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Comment by ngoel36 | Hacker News Reader

Yes but the few social media sites get to control how a link to anywhere else appears. For example, try updating your Facebook status with a video. If you upload the raw mp4 directly, the video will autoplay in your friends' news feeds, generating more engagement & likes. If you instead post a YouTube link, your friends will see one screenshot in an ugly embedded player.

Facebook, intentionally or not, gets to control part of YouTube's fate and relevance. It has every right to, but that's a bit scary when it's the only way to share a video with my friends.

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Google does the exact same thing with queries. Plenty of queries will be answered with data harvested from the pages that those queries originally led to. Now google shows a box on the side with the facts collected from the underlying pages. No more need to go visit any of those.

Then there's google images, which shows the images on the google site itself (a vast copyright infringement, unlike the search engine result pages these are copies of the images at quite high resolution).

Every web company, as soon as they get large enough will stop playing nice and will start trying to lock their users into their own ecosystem.

> Then there's google images, which shows the images on the google site itself (a vast copyright infringement, unlike the search engine result pages these are copies of the images at quite high resolution).

Well, image search would be a lot less useful if it didn't show images. And Google's image thumbnails are very modest resolution copies. The larger image previews displayed when clicking a specific image result are actually hotlinked from the original source, and hence not copyright violations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking#Copyright_law_i...

> The larger image previews displayed when clicking a specific image result are actually hotlinked from the original source

So the website pays the cost without getting the benefit of a visit?

Exactly. As if hotlinking makes it better.

Heads you're a copyright thief, tails you're a bandwidth thief...

The larger image preview is still moderately sized (it loads the original image but in a smaller frame), so most users probably click through to the original page (since most users aren't savvy enough to right-click and go to the image directly, or mouse over to the "view image" button).

"Every web company, as soon as they get large enough will stop playing nice and will start trying to lock their users into their own ecosystem."

I think you hit something here... Why is this happening? Over and over again? Like a broken record. It is deep roooted, survival instincts which are acquired unconsciously because of the medium you're born and living in. Can this be changed? So future (web) company wil not be like this? Is anyone reflecting on this? Working on this? It is one's resp/job/passion to do this? I would love to know, help.

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