The War on links continues

More and more, I'm coming across new attitudes to URLs. Essentially, people are saying that one should not post links, or include them in emails, as it may be offputting or seen as risky by recipients.

Obviously this is a disaster for the web and openness and agency (etc, etc).

Contributing factors seem to be:

people cannot trust their own email/browser platforms not to compromise their own computers when accessing unknown URLs

the ability, via Javascript or otherwise, to obfuscate the referent of links

a lack of self-publishing and self-hosting, leading to a lack of familiarity with what is and is not "safe"

a presumption that big, well-known sites are, by reason of being big and well-known, somehow likely to be "safer" than others

There is also a point here to be made about the "Y-property": the idea that the person who sends you a link is someone you're having to trust about where that link goes

YURLs, Y-property