9 ms·

I really hate link shorteners, because they inevitably die and leave a spray of broken links over the web. What’s wrong with normal URLs?

• bluetidepro 4y ago
  >What’s wrong with normal URLs? Length (in many contexts). Agree or disagree, but that answers your question for the "why" from what I have seen in my experience. Marketing wants to link to something sexy like "te.st/dog" vs "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939407". Many sites may have longer url structures (esp nested structures) for various reasons that are not easy to remember or sexy to have on an ad, so when it's short it's easy to remember, and simple to type out for the user.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    it's not really about it being sexy, it's about it being able to be typed in manually on a mobile keyboard by humans. the url editing experience on mobile browsers is terrible. like trying to write an essay through a keyhole.
    • bluetidepro 4y ago
      That too, yup!
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    Tim Berners-Lee invented hyperlinks so that URLs can be shortened to a single word, character or even image while keeping them visible to the user if need to by hovering over it. People using these kind of links shorterner are people using bad tools and bad UIs. This is that usage that needs to be corrected, and not by inventing things even more stupid.
    • InitialBP 4y ago
      You can't put a hyperlink on a magazine, the tv, or the radio. There are definitely reasonable applications of shortened URLs that apply outside of the normal day-to-day web browsing and applications.
      • Semaphor 4y ago
        I agree, we sell PDFs with the ability to be printed, all links are short links (on our own domain, though) so they aren’t lost/inaccessible when printed.
      • prmoustache 4y ago
        qrcodes are superior for most printed usage. It never occured to me to type an url from a radio or TV message and I've never heard anyone spelling an url from a url shortener. All TV/radio broadcasters will rather tell you check for more information in "name of the show" on "domain of the TV/radio channel" or their social media feed. They all have a web presence anyway.
        • Volundr 4y ago
          > qrcodes are superior for most printed usage Disagree. I can't scan or type a QR code into my computer.
          • prmoustache 4y ago
            Usuallt you don't deal with printed code when you are in front of a computer and even then it is easy to scan the code with your phone and paste the link on your computer.
            • Volundr 4y ago
              I don't? I do most of my reading at home where I have multiple computers in easy reach. I'm also not sure how I'm "easily" copy/pasting between my phone/computer. Is this an iOS/OS X thing? Not everyone is in that eco-system.
    • bluetidepro 4y ago
      I think you underestimate how much separation there sometimes is on large teams with the people who run/build the website, vs the marketers who are moving fast. I've seen terrible devs who will claim it takes DAYS to add a simple redirect of dog.com/X to your long marketing url (cutting out services like this), but the marketing team can't wait that long so services like this are much more async in many contexts, too.
      • solardev 4y ago
        100% this... I was our web dev working with marketing, and before I got there, short URLs/marketing links had to be manually created as new pages in Drupal sometimes, in a 301 redirect dashboard other times (what the hell), which meant submitting a ticket, waiting for it to get prioritized, etc., then making sure there were no conflicts anywhere. Switched it out with a cheap commercial short URL system with its own domain, and the marketers could login anytime and make their own URLs, see all the analytics, edit the destinations, etc. Everyone was much happier after that. It did indeed cut the wait from days to seconds, and plus they had real-time usage data after that.
      • intelVISA 4y ago
        Terrible, perhaps, but very smart.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • EGreg 4y ago
      Actually, link shorteners are just a symptom of the problem. The problem is the DNS system itself. It is the reason that your email address gets spammed, and the reason that you can DDOS websites, etc. DNS is a glorified search engine, and it is only really used for root urls like mydomain.tld . It's pretty much only good in two contexts: 1) for when people dictate a specific domain name verbally to someone, and even then, spelling errors can occur. 2) advertising a URL somewhere to a landing site. But you can just use a QR code that people can scan, or a link in a webpage. Everything else may as well be at non-human-readable domain names, in which case you can even use distributed hash tables instead of DNS. Perhaps one day browsers will allow plugins realize their own schemas, such as ipfs://hjkldfjhsdfkjgsdhfgsdf and the plugin would do the routing instead of DNS. Is that currently possible with standard browser extensions?
      • blowski 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure my email gets spammed because bad actors exist in the world. I'm sceptical any technical solution will protect against that.
        • EGreg 4y ago
          It takes both. If people couldn't send a message to your email just by knowing it, then you wouldn't get SPAM. Instead, you could be giving out capabilities, to send you email. And if one of them was abused, you'd simply turn it off, and only accounts who used it in the past could continue to send. New ones wouldn't be.
  • robin_reala 4y ago
    Right, but your domain name is part of your marketing effort. And you don’t need to resort to a short URL service to get a branded URL. If you listen to any sponsored podcasts they have the job of reading out a sponsorship URL, and inevitably it’s something like {sponsoringCompany}.com/{podcastName}, which is totally understandable to people.
    • 411111111111111 4y ago
      It is maybe understandable but also too long for lots of content. You want it to be as short and memorable as possible for anything which has limited "screen" time. Which is basically everything, i.e. Radio broadcasts, video streams/adverts, Billboards you drive by, advertisements on websites etc.
  • MisterSandman 4y ago
    I feel like custom URLs are better than random bit.ly. I can create a link like `company.com/summer23promo` that is easier to remember than `bit.ly/gsjsun618n` I think the paid version let's you do custom URLs but that is just a worse version of doing it yourself since a typo can lead to a completely random website.
• memorable 4y ago
  Not to mention the fact that they can be abused to redirect into malicious sites, but I think that is pretty obvious at this point.
  • orliesaurus 4y ago
    Agreed I think on bitly at least you can use some character after the URL - I think its bit.ly/somethingsomething+ (the plus) - and you get a bitly page that shows you where the URL is supposed to land. I think tinyurl had a similar mechanism.
    • memorable 4y ago
      TinyURL has a feature called preview mode, which allows you to automatically preview any URL before getting redirected without using the extra +. I think it's a nice feature.
      • koolba 4y ago
        IIRC, tinyurl also rewrites URLs to some commerce sites to include their affiliate token.
    • corobo 4y ago
      It used to show you all the click stats too, it was useful to see how everyone's ad campaigns were doing
• forgotpwd16 4y ago
  In past they took much space in comments and messages. Now most sites have gotten smarter and automatically shorten a long URL when presenting it. For the first part, depending on site, a deterministic shortener could be possible. For example "example.com/blog/2022/09/22/first-article-of-the-day.html" can be "example.com/s/b22092201". Remember read someone utilizing something like this but cannot find the article.
• dewey 4y ago
  > What’s wrong with normal URLs? Nothing, but how would you then track users and redirect through 3 nested services to attribute purchases? ;)
• efficax 4y ago
  how else would you embed tracking params into spam links sent over sms, riddle me that
  • LinuxBender 4y ago
    Query strings after an image URL are the most common I have seen. https://some.tld/obvious-tracking/some-transparent.png?someUniqueCode
    • sosborn 4y ago
      But now you've burned about 40% of your character limit.
      • LinuxBender 4y ago
        Fair enough. I hope that should I ever get a smart phone that there are filters to make all SMS text only. My current flip-phone just renders html as text and binary images as garbled junk.
        • sosborn 4y ago
          > I'm OK with this. I mean, on a personal level sure, but if you need to get out an SMS with a link and a coherent message, you want all the characters you can get.
          • LinuxBender 4y ago
            In that case I would go with a tiny SMS specific domain for the company and a tiny query string. https://my.tld/r?B33F https://my.tld/r?B33F Two hex values should allow for a large number of redirects for a single company. Or even one hex code and use a different letter /a?00 /a?FF /b?AF etc... 36x255 I would give the marketing/sales team a way to update the letter/HEX map as a plain text file.
            • 4y ago
• ddevault 4y ago
  Agreed. Please do not use this software, nor link shorteners generally.
• anderspitman 4y ago
  Short URLs are nice for some things. QR codes for example work better the shorter a URL is. Nothing's wrong with normal URLs. Every post on my website can be reached by a single decimal number appended to the end of the domain. But this requires every website on the internet to care about having URLs of reasonable length. URL shorteners allow a third party to put a bandaid over the problem.
• beauHD 4y ago
  There's a project[0] designed to archive various URL shorteners to combat the link-rot problem. It's ran by ArchiveTeam which is a bunch of preservationists who are hell-bent on preserving parts of the web that otherwise would go into the dustbin of history. [0] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam [0] https://tracker.archiveteam.org:1338/status https://tracker.archiveteam.org:1338/status
  • bjord 4y ago
    yeah, this is cool, but in the future, wouldn't it be better to just skip the link shorteners?
  • nonameking2026 4y ago
    Maybe these fine people should run a url shortener service.
• boredemployee 4y ago
  An use case: I work daily with short links, because we need to pass parameters in URL and, depending on the amount of parameters you use in your URL, it gets bigger quickly. Then you have many stakeholders, with no IT background, using those links and if for some reason they use ctrl+c missing some part of that big URL, the access will be broken and then they will complain its not working. Short links are better to avoid that problem.
  • atahanacar 4y ago
    That's why you have your own link shorteners. There is no reason to use some third party shortener that may or may not be alive the next year.
    • boredemployee 4y ago
      I actually use a third party, because I'm not a dev and have no idea on how to do one myself.
      • atahanacar 4y ago
        It's actually very easy to implement if all you want is just shortening and you have the slightest idea about databases. All you need to do is generate a random string (functions that do this for almost any language are available online), save that string and the long URL to the database. If you want tracking and statistics though, it gets more complicated. The simple version can be a good way to get into web development now that I think about it. You learn about forms, GET/POST, databases, very basic SQL etc.
        • boredemployee 4y ago
          thanks a lot for elaborating it :) how it works with the domain tho? i need to buy a short domain that will concatenate with my database strings, is that correct?
          • 4y ago
• KronisLV 4y ago
  > What’s wrong with normal URLs? I've seen some random blogging software break when you embed certain kinds of links into articles, for example, ones that have query strings (?key=value), where the question mark gets interpreted as something else by the software and thus the link gets cut off and no longer works. In cases like that, it makes sense (because you literally don't have a choice, unless you want to migrate to something else). Also some might enjoy the consistency of short links, instead of having a URL that's really long. That is also pretty nice for putting the URL on a poster, flier, or sending it to someone. Some also just don't care about the implications of the link going down in the future.
• wizofaus 4y ago
  When a URL is generated and contains some long cryptic un-memorizable code they're pretty handy (but only if you can specify the path name yourself, which is how I use tinyurl)
• steventey 4y ago
  Hey! Creator of Dub here! Appreciate the sentiment, also great point in the replies about link shorteners leading to spam. My plan with Dub is to keep this running at a sustainable pace for as long as possible, and I believe it's possible for a few reasons: - Operating costs for Dub are quite low at the moment, thanks to Edge Functions (https://vercel.com/edge https://vercel.com/edge) + Redis. - I'm leaning into the custom domains & self-hosted aspect with the freemium model – where enterprises and businesses would be able to get set up with a custom domain link shortener super easily. - Agree that individual short links are definitely not sustainable in the long run, I might set a rule where randomly-generated links > 30 days get deleted, to save it you'll either need to make an account (to prevent spam) or set up your own domain.
• xtracto 4y ago
  I have wanted to implement a link shortener with a couple of monetization ideas to avoid that: * Allow you to "buy" transparent clicks for your URL (e.g. 1 cent per "transparent" click) * Implement "ad gateway" like what adf.ly does for non-transparent URLs * Give you X small amount of "transparent" clicks for free * Use something like IPFS or (gasp) Ethereum blockchain for storing the data... allow you to keep your URLs alive by paying for them (this last one is not that clear) * [Don't kill me] At some point (back when it had started) I though of putting a WASM miner in a frame when visiting a page. My main problem is that I have not been able to get a good domain name.
  • intelVISA 4y ago
    I see you also read the Bitly playbook re: WASM miner
• firecall 4y ago
  With that in mind, QR Codes are the new shortlinks. Sort of :-) Hmm... I wonder if Google interprets and follows QR Codes?