Nobody should be using URL shorteners in the first place.
Afaik, originally they solved the problem twitter has created: URLs were counted together with the tweet text - with overall limit of 140.
deleted by creator
I think Twitter might do it to standardize the number of characters a link takes up in a tweet? 23 characters IIRC
That used to be the case, don’t think it is anymore. I don’t remember though, I ditched that shit hole.
Why is that? They can be useful - especially if you are including links in something like a print publication
It doesnt matter how short a link is on paper, I am probably not going to take the time to type the whole damn thing on a shitty phone keyboard.
QR codes aren’t great either, but I would prefer those in a print publication than a shortened URL. Just give me the full URL in a QR code thanks.
How about a QR code that takes you to a shortened link
URL shorteners are but inherently bad. I find them useful. I self host them on domains I own. So they’re secure, trust worthy, I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be.
Plus, I’m pretty sure Twitter forces you to use their shortener. My URL http://gho.st was “shortened” to a longer https://t.co/blahblah URL 😂
I work for a college. We use our internal link shorteners to make sure a given link points at the latest version of a resource and measure engagement by seeing what is the best way to get important information to our students and faculty. (Did people actually click on that announcement in our LMS?)
They’re terribly useful for us.
I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be
That’s inherently bad as in:
- Third party (you) tracking the user
- Hiding the true target from the user
- Destroying any attempt at content archival
They’re not inherently bad “for you”, just for everyone else.
Third party (you) tracking the user
I’m not tracking users, I’m tracking engagement. I’m not Zuckerberg
Hiding the true target from the user
99.99% of website use a reverse proxy, the target is nearly always hidden. I don’t think you understand how the internet works.
Destroying any attempt at content archival
Who would archive a shortened URL and not follow the link to its target? It’s not my fault if people don’t know how to archive my content.
URL shorteners are not inherently bad.
You being able to track engagement is bad, actually.
This obviously depends on the context. For instance, I’m speaking at a public event and I put a link up on a presentation to my website. The website is running on my nginx server so I could already track every visit. Having a shortened URL helps me gauge the value of my talk. It’s not black and white
Real name and face on the internet guy doesn’t get to have an opinion on tracking.
deleted by creator
It’s like assuming someone doesn’t understand hygiene because they shit on the floor, so unreasonable.
I don’t believe in security by obscurity
I self host them on domains I own.
I’ve been trying to get a short domain to do exactly that, do you know any good brokers?
No sorry, I was just lucky and persistent
Posting for no reason in particular.
https://github.com/theAlinP/twitter-link-deobfuscator
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-deobfuscator/
Eh I don’t think it’s malicious in nature but can’t prove it either is or isn’t. They might be doing more analysis on some outbound links or users for something or just A/B testing some additional methods for gathering more data. Unsure. But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.
If adding some analytics adds 5s to the load time, then they need to fire their developers.
There’s no way this is accidental.
That’s kind of the problem, they did fire their developers.
