So reading my morning daily sites while having coffee, I came across an small article poorly written on Mashable which was about Foursquare. It was written in such a way as to frustrate the hell out of me and this is a trend I have seen other places.
Basically as I was reading the article, I wanted to better understanding what Foursquare was and wanted to check it out and then come back and finish the article. This way I would have a deeper understanding about what I am reading. Yet here again we have an Internet site trying to horde all traffic coming into it and not sharing any traffic outside of it. When I come across sites like this, I tend to avoid them if at all possible. In most cases a regular author would link to the website, but sites like Mashable and hub pages don't allow outside linking except in certain situations. As with nofollow they attempt to get all traffic and keep all traffic at their site.
If memory serves About started this trend and in those days you actually got paid if you created pages that brought traffic. Now they use and abuse their customers and writers. All I can say is this is the primitive DRM mindset that serves no one, not even the company doing it. In the short term this might work, but int he long term it drives people away. The funny thing is that Mashable calls it's self a social network, but it really is the worst sense of that. You can only become apart of their network if you write articles for free. Mashable is really a big marketing machine that use other social networks to promote itself. The funny thing is that it doesn't work very well. I have only had to stumble across them a couple of time and their articles appear to mostly recycled from other content on the net.
In closing, sharing is the key to real community and for your own growth.