Trapped in the Platforms

Platform lock in and the Open Web

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The internet used to be a much wilder place.

I’m using the word ‘wild’ not as a way to say that people behaved in more extreme ways, but to say that it was literally unexplored. It felt like surveying a new frontier, a vast wilderness of unknown stuff that was just waiting to be discovered. One of my favorite ways to discover new things was a site called StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon had a pretty simple interface. The core idea was the ‘Stumble!’ button on the left hand side of the screen, which when pressed would take you to a random website in the StumbleUpon database. The idea was that over time, the algorithm learned what kind of sites you liked and didn’t like, and would be able to recommend you increasingly better websites to visit.

StumbleUpon eventually died, replaced by link aggregators like Reddit and Digg. But it was part of what I loved about the early web. The internet, at its best, feels like it has everything. It feels like a place where you can do anything, be anyone, and you might find the coolest, most interesting and most useful or bizarre stuff just around the corner. Like many old-timers I’m romantic about that sense of discovery and freedom. You used to hear metaphors like ‘the internet is the Wild West’, and that was true not because of people’s behaviors but because of the sense that the internet was an uncharted landscape there for you to explore.

I’m worried that world is disappearing. I’m worried that the sense of wonder that came with the internet as place-to-be-explored is going away.

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Today, StumbleUpon feels like an impossible site. A question for the readers out there - when was the last time you actually visited a new website you’d never been to before? I used to explore new sites every day, now it’s something I do only rarely.

I certainly look at a lot of new content. I’ll see a funny Twitter post, or learn about a new YouTube channel. But that’s all taking place on the same few giant platforms, which dominate our online experience. Years ago I talked about the idea of online gravity in You Need Gravity To Survive, explaining why many independent media sites have gone bankrupt:

But all of BuzzFeed’s success masked a crippling flaw in their long term plans - they were far, far more dependent on Facebook than they realized. If Facebook’s algorithms changed, BuzzFeed could find themselves with a fraction of their previous traffic. There was no way to stop that kind of disaster from happening, and boy did it happen…

BuzzFeed’s main issue was that nobody turned on their laptops or phones and went directly to BuzzFeed.com. They opened their laptops or phones and went to Facebook (or Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc). And then they would see something fun from BuzzFeed and click on it. BuzzFeed never controlled their own flow of users. To put it simply, they had no gravity. They had no organic pull where users felt compelled to visit their site independent of other sites or platforms. Digital gravity is a real thing, and if you don’t have any your site will always be vulnerable to disaster - no matter how successful you currently seem.

As I pointed out in 2023, the reason Buzzfeed (and other sites like Vice, Vox, etc) are so vulnerable is that they don’t generate their own traffic. They relied on platforms to send them traffic, and the platforms stopped doing it:

Increasingly, the goal of platforms is to make sure you never leave the platform.

Social media used to be a great way to find new and interesting things out there in the wider internet. But large platforms no longer want you clicking links and exploring in that way. They measure success by how long you stay, and failure by how quickly you leave. Leaving would mean lowering the total time you spend on the site, thus lowering the KPIs on a dashboard somewhere, thus making a VP of product look bad in the next quarterly meeting. So rather than encouraging you to explore, they try to keep you locked inside the platform.

You see this on social media platforms like X, which has explicitly deprioritized links under Elon Musk.¹ But they’re not alone. LinkedIn and Meta also algorithmically neuter any post with an external link. Instagram makes it nearly impossible to include links in posts. TikTok wants to convert its users to buying things on TikTok Shop, not buying products elsewhere, and promotes posts connected to TikTok Shop. This is also related to the practice whereby social media companies have stopped showing you a feed of people you follow, and instead show an algorithmic ‘For You’ designed to keep you on the site longer.

But you also see it in non-social media contexts. Microsoft wants you to use Teams and OneDrive, not Zoom or DropBox. Google is increasingly showing you AI-generated results rather than links to websites, so they can keep you on their page longer. The entire original purpose of Google was to search for external sites! But increasingly Google - along with Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and everyone else - wants to keep your attention locked on the properties they control.

This isn’t always bad. Google Calendar is useful, and so is Gmail, and I don’t think it’s necessarily sinister that the two are linked and owned by the same company. Sometimes integrated products are convenient and useful and valuable. I like that my calendar is seamlessly and automatically connected to my email - it saves me the headache of having to manually input a lot of meetings. But sometimes that momentary convenience causes stagnation later, as you never explore alternatives.

That lack of exploration has done serious damage to the businesses that use to rely on traffic from major platforms. Sites like BuzzFeed and Vice are dead. Other sites saw the catastrophic decline of ad revenue and had to pivot to subscription models - take a look at this chart from TalkingPointsMemo:

At the risk of being the old guy who says everything was better Back In My Day… this sucks.

• It’s a bad set up for discovering cool things. You have fewer moments of serendipity, where you organically discover something new and amazing. You can still discover a new podcast (on Spotify) or a new video essayist (on YouTube). But things just aren’t as free and open as the internet used to be.

• It’s dangerous for creators. Rather than making content in a truly independent way, you’re reliant on the goodwill of the platforms. This has its upsides. The scale that a giant like YouTube provides has made many, many YouTubers into millionaires. But if the pay rate changes, if your content is deemed unsafe for advertisers, if your account gets banned… if the algorithm decides that viewers don’t like you any more… there’s not much you can do. Have fun starting over on some other platform. Fans often don’t want to travel between platforms, so you might just be out of luck.

• It allows algorithms to dominate our experiences. Once the system learns what you want, it shows you more and more of it. In small measures, that’s a good thing. But once you’re locked in to a certain set of topics, you may never escape the algorithmic bubble you’ve created for yourself. This also increases the risk and people fall into conspiratorial holes or politically extreme content.

• It also creates isolated islands of content, where users can only really understand their own platform’s conventions. You become dumber and less fluent in other digital languages. You might speak Instagram, but you have no ability to understand what’s happening on Tumblr, X, YouTube, etc.

The internet is at its best when you can organically skip from blog to blog, new thing to new thing, discovering stuff naturally and democratically. It almost feels like the promise of the internet is fading as more and more stuff sits behind platform walls. I hope more people notice and make the conscious choice to keep linking stuff, because otherwise we’ll be missing something vital that makes the internet what it is.

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I love exploring the internet. I want you to love it. I’m an evangelist for Being Very Online.

This is why, every week, I include a multiple links sections at the end of the Weekly Scroll post. I think linking to other people’s work is one of the best things you can do on the internet. It helps you, the reader, discover new cool stuff. It helps those writers and content creators get more traffic and recognition. And it helps me fill out the post with content. Win, win, win. To me, this is the best part of the internet - discovering amazing new stuff via links on a trusted site.

It’s also why I’m on Substack in the first place. Substack is a platform. I’m sure they also have VPs who monitor KPI dashboards and are trying to maximize the amount of time spent on Substack. But for now, even though Substack is a platform, it feels more website-ish. It feels a bit more like the old blogosphere, like the old internet of discovery. It’s very explicitly pro-content, and it wants writers to earn money directly from their readers rather than from an algorithmic ad system. It’s pro-links and pro-exploration, and Substack Notes has been a pretty good tool for me to discover brand new stuff I never would have otherwise found.² Substack feels like a pretty decent compromise between the world of platforms and the Wild West that the internet used to be.

What can you do about all this? For one, you can subscribe to independent sites like this one. I’m going to do my best every week to bring you stories from around the web, from a wide variety of social media sites, platforms, and other communities. But you can engage in other ways. Click more links. Follow through to original sources. Be more mindful and don’t get captured. The platforms want to lock you in, but platform lock in only works if you let it.

In the spirit of this post, here’s a website called The Useless Web that will send you to a randomly chosen useless website. Have fun.

1. There’s a hack around this where, rather than linking to an article, you include a screenshot of a paragraph in your first tweet and then include the link in a second tweet. It’s a moderately effective workaround but it’s also very annoying.

2. Almost always within the Substack platform, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.