Interesting that they chose to save 3 characters on their short URLs via the tiny domain name, but are wasting 4 by using only numeric characters in their story

Interesting that they chose to save 3 characters on their short URLs via the tiny domain name, but are wasting 4 by using only numeric characters in their story slugs. Nine numeric characters provide for a possible set of 1 billion unique story IDs. You can get roughly the same size set with five alpha numeric characters (even more if you toss in a couple of symbol characters).