Social Media Is Deliberately Making the Web Worse
Social media platforms deliberately restrict basic web functionality, creating unnecessary friction when accessing, linking to, copying, and sharing content. These user-hostile design choices undermine interoperability and damage the open web.
By. Jacob
Edited: 2026-08-08 14:40
Social media has become a striking example of how online platforms can actively work against the interests of their own users and the open web. Instagram is a particularly obvious example: instead of providing a functional, open, and user-friendly experience, it imposes artificial restrictions that make basic actions unnecessarily frustrating. What should be a simple platform for sharing, linking to, and interacting with content has become a tightly controlled environment designed to keep users inside the platform and its preferred workflows. Here are some obvious examples that I am sure have irritated many users:
- You can't post clickable links in descriptions alongside images; a deliberate design decision that goes against users' wishes.
- Text—including links that appear as plain text in descriptions—cannot be selected and copied within the app; a deliberate design decision that infuriates users and goes against our wishes.
- On the web-version of Instagram, you will be prompted to use the app; a deliberate design decision that infuriates users, ruins the open internet, and goes against our wishes.
Social media companies should not be allowed to deliberately degrade the quality and usability of their products in pursuit of ever-increasing profits. When platforms intentionally remove basic functionality, restrict user freedom, or create friction purely to lock people into their ecosystems, they are not innovating—they are exploiting their users. The internet should empower communication and access to information, not be engineered into a maze of artificial limitations designed to maximize engagement metrics and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience.
Reddit, X, and Facebook suffer from the same problem: artificial restrictions that make it unnecessarily difficult to access, share, link to, and interact with information. By pushing users into closed platforms and limiting ordinary web functionality, these companies undermine the open web and replace it with increasingly isolated ecosystems under corporate control.
Self-hosting
Self-hosting, personal blogs, and open platforms such as Matrix and Nextcloud represent a healthier vision for the internet. They give individuals greater ownership of their data, content, and online identity while encouraging interoperability instead of artificial lock-in. A web built around open standards, independent websites, and user-controlled services is more resilient, diverse, and genuinely empowering. Unfortunately, this approach is not practical for everyone, leaving many people dependent on platforms that exploit their position and impose deliberately restrictive design choices. In some cases, even basic web functionality is made unnecessarily difficult, including obtaining canonical URLs for content, sharing direct links, and accessing publicly available content without an account or proprietary app.
Regulation of big platforms
This is why stronger regulation of dominant social media platforms is also needed. Platforms should be required to follow established web standards and reasonable industry best practices rather than deliberately creating unnecessary barriers between their services and the wider web. Links should use real canonical URLs instead of obscured tracking and redirection URLs designed to keep users inside proprietary ecosystems.
Most importantly, content deliberately published to the public should actually be public. If a Facebook post, Reddit discussion, or other resource is publicly shared, anyone should be able to open its URL in an ordinary web browser without creating an account, installing an app, accepting a forced redirect, or navigating artificial login barriers. Platforms should remain free to require authentication for genuinely private or account-specific functionality, but publicly accessible information should not be held hostage behind artificial platform restrictions.
The open web depends on the principle that websites can link to one another and that publicly published information can be accessed through standard browsers using stable, meaningful URLs. Regulation should defend that principle and prevent sufficiently powerful platforms from replacing the web with closed ecosystems in which access, linking, discovery, and interoperability exist only on terms dictated by a handful of corporations.
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