[orcasushi]

Average websites goal is now to keep you on them as long as possible. According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there. Linking to another website destroys that metric.

Also if you are going to make a purchase somewhere, any website would try to get a cut of the money you spend by actually sending referral links to the product. So small websites that do not allow this service will not get linked so much.

On a metalevel it is thus that links or connections between items are information. Information is money. And as soon as that became evident links and connections also became more scarce.

[fractalb]

> According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there.

That is really sad. Metric folks inventing metrics for the sake of metrics, which dubiously correlates to profitability of the company.

[toastal]

Yup and developers have been allowing the marketing and product teams to break the back button as well opening every external link in a new window instead so users have to keep something open to their site. You always had middle-click to do this, but now it's being forced on users.

[toastal]

I just noticed even the goobers at GitHub break the back button when you click a project link too. I don't know why people champion this brand when they have dark patterns and shoehorn 'social' functions into the proprietary platform.

[type0]

This is a prisoners dilemma of sorts and the whole free web is loosing in this.