Links are incredibly useful. Leaving aside the dubious benefit of the idea that we want everything to "be inside the same app" (an idea that is essentially 'platform lock-in rephrased as a feature'), a huge amount of useful content is already on web pages with URLs. The ability to share those resources quickly is essential. There's zero benefit to forcing users into copying and pasting existing text into a medium with extreme formatting limitations and no ability to handle dynamic content or inline images. And there is negative benefit from moving content from the open web to a site that requires a login.
> Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, chose the name “World Wide Web” because he wanted to emphasize that, in this global hypertext system, anything could link to anything else
Berners-Lee was brought up as a rejoinder to various decision makers who originally agreed to implement it, being that the www is more original than twitter, and fwiw he's not an American.
It's quite exasperating to find someone arguing that there is some benefit to regression towards applications which don't link into other applications. Why be on the web at all?
If someone limits your options to only two, or even one source of resources, are you better off?
This discussion thread emerged from the suggestion of "maybe that's a good thing." Is it?
It's a question of trust, competition, and whether there's so much destruction of honest competition that only the destructive and twisted competition remains, keeping people afraid to venture into the unknown, willing to perpetuate the cycle of destroying competitors and endangering civilization itself.
This comment is so deep in the comment chain that it makes no sense to talk generally about this when the thread starting comments are available for you to reply too…
Are we not talking about opinion vs opinion ? What twitter engineers think is good for twitter vs what web engineers think is good for the web ? I don't really follow what your assertion is, I would be happy to elaborate my position if you elaborate yours.
Now there is. Didn't used to be, and it cost a startling amount of money for that to be the case, and it was done to achieve a purpose rather than to make Twitter better at being Twitter. Something of a pyrrhic victory, that.
