I don’t think instagram’s link policy has anything to do with dark patterns. Rather it is a distinct design choice for a social network to avoid spam. Another key decision instagram made was preventing shares/retweets, with the intended effect of promoting original content. These two consequential decisions (both made very early on in Instagram history, likely even before the fb acquisition) made original photos the focus. It’s an opinionated app and has succeeded because of it — I don’t believe either decision should be called a dark pattern.
How the hell does it prevent spam? Spammers just bake bit.ly links into the image which I doubt have a much lower hit rate than usual spam.
Meanwhile, every time I find a new account I like and want to see what they're all about, I have to use a search engine because all of their posts just say "link in bio" for the context and additional content, but their bio link has long since changed. This is a clear dark pattern to keep people in their walled garden and I really can't see any other explanation.
(they do allow links for ads though, which are usually just spam anyways, so that reinforces this even further)
I figure that people who are gullible enough to believe spam like "Triple your investment at our new exchange: cryptomatron.xyz" wouldn't be stopped by having to type the URL in manually.
I never thought of the blocking of links as spam prevention but it makes complete sense.
Now that they’ve progressed a lot they have swipe up links for various accounts that integrate with ads and other publishers so they are loosening the grip.
At first i hated not having links and being able to click but now i rather appreciate it because anecdotally it definitely reduced spam.
Don’t forget that Instagram was originally just an app with no website. The fact that you got a website to see some posts technically is a step towards openness. =]]
I have similar feelings about the move away from native apps that others have about the move away from the “open web”: I like being able to control the update cycle of the applications I use and not accept new features I don’t like.
I was referring to the fact that they don’t make urls clickable, to disincentivize spammers sharing urls (at least make it a less effective spam tactic)
