream of junk on FB: quick bait links with the potential for instant gratification. Also for many people this stream is their one-stop-shop web, which is fine, do whatever you like, but now it has reached the point where social media has to be appeased just to get people to look beyond the stream, which I think goes against the openness philosophy of the internet. As the builders of the web (majority of HN base) we should stay conscious of this philosophy.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    Relevant Eli Pariser: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... I thought the "stream as something that only gazes inward" was a nice metaphor. "Aren't there outward links on Facebook?" is a less relevant question to the author's point than "What's the chance I click on a link in Facebook and it takes me to something unexpected?"
- ngoel36 11y ago
  Yes but the few social media sites get to control how a link to anywhere else appears. For example, try updating your Facebook status with a video. If you upload the raw mp4 directly, the video will autoplay in your friends' news feeds, generating more engagement & likes. If you instead post a YouTube link, your friends will see one screenshot in an ugly embedded player. Facebook, intentionally or not, gets to control part of YouTube's fate and relevance. It has every right to, but that's a bit scary when it's the only way to share a video with my friends.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Google does the exact same thing with queries. Plenty of queries will be answered with data harvested from the pages that those queries originally led to. Now google shows a box on the side with the facts collected from the underlying pages. No more need to go visit any of those. Then there's google images, which shows the images on the google site itself (a vast copyright infringement, unlike the search engine result pages these are copies of the images at quite high resolution). Every web company, as soon as they get large enough will stop playing nice and will start trying to lock their users into their own ecosystem.
    - yohui 11y ago
      > Then there's google images, which shows the images on the google site itself (a vast copyright infringement, unlike the search engine result pages these are copies of the images at quite high resolution). Well, image search would be a lot less useful if it didn't show images. And Google's image thumbnails are very modest resolution copies. The larger image previews displayed when clicking a specific image result are actually hotlinked from the original source, and hence not copyright violations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking#Copyright_law_issues_that_inline_linking_raises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking#Copyright_law_i...
      - scholia 11y ago
        > The larger image previews displayed when clicking a specific image result are actually hotlinked from the original source So the website pays the cost without getting the benefit of a visit?
pjbrunet 11y ago
And 90% of that falls on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders, Facebook owns Instagram. But if Instagram suffocates the Internet, perhaps it's an opportunity for the arts. Renaissance. That's my take. I noticed the same thing happening (I wrote this same rant 10 mins ago on Facebook) and I have already shifted more of my focus to fine art and I have drawings for sale on Instagram as of a few days ago. If I can choose between making a $2000 web app or a $2000 painting, I'm going to do the painting if that's what people want, and then I get to teach painting, podcast about art, coach artists, the whole nine yards ;-)
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  He is giving people what they want. If it wasn't facebook they would still be using myspace, hi5 or some other crap. There's no one to blame here, just a realization: humanity screws everything up eventually. That being said, the "open web" still is a rich place if you know where to look, but it sure would be better if the vast majority of people on it weren't social media drones.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    What are some of these sites? My favorite sites are gone, or deemed illegial. I go to HN daily. Then--it's trying to avoid social media sites, or anything remotely related to Kardasian's.
    - TranceMan 11y ago
      Think the Internet - built by engineers - destroyed by social engineers.
open-source-ux 11y ago
A lot of sites seem terrified that users might (gasp!) leave their site to go elsewhere. The result is ridiculous articles like this: 42 startups that grew to be worth billions in 2015. Not a single link to any of the comapnies mentioned in the article. http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-unicorns-in-2015-2015-12 http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-uni... Another horrible trend is to hide links behind Javascript. Simple Hypertext links should never require Javascript to be clickable, on many websites they very often are.
- ethbro 11y ago
  This. I've tried to stop reading new articles from sites that seemingly only allow inward hyperlinks to be posted with their articles. Informally, through personal observation: if anyone has a list of actual editorial policies that preclude doing that, I'd be happy to look at it! BBC News, afaict, will typically drop an external link next to the article.
- petepete 11y ago
  Our company blog is like this, I left a comment on the related LinkedIn post (that links to our own website using some URL-shortening service!) saying "this doesn't really make any sense without citations and providing links to the services discussed" and received a request to remove my comment shortly after. The marketing team believe linking to sites other than our own drive people away. Instead they internally link to product/service pages that are often barely relevant and rarely (if ever) what anyone reading the post wants to see. It makes me want to throw the whole thing away and start over.
  - unusximmortalis 11y ago
    Yes yes, let's do that. Let's start over with all the lessons learned. Let's build something that will not be able to be morphed into something close to ... hidious.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Pet peeve: pdf links on google. When you want to mail someone a link to a pdf you search for the pdf, then copy-and-paste the link from the results page and boom a whole screen full of garbage and a link that is next to unusable instead of the actual link to the document. Super annoying.
elorant 11y ago
As a counterargument, if Instagram allows links there is a very good chance it will become a spammer’s playground with affiliate links all over the place.
- bashinator 11y ago
  Perhaps that wouldn't be true, if the WWW were more of a federation and less of a republic.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    That's a good point. Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem with that line of reasoning in relationship with the WWW is that the WWW is the platform and it is vast, federated or republic doesn't matter to the spammers, as long as there are forms and buttons to click spambots will come because the similarities between federated sites are still large enough to take advantage of them.
    - zmmmmm 11y ago
      >Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem is that the 'I' in ROI is tiny. I occasionally put up custom web forms for sending feedback about my software. All custom fields etc. And after a period they will start generating spam, despite the fact they send only to me and some spammer had to go and create a completely bespoke spam bot to fill it out. It is clearly worth it for spammers to hit just about every open web form on the internet, as far as I can tell.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Not sure how custom your form was, but spammers do have "smart" bots that use heuristics to guess what they should fill in the fields.
    - bashinator 11y ago
      If a Federated Internet (see dscr in alt thread) allows for some spam, that's OK by me. I think some spam is the price you pay for having a well trafficed protocol.
noobermin 11y ago
It seems like a number of people commenting here don't use instagram other than passively. You aren't allowed to have links on instagram pics, and as others have mentioned that this helps with spam issues, but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't doesn't lead to isolation and the same can be said for twitter. People do connect to each other across ig and twitter using hashtags, so in a way, hashtags help link people together in a way that links didn't. Something I like about hashtags over links is that the content you link to now isn't specific and thus there is no filter. This is how I discover content and content producers (photographers) I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For example, something I love is #komorebi[0]. I have discovered and followed a number of people from Japan and elsewhere on the basis of that hashtag and I wouldn't have found them if I could only go link by link. Hashtags effectively make a large number of nodes in the graph adjacent to you, while with hyperlinks, you'd have to travel from node to node through one edge at a time, making finding interesting content more difficult. What might differ then with the old web is that people are no longer represented by websites, they are represented by profiles, profiles that are somewhat limited, somewhat forced into a mold, so that it is easier to polish and curate them. That is a discussion in and of itself, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is connection between people going on, and in some ways, better than before. [0] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-equivalent-of-komorebi-%E6%9C%A8%E6%BC%8F%E3%82%8C%E6%97%A5-sunshine-filtering-through-leaves http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-eq... Using hashtags gives your content eyes and gives
- chippy 11y ago
  >but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't Do instagram hashtags only work within Instagram? Do hashtags within Instagram look outwards, or inwards? How about Twitter? Does Twitter hashtags cross over to other "Content Producer" friendly applications?
  - hasenj 11y ago
    Exactly, which emphasizes why instagram only looks inwards. In effect it's an isolated web. A web of images.
Retric 11y ago
Google search killed the web. Links went from how you shared content to how you spam page-rank which promoted spammers swarming any popular site not because humans would click links but because dumb algorithms would do so. Further simply linking to interesting things became less useful so simply sharing link collections stopped being a thing.
- skj 11y ago
  Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.
  - andybak 11y ago
    IMHO the golden age of the web was in-between the points where pagerank started having a major impact (leading to the rise of indepenent blogs as easily discoverable sources of writing and thought) and before they got crushed between the scylla and charybdis of spam blogs and over-optimized big content sites. Google started drowning in spam and began to tweak it's algorithms in favour of big content. Simultaneously Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and god knows what else captured the mainstream eyeball. There's still great independent content out there - but somehow it now feels like it's a side-channel rather than a vanguard.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    It is? Google was created in 1998 and didn't hit it big for a few years thence. There was a vibrant web for several years before that, and other search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) did a perfectly fine job of doing what Google does now. Sites like Slashdot and Geocities existed long before Google came around. Google was a better search engine, but it hardly created the web.
    - contingencies 11y ago
      Agreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.
iamcreasy 11y ago
Also this part, The prominence of the stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the internet biased against quality – it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned. and, The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links – toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on the like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.
- Jormundir 11y ago
  Beautiful arguments. What's the solution put forward? Being critical is easy, but what's something better we can build with the internet?
  - iamcreasy 11y ago
    From the article, Hossein Derakhshan is currently working on an art project called Link-age to promote hyperlinks and the open web. Link-age : http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/ http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - vvpan 11y ago
    Nothing wrong with being critical even when you don't have a solution.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Well, getting off Facebook and Twitter is a good start.
mooreds 11y ago
Just a request for clarification. > Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. Not clear what "them" refers to here. Is it instagram or "others"? > The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. This seems to imply that it is the "others", but I'd love a second opinion.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  I read it unambiguously as others fwiw
lcedp 11y ago
Indeed Instagram is looking inward. But isn't large portion of both Facebook and Twitter posts is no more than a link to other sites with a brief comment?

personjerry 11y ago

But there are links both to and from social media sites, aren't there?

soheil 11y ago
As he also mentioned Instagram for instance doesn't allow links in posts.
johnchristopher 11y ago
Try keeping up with newspaper comments that are driven by Facebook. It's a nightmare to follow conversations.
amirmansour 11y ago
Yes, but I also think you have to consider how those links are presented and interacted with. It's not just a link, it's got "like" button. What you see is people posting and even crafting links to optimize for that "number of likes" metric. That's how you end up with the stream of junk on FB: quick bait links with the potential for instant gratification. Also for many people this stream is their one-stop-shop web, which is fine, do whatever you like, but now it has reached the point where social media has to be appeased just to get people to look beyond the stream, which I think goes against the openness philosophy of the internet. As the builders of the web (majority of HN base) we should stay conscious of this philosophy.
- ethbro 11y ago
  Relevant Eli Pariser: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b... I thought the "stream as something that only gazes inward" was a nice metaphor. "Aren't there outward links on Facebook?" is a less relevant question to the author's point than "What's the chance I click on a link in Facebook and it takes me to something unexpected?"
ngoel36 11y ago
Yes but the few social media sites get to control how a link to anywhere else appears. For example, try updating your Facebook status with a video. If you upload the raw mp4 directly, the video will autoplay in your friends' news feeds, generating more engagement & likes. If you instead post a YouTube link, your friends will see one screenshot in an ugly embedded player. Facebook, intentionally or not, gets to control part of YouTube's fate and relevance. It has every right to, but that's a bit scary when it's the only way to share a video with my friends.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Google does the exact same thing with queries. Plenty of queries will be answered with data harvested from the pages that those queries originally led to. Now google shows a box on the side with the facts collected from the underlying pages. No more need to go visit any of those. Then there's google images, which shows the images on the google site itself (a vast copyright infringement, unlike the search engine result pages these are copies of the images at quite high resolution). Every web company, as soon as they get large enough will stop playing nice and will start trying to lock their users into their own ecosystem.
  - yohui 11y ago
    > Then there's google images, which shows the images on the google site itself (a vast copyright infringement, unlike the search engine result pages these are copies of the images at quite high resolution). Well, image search would be a lot less useful if it didn't show images. And Google's image thumbnails are very modest resolution copies. The larger image previews displayed when clicking a specific image result are actually hotlinked from the original source, and hence not copyright violations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking#Copyright_law_issues_that_inline_linking_raises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking#Copyright_law_i...
    - scholia 11y ago
      > The larger image previews displayed when clicking a specific image result are actually hotlinked from the original source So the website pays the cost without getting the benefit of a visit?

pjbrunet 11y ago

And 90% of that falls on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders, Facebook owns Instagram. But if Instagram suffocates the Internet, perhaps it's an opportunity for the arts. Renaissance. That's my take. I noticed the same thing happening (I wrote this same rant 10 mins ago on Facebook) and I have already shifted more of my focus to fine art and I have drawings for sale on Instagram as of a few days ago. If I can choose between making a $2000 web app or a $2000 painting, I'm going to do the painting if that's what people want, and then I get to teach painting, podcast about art, coach artists, the whole nine yards ;-)

rpgmaker 11y ago
He is giving people what they want. If it wasn't facebook they would still be using myspace, hi5 or some other crap. There's no one to blame here, just a realization: humanity screws everything up eventually. That being said, the "open web" still is a rich place if you know where to look, but it sure would be better if the vast majority of people on it weren't social media drones.
- marincounty 11y ago
  What are some of these sites? My favorite sites are gone, or deemed illegial. I go to HN daily. Then--it's trying to avoid social media sites, or anything remotely related to Kardasian's.
  - TranceMan 11y ago
    Think the Internet - built by engineers - destroyed by social engineers.

open-source-ux 11y ago

A lot of sites seem terrified that users might (gasp!) leave their site to go elsewhere. The result is ridiculous articles like this: 42 startups that grew to be worth billions in 2015. Not a single link to any of the comapnies mentioned in the article. http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-unicorns-in-2015-2015-12 http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-billion-dollar-startup-uni... Another horrible trend is to hide links behind Javascript. Simple Hypertext links should never require Javascript to be clickable, on many websites they very often are.

ethbro 11y ago
This. I've tried to stop reading new articles from sites that seemingly only allow inward hyperlinks to be posted with their articles. Informally, through personal observation: if anyone has a list of actual editorial policies that preclude doing that, I'd be happy to look at it! BBC News, afaict, will typically drop an external link next to the article.
petepete 11y ago
Our company blog is like this, I left a comment on the related LinkedIn post (that links to our own website using some URL-shortening service!) saying "this doesn't really make any sense without citations and providing links to the services discussed" and received a request to remove my comment shortly after. The marketing team believe linking to sites other than our own drive people away. Instead they internally link to product/service pages that are often barely relevant and rarely (if ever) what anyone reading the post wants to see. It makes me want to throw the whole thing away and start over.
- unusximmortalis 11y ago
  Yes yes, let's do that. Let's start over with all the lessons learned. Let's build something that will not be able to be morphed into something close to ... hidious.
jacquesm 11y ago
Pet peeve: pdf links on google. When you want to mail someone a link to a pdf you search for the pdf, then copy-and-paste the link from the results page and boom a whole screen full of garbage and a link that is next to unusable instead of the actual link to the document. Super annoying.

elorant 11y ago

As a counterargument, if Instagram allows links there is a very good chance it will become a spammer’s playground with affiliate links all over the place.

bashinator 11y ago
Perhaps that wouldn't be true, if the WWW were more of a federation and less of a republic.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  That's a good point. Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem with that line of reasoning in relationship with the WWW is that the WWW is the platform and it is vast, federated or republic doesn't matter to the spammers, as long as there are forms and buttons to click spambots will come because the similarities between federated sites are still large enough to take advantage of them.
  - zmmmmm 11y ago
    >Spammers know everything about ROI, if a platform isn't worth it spam won't be found there. The problem is that the 'I' in ROI is tiny. I occasionally put up custom web forms for sending feedback about my software. All custom fields etc. And after a period they will start generating spam, despite the fact they send only to me and some spammer had to go and create a completely bespoke spam bot to fill it out. It is clearly worth it for spammers to hit just about every open web form on the internet, as far as I can tell.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Not sure how custom your form was, but spammers do have "smart" bots that use heuristics to guess what they should fill in the fields.
  - bashinator 11y ago
    If a Federated Internet (see dscr in alt thread) allows for some spam, that's OK by me. I think some spam is the price you pay for having a well trafficed protocol.

noobermin 11y ago

It seems like a number of people commenting here don't use instagram other than passively. You aren't allowed to have links on instagram pics, and as others have mentioned that this helps with spam issues, but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't doesn't lead to isolation and the same can be said for twitter. People do connect to each other across ig and twitter using hashtags, so in a way, hashtags help link people together in a way that links didn't. Something I like about hashtags over links is that the content you link to now isn't specific and thus there is no filter. This is how I discover content and content producers (photographers) I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For example, something I love is #komorebi[0]. I have discovered and followed a number of people from Japan and elsewhere on the basis of that hashtag and I wouldn't have found them if I could only go link by link. Hashtags effectively make a large number of nodes in the graph adjacent to you, while with hyperlinks, you'd have to travel from node to node through one edge at a time, making finding interesting content more difficult. What might differ then with the old web is that people are no longer represented by websites, they are represented by profiles, profiles that are somewhat limited, somewhat forced into a mold, so that it is easier to polish and curate them. That is a discussion in and of itself, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is connection between people going on, and in some ways, better than before. [0] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-equivalent-of-komorebi-%E6%9C%A8%E6%BC%8F%E3%82%8C%E6%97%A5-sunshine-filtering-through-leaves http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181055/english-eq... Using hashtags gives your content eyes and gives

chippy 11y ago
>but the idea that instagram "looks inwards" isn't Do instagram hashtags only work within Instagram? Do hashtags within Instagram look outwards, or inwards? How about Twitter? Does Twitter hashtags cross over to other "Content Producer" friendly applications?
- hasenj 11y ago
  Exactly, which emphasizes why instagram only looks inwards. In effect it's an isolated web. A web of images.

Retric 11y ago

Google search killed the web. Links went from how you shared content to how you spam page-rank which promoted spammers swarming any popular site not because humans would click links but because dumb algorithms would do so. Further simply linking to interesting things became less useful so simply sharing link collections stopped being a thing.

skj 11y ago
Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.
- andybak 11y ago
  IMHO the golden age of the web was in-between the points where pagerank started having a major impact (leading to the rise of indepenent blogs as easily discoverable sources of writing and thought) and before they got crushed between the scylla and charybdis of spam blogs and over-optimized big content sites. Google started drowning in spam and began to tweak it's algorithms in favour of big content. Simultaneously Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and god knows what else captured the mainstream eyeball. There's still great independent content out there - but somehow it now feels like it's a side-channel rather than a vanguard.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  It is? Google was created in 1998 and didn't hit it big for a few years thence. There was a vibrant web for several years before that, and other search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) did a perfectly fine job of doing what Google does now. Sites like Slashdot and Geocities existed long before Google came around. Google was a better search engine, but it hardly created the web.
  - contingencies 11y ago
    Agreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.

iamcreasy 11y ago

Also this part, The prominence of the stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the internet biased against quality – it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned. and, The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links – toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on the like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.

Jormundir 11y ago
Beautiful arguments. What's the solution put forward? Being critical is easy, but what's something better we can build with the internet?
- iamcreasy 11y ago
  From the article, Hossein Derakhshan is currently working on an art project called Link-age to promote hyperlinks and the open web. Link-age : http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/ http://newmediasoc.com/projects/link-age/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vvpan 11y ago
  Nothing wrong with being critical even when you don't have a solution.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Well, getting off Facebook and Twitter is a good start.

mooreds 11y ago

Just a request for clarification. > Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. Not clear what "them" refers to here. Is it instagram or "others"? > The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying. This seems to imply that it is the "others", but I'd love a second opinion.

wutbrodo 11y ago
I read it unambiguously as others fwiw

lcedp 11y ago

Indeed Instagram is looking inward. But isn't large portion of both Facebook and Twitter posts is no more than a link to other sites with a brief comment?