Those sharing links don't go to any company, they simply integrate with platforms to facilitate sharing. It's one of the few tools available to disseminate. I find it odd that sharing links made you question the article. I would personally focus on the content of the article, not the ability to share content.
He says in the second article you link that he doesn’t think hotlinking is bad per se, especially when it’s done in support of knowledge and education.
I think the moral is rather that hotlinking is dangerous.
I'd say rather that linking is the standard, the established social order, and that companies restricting linking in their platforms are the ones subverting.
I've always considered linking perfectly fine, but what to me is shady when platforms start to summarize or preview content of the link to the point where that functions as a substitute for the site.
There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly. Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's perfectly legitimate to not allow this.
Is this distinguishable from a startup creating OSS, which will cause people to "lie to Google" when citing the OSS, and if so how? (I happen to know two reasons how: they're much, much cheaper to crank out at scale than OSS is, and they're typically backed by an outsourced promotion team. These do not strike me as having ethical significance.)
Are we maybe leading with our geek brains here? The geek brain that maybe isn't quite 100% onboard with "it is ethical to attempt to market $FILL_IN_BLANK , even in ways which are effective"?
Edited to add: I do not often ask myself, after typing in A HREF, "Am I being true in my thoughts and deeds to my primary reason for all linking activity, which is to preserve the sanctity of Google's link graph?" Should I? Really?
That's perfectly fine thinking if it's something you found yourself. However, implicit in linking something on a social link aggregator is a sort of "here, read this, it's good" on the part of the poster, which just doesn't jive with the site asking for a fee. It's like bringing donuts for your friends, opening the box and telling them you got each person their favorite, and then charging for them—it's just not how our particular social machinery works.
People got so used to seeing links up to the point a fight might end in a "URL request": you have to sustain your claims by bringing a link to the discussion, and if you fail to do so, you are wrong. Like if every research and every paper, study or whatever is publicly accessible and indexed.
If am I wrong, please provide a link to a study which demonstrates it.
I don't think linking should be illegal, but en mass linking with the blatant intent for people to exploit linked to resources... perhaps it should be? I don't know.
RE: your point that open space for people to link to shouldn't be illegal, is it ok then to create a CP linking website? Would you be OK with this?
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