The Facebook Hyperlink Silo

This morning I saw two posts commenting on how Facebook was paywalling external hyperlinks. In order to link to an external site Facebook is now adding payed tiers. Pay one amount, and you can post more hyperlinks, pay another and you can pay fewer.

Years ago people spoke of the social media silos and Facebook is amplifying the problem, by rationing people’s ability to hyperlink to their own content on other sites. In effect, if you’re in the facebook silo, you’re expected to stay within the silo. Facebook becomes the portal and trap.

Today it is easy to open Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or other apps and to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, seeing worthless content, without any reward. We don’t browse for interesting articles. We don’t scroll looking for a conversation. We just scroll to waste time instead of connecting with others.

In the era of browsing the web we browsed from one news site to another or from one blog post to another, and we carried out web searches, looking for something. Now we mindlessly consume, looking at what the algorithm has selected for us based on what others have browsed to.

As I write this I realise that I use Feedly and Flipboard far less than I used to. There was a time when I used Google Reader, and Feedly, and Flipboard daily but with social media, when it was social, we relied on community for hyperlinks. Now that social media is dead, and that it is become more and more fascinated by its own bellybutton to use a franglicism, it makes sense to consider how we find new sources of information, now that the silos that were formerly social, are now more and more locked off from the open web.

The Guardian wrote about how publishers are worried by the change but I see it from the other angle. If we no longer chat with friends, and if news sources and content creators can’t share links, and if Facebook wants people to pay 50 USD for two hyperlinks per month, then what niche does Facebook retain? I’m not paying 50 CHF per month to share two hyperlinks.

Jetpack tried to get us to pay for social sharing and I refuse. If my site is free to read, and access, why would I pay for social sharing? I come from the era when the web was free and open, rather than siloed and paid for.

Recently, whilst browsing Facebook, especially, I noticed the tendency to lure you with a video that you click and watch, and then watch a dozen more. I also noticed that these videos are getting longer and longer. Sometimes they’re three or four minutes long. It is very easy to lose an entire afternoon to these videos, and have no reward.

If you’re reading news articles you’re more informed about what’s going on. If you’re having social conversations then your social network is being consolidated. If you look for sports events on Strava or events on Meetup then you’re looking to be social in person, and connect with more people.

Facebook, at this point is about wasting time, rather than being social. It is for this reason that Facebook and Twitter, which might have been worth paying for in 2007 or so, became a waste of time, and in association, a waste of money. What would we pay for?

Social networks, including Facebook, benefit from people sharing content with each other. If we restrict the use of hyperlinks then the site becomes less relevant, more niche. I feel that FB is pivoting more and more towards video because the more videos we watch, the easier it is to force video ads on us.

Meanwhile Strava has never, that I know of, allowed the sharing of links, and as a result the site has a well defined niche, and that niche is so well defined, and so engaged, that many of those I cycle, run and hike with have pro accounts.

Hyperlinks are core to the social web, and if sharing them is paywalled then Facebook undercuts its own conversational niche. Having said this, I barely ever see conversations around links I share. That’s why charging for hyperlinks is counter-productive, and why blocking them is destructive.

If I’m browsing for content I will use flipboard or similar sites in future.