If you use Instagram, you have seen an
That’s shorthand, of course, for the single link that Instagram allows users to drop into their profiles. Because other links can’t be added to posts, that single link is an endorsement: It must be the one URL in the world that you are willing to attach to yourself at that moment.
For years, I’ve wondered why Instagram doesn’t allow links elsewhere. It would be so simple. (I reached out to Instagram for comment, but they didn’t respond.) The Ringer’s Alyssa Bereznak dressed down the company in a post titled, appropriately, “‘Link in Bio’ Is the Worst Thing About Instagram.”
“A network that hosts millions of people won’t let them do something that is second nature for digital natives. So its users have concocted their own clunky loophole to get around the problem,” Bereznak writes. “It’s as if there were a permanent snowstorm in a city, and the mayor refused to clear the sidewalks. Inevitably, pedestrians would just stomp out their own inelegant roundabout paths to navigate the dirty, urine-filled slush.”
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