6 ms·

URL shorteners were (still are!) probably the worst idea/trend on the internet. They solved a silly short-term pain (twitter not storing full URLs) but introduc

URL shorteners were (still are!) probably the worst idea/trend on the internet. They solved a silly short-term pain (twitter not storing full URLs) but introduced a long term dependency, and normalized tracking via these links.

JamesSwift 4y ago
They are also useful for reducing SMS cost EDIT: also for vanity "rememberable" urls
- lekevicius 4y ago
  I have nothing against "owned" short URLs, without external dependencies. But for "vanity", the best vanity URL is a domain name. Buy it, own it.
  - JamesSwift 4y ago
    The vanity part is not the domain, its the path. foo.com/sites/blog/signup-for-my-conference-2022-seo-friendly-url vs shortenedurl.com/conf-2022
- mygo 4y ago
  DNS solved vanity memorable URLs, and continues to do so if someone is not looking for a .com URL shorteners offering vanity urls solved people not needing to deal with the hassle of purchasing a vanity domain via a registrar, setting up DNS records, and waiting for propagation.
  - JamesSwift 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that instead of short.com/foo you register foo.mydomain.com and setup a reverse proxy to redirect? Isnt that just a url shortener with more steps? Why wouldn't I just setup my own shortener service instead and send a `POST` request when I want a new url?
    - mygo 4y ago
      > Isnt that just a url shortener with more steps? URL shorteners came later, and solved the problem of people needing to deal with “more steps” in order to have short memorable urls. Achieving memorable urls in “less steps” is one of the major selling points of url shorteners. However, url shorteners did not solve short memorable urls — DNS had already solved that. But, as you’ve pointed out, acquiring a domain and setting up DNS records takes more work than simply using a url shortener service.
TkTech 4y ago
I use them to get long GitHub URLs for diffs between tags into IRC messages (which also have a line limit). It's used by cpythons commit notifier for example.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  IRC line limits are normally plenty for GitHub URLs—my vague memory (haven’t used IRC for quite some years) is that 512 was the proper wire format length limit, and I can’t remember what other guff there was in transmitting a message but less than 50 characters, so it should still be over 450 characters. Think I did encounter one server with a considerably lower limit once, maybe around 200 so it was probably 256, which is still oodles for all normal GitHub URLs. (Oh sure, you can exceed it easily enough if you want to, by defining ridiculously long ref names, or referring to a very long path.) But really, opaque short URLs are significantly worse than the full URL: you have to go to extra effort to create them, and extra effort to retrieve from them, and you’re adding an additional point of failure, and you can no longer just read the URL.
nocman 4y ago
URL shorteners have been around longer than Twitter. For example, tinyurl.com launched in 2002 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL). Twitter wasn't until 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). People have many reasons they want a shorter URL. Twitter is only one of them.
_8j50 4y ago
What are you talking about? I use them all the time to type out a url I found on one machine for use on another machine or for sharing with people.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Unless your machines are air-gapped and disconnected from the Internet - aren't there better ways to send text these days than typing it in by hand?
  - _8j50 4y ago
    No there aren't. Do you suggest setting up nginx on one machine as a reverse proxy to the long link the second machine can access? Many ways for sure but typing out a few letters is the easiest. I do this for regular desktops but I do it more on headless machines or when installing an OS.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Email? DM? Text message? AirDrop?
      - tedivm 4y ago
        Firefox has a feature where, if you're logged into firefox, you can see what tabs are open on your other browsers. It makes sharing links across computers trivial.
        tomschlick 4y ago
        You can also right click a tab and directly send that tab to another device.
        nybble41 4y ago
        Chrome has a similar feature when sync is enabled: the "tabs from other devices" section of the History page (Ctrl-H). The context menu for tabs also includes an option to send the tab to another device.
greggsy 4y ago
They fill a need across a range of use cases, and make content much easier to read and share. Have you seen a raw Teams link recently?
CivBase 4y ago
I wish that tools which remove unnecessary information from URLs were more popular than traditional URL "shorteners". For example, if I go to some random product page on Amazon, the link looks something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Really-Long-Product-Name/dp/PRODUCTID/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=garbage&pf_rd_p=long-garbage-value-that-doesnt-matter-to-the-user&pf_rd_r=MORELONGGARBAGE&pd_rd_r=another-really-long-garbage-value&pd_rd_wg=garbage&ref_=even_more_garbage&th=1 That link looks ridiculous and isn't suited for sharing in many situations. For most people, this is the link they really want: https://www.amazon.com/dp/PRODUCTID/ I know there are tools out there that can shorten URLs like that. I used to have a browser extension which did exactly that. It doesn't work for everything, but at least your link wont die because a third-party service shut down or messed up.
- karlicoss 4y ago
  It's kind of tricky to do in general case, e.g. even hackernews is keeping meaningful semantic information in id= query parameter. Because of that it ultimately needs to a site-specific database/algorithm, perhaps with a fallback to the default behaviour like simply cleaning up the most common garbage like (_encoding/usg/etc). I suspect it's possible to use some sort of machine learning to guess the meaningful parts of the URL path/query/fragments, but even for that we need some human curation for the training set. I wish we could collaborate on a shared database/library for that, have sketched some ideas/applications/prior art here: https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/projects/cannon.html https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/projects/cannon.html I started thinking about it since I have a similar problem in Promnesia (https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme), a knowledge management tool I'm working on. Ideally I want to normalise URLS, so they address the exact bit of information, and nothing more.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    It doesn't cover everyone, but you should know about rel="canonical" (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6596 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6596). For example, Amazon helpfully hints that this messy Kindle Paperwhite link (https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essentials-including/dp/B09FNJZD68/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3H1D0BMHBNTQ0&keywords=kindle+paperwhite+2022&sprefix=kindl%2Caps%2C358&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essential...) is actually https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essentials-including/dp/B09FNJZD68 https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essential.... Additionally, CleanURLs to the rescue! https://github.com/ClearURLs https://github.com/ClearURLs
beardedscotsman 4y ago
Twitter... have you ever tried to share a Sharepoint link. Those take up like 4+ lines in emails, it's a nightmare. Back in the day, Microsoft even used to have an internal url shortening service that people used to clean up Sharepoint links.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Aka.Ms?
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    That's actually newer. I've remembered go.microsoft.com for a long time though.
bodge5000 4y ago
Ages ago they used to be quite big for podcasts where they didnt have any means to share text and would have to manually read out the url

JamesSwift 4y ago

They are also useful for reducing SMS cost EDIT: also for vanity "rememberable" urls

lekevicius 4y ago
I have nothing against "owned" short URLs, without external dependencies. But for "vanity", the best vanity URL is a domain name. Buy it, own it.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  The vanity part is not the domain, its the path. foo.com/sites/blog/signup-for-my-conference-2022-seo-friendly-url vs shortenedurl.com/conf-2022
mygo 4y ago
DNS solved vanity memorable URLs, and continues to do so if someone is not looking for a .com URL shorteners offering vanity urls solved people not needing to deal with the hassle of purchasing a vanity domain via a registrar, setting up DNS records, and waiting for propagation.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that instead of short.com/foo you register foo.mydomain.com and setup a reverse proxy to redirect? Isnt that just a url shortener with more steps? Why wouldn't I just setup my own shortener service instead and send a `POST` request when I want a new url?
  - mygo 4y ago
    > Isnt that just a url shortener with more steps? URL shorteners came later, and solved the problem of people needing to deal with “more steps” in order to have short memorable urls. Achieving memorable urls in “less steps” is one of the major selling points of url shorteners. However, url shorteners did not solve short memorable urls — DNS had already solved that. But, as you’ve pointed out, acquiring a domain and setting up DNS records takes more work than simply using a url shortener service.

TkTech 4y ago

I use them to get long GitHub URLs for diffs between tags into IRC messages (which also have a line limit). It's used by cpythons commit notifier for example.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chrismorgan 4y ago
IRC line limits are normally plenty for GitHub URLs—my vague memory (haven’t used IRC for quite some years) is that 512 was the proper wire format length limit, and I can’t remember what other guff there was in transmitting a message but less than 50 characters, so it should still be over 450 characters. Think I did encounter one server with a considerably lower limit once, maybe around 200 so it was probably 256, which is still oodles for all normal GitHub URLs. (Oh sure, you can exceed it easily enough if you want to, by defining ridiculously long ref names, or referring to a very long path.) But really, opaque short URLs are significantly worse than the full URL: you have to go to extra effort to create them, and extra effort to retrieve from them, and you’re adding an additional point of failure, and you can no longer just read the URL.

nocman 4y ago

URL shorteners have been around longer than Twitter. For example, tinyurl.com launched in 2002 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL). Twitter wasn't until 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). People have many reasons they want a shorter URL. Twitter is only one of them.

_8j50 4y ago

What are you talking about? I use them all the time to type out a url I found on one machine for use on another machine or for sharing with people.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Unless your machines are air-gapped and disconnected from the Internet - aren't there better ways to send text these days than typing it in by hand?
- _8j50 4y ago
  No there aren't. Do you suggest setting up nginx on one machine as a reverse proxy to the long link the second machine can access? Many ways for sure but typing out a few letters is the easiest. I do this for regular desktops but I do it more on headless machines or when installing an OS.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Email? DM? Text message? AirDrop?
    - tedivm 4y ago
      Firefox has a feature where, if you're logged into firefox, you can see what tabs are open on your other browsers. It makes sharing links across computers trivial.
      - tomschlick 4y ago
        You can also right click a tab and directly send that tab to another device.
      - nybble41 4y ago
        Chrome has a similar feature when sync is enabled: the "tabs from other devices" section of the History page (Ctrl-H). The context menu for tabs also includes an option to send the tab to another device.

greggsy 4y ago

They fill a need across a range of use cases, and make content much easier to read and share. Have you seen a raw Teams link recently?

CivBase 4y ago

I wish that tools which remove unnecessary information from URLs were more popular than traditional URL "shorteners". For example, if I go to some random product page on Amazon, the link looks something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Really-Long-Product-Name/dp/PRODUCTID/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=garbage&pf_rd_p=long-garbage-value-that-doesnt-matter-to-the-user&pf_rd_r=MORELONGGARBAGE&pd_rd_r=another-really-long-garbage-value&pd_rd_wg=garbage&ref_=even_more_garbage&th=1 That link looks ridiculous and isn't suited for sharing in many situations. For most people, this is the link they really want: https://www.amazon.com/dp/PRODUCTID/ I know there are tools out there that can shorten URLs like that. I used to have a browser extension which did exactly that. It doesn't work for everything, but at least your link wont die because a third-party service shut down or messed up.

karlicoss 4y ago
It's kind of tricky to do in general case, e.g. even hackernews is keeping meaningful semantic information in id= query parameter. Because of that it ultimately needs to a site-specific database/algorithm, perhaps with a fallback to the default behaviour like simply cleaning up the most common garbage like (_encoding/usg/etc). I suspect it's possible to use some sort of machine learning to guess the meaningful parts of the URL path/query/fragments, but even for that we need some human curation for the training set. I wish we could collaborate on a shared database/library for that, have sketched some ideas/applications/prior art here: https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/projects/cannon.html https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/projects/cannon.html I started thinking about it since I have a similar problem in Promnesia (https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme), a knowledge management tool I'm working on. Ideally I want to normalise URLS, so they address the exact bit of information, and nothing more.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  It doesn't cover everyone, but you should know about rel="canonical" (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6596 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6596). For example, Amazon helpfully hints that this messy Kindle Paperwhite link (https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essentials-including/dp/B09FNJZD68/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3H1D0BMHBNTQ0&keywords=kindle+paperwhite+2022&sprefix=kindl%2Caps%2C358&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essential...) is actually https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essentials-including/dp/B09FNJZD68 https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Signature-Essential.... Additionally, CleanURLs to the rescue! https://github.com/ClearURLs https://github.com/ClearURLs

beardedscotsman 4y ago

Twitter... have you ever tried to share a Sharepoint link. Those take up like 4+ lines in emails, it's a nightmare. Back in the day, Microsoft even used to have an internal url shortening service that people used to clean up Sharepoint links.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Aka.Ms?
- zinekeller 4y ago
  That's actually newer. I've remembered go.microsoft.com for a long time though.

bodge5000 4y ago

Ages ago they used to be quite big for podcasts where they didnt have any means to share text and would have to manually read out the url