This is not what hyperlinks are for

Allow me a little rant. I was reading this FastCo article about a Spotify webapp that seemed interesting to me. Here’s a screencap of the relevant part.

See the hyperlinked words “playlist tool”, underlined in yellow? You’d think that this would link to the webapp in question.

But no, it resolves to a category/tag-explorer page with the URI http://www.fastcompany.com/explore/playlist-tool.

What about “web app”? Nope: http://www.fastcompany.com/explore/web-app.

Does the article link to the tool at all? No.

I don’t need to cite any RFC proposals to show that this is crappy UX at its worst, all in the name of driving page traffic and reducing the bounce rate.