5 ms·

And the house of cards begins its collapse. Let's hope it crumbles fast and we can rid the web of these shorteners before they cause more damage to the future

by pj 17y ago

And the house of cards begins its collapse. Let's hope it crumbles fast and we can rid the web of these shorteners before they cause more damage to the future of the internet.

endtwist 17y ago
One failure does not a trend make. If another service flops in the next few months, then yes I agree, the house of cards is collapsing, but right now that statement is a little premature.
- tlrobinson 17y ago
  It's inevitable, whether it's in the next few months or in 5 years, we're going to end up with millions of broken links.
  - palish 17y ago
    Oh no! ... I'm sure we'll survive.
  - iheartmemcache 17y ago
    Broken links have been happening since the web began. Any time you've made any web request, there's been a SPOF(1). In fact, think back to 2002-- remember when a good number of links you'd click were dead? When was the last time in recent memory you've had that happen? In fact, I argue that the web has a lower percentage of broken links today than back in the day. In 5 years, we'll likely have even less. (1) Yeah yeah, I know, a drastic over simplification. There's Foundry LB hardware, round-robin DNS at different sites, BGP failover, etc.
    - lyime 17y ago
      Sure, the percentage might decrease. But only because the number of total links are increasing by a ton.
    - pj 17y ago
      broken links in the past were the result of actions of the creator of the content, however, in the case of url shorteners, the broken links are pointing to content that still exists, in the same place it was when the link was created. There's a big difference betwen that an the broken links since the web began...
    - rjurney 17y ago
      This is a problem google can solve pretty easily, isn't it? They've indexed both sides of the link... so they can somehow 'heal' the broken link - right?
    - mseebach 17y ago
      > Any time you've made any web request, there's been a SPOF And when you make a request through a shortener, there are two independent SPOF's. Also, if you go to www.example.com/here/there/article and get a 404, you navigate up in the hierachy, and search for the content. If you get a 500 or server is down, you can try later. If either happens at the shortener-level, you're SOL.
- joshu 17y ago
  Lots of these services are failing. I found a huge list of them once and MORE THAN A THIRD were marked as "defunct"
ubernostrum 17y ago
The argument against URL shorteners is specious, and taken to its logical conclusion is an argument against anyone ever linking to anything: any URL might turn up gone in the future, and you have no way of knowing or predicting which ones will last. Amazingly, the web's managed to survive this. But if you're genuinely concerned that this poses some sort of threat to the web, start an archiving service which preserves mappings of short -> long URLs, or talk to the archive.org folks to see if they'd be interested.
- PostOnce 17y ago
  That idea in the second paragraph of your comment is good. Someone ought to do that. As far as the first, though, I think that you've got it wrong. It's not the same as any old site breaking. Say a person, over time, links to eight sites in his forum comments, and one goes down. Seven links are still valid. If he uses a shortener service that collapses, none of his links are valid.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    Say a person links to a series of articles, and the site which hosted them goes down. Now all the links are invalid, and this is nothing more than what we deal with every day. The alarmist rants I've seen against URL shorteners are simply making this argument without realizing that there is no "new" problem in need of solving, only an old one that we already handle fairly well. Though given the level of irrational rhetoric I've been seeing in these discussions (example here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998) I'm not sure there's any point trying to argue with it.
    - calambrac 17y ago
      Dude, you keep saying that "it's the same problem we've always had", but it simply isn't. You seem like a smart guy otherwise, so I don't know why you persist in making this assertion. The difference is simple: url shorteners introduce a middle man, another point of failure or abuse, and one that can't be fixed by the person who made the link (because they may forget the original target and not know who to contact) or the person who manages the target (because they can't set up a redirect from the old url).
mynameishere 17y ago
OTOH, they could be used as failsafes. If a normal link dies, tinyurl or whatever could go to a page that says, "This link seems to be missing. Do you know where it moved to?" The responses could be published as long as the 404 continue. I have to think someone has already thought of this.
- martey 17y ago
  If the link is missing, the author/website admin should use a 301 code, not 404. See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.2 http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10...
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    That doesn't work so well if the server/author/company goes away altogether.
  - mynameishere 17y ago
    "should"

by pj 17y ago

And the house of cards begins its collapse. Let's hope it crumbles fast and we can rid the web of these shorteners before they cause more damage to the future of the internet.

endtwist 17y ago

One failure does not a trend make. If another service flops in the next few months, then yes I agree, the house of cards is collapsing, but right now that statement is a little premature.

tlrobinson 17y ago
It's inevitable, whether it's in the next few months or in 5 years, we're going to end up with millions of broken links.
- palish 17y ago
  Oh no! ... I'm sure we'll survive.
- iheartmemcache 17y ago
  Broken links have been happening since the web began. Any time you've made any web request, there's been a SPOF(1). In fact, think back to 2002-- remember when a good number of links you'd click were dead? When was the last time in recent memory you've had that happen? In fact, I argue that the web has a lower percentage of broken links today than back in the day. In 5 years, we'll likely have even less. (1) Yeah yeah, I know, a drastic over simplification. There's Foundry LB hardware, round-robin DNS at different sites, BGP failover, etc.
  - lyime 17y ago
    Sure, the percentage might decrease. But only because the number of total links are increasing by a ton.
  - pj 17y ago
    broken links in the past were the result of actions of the creator of the content, however, in the case of url shorteners, the broken links are pointing to content that still exists, in the same place it was when the link was created. There's a big difference betwen that an the broken links since the web began...
  - rjurney 17y ago
    This is a problem google can solve pretty easily, isn't it? They've indexed both sides of the link... so they can somehow 'heal' the broken link - right?
  - mseebach 17y ago
    > Any time you've made any web request, there's been a SPOF And when you make a request through a shortener, there are two independent SPOF's. Also, if you go to www.example.com/here/there/article and get a 404, you navigate up in the hierachy, and search for the content. If you get a 500 or server is down, you can try later. If either happens at the shortener-level, you're SOL.
joshu 17y ago
Lots of these services are failing. I found a huge list of them once and MORE THAN A THIRD were marked as "defunct"

ubernostrum 17y ago

The argument against URL shorteners is specious, and taken to its logical conclusion is an argument against anyone ever linking to anything: any URL might turn up gone in the future, and you have no way of knowing or predicting which ones will last. Amazingly, the web's managed to survive this. But if you're genuinely concerned that this poses some sort of threat to the web, start an archiving service which preserves mappings of short -> long URLs, or talk to the archive.org folks to see if they'd be interested.

PostOnce 17y ago
That idea in the second paragraph of your comment is good. Someone ought to do that. As far as the first, though, I think that you've got it wrong. It's not the same as any old site breaking. Say a person, over time, links to eight sites in his forum comments, and one goes down. Seven links are still valid. If he uses a shortener service that collapses, none of his links are valid.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Say a person links to a series of articles, and the site which hosted them goes down. Now all the links are invalid, and this is nothing more than what we deal with every day. The alarmist rants I've seen against URL shorteners are simply making this argument without realizing that there is no "new" problem in need of solving, only an old one that we already handle fairly well. Though given the level of irrational rhetoric I've been seeing in these discussions (example here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998) I'm not sure there's any point trying to argue with it.
  - calambrac 17y ago
    Dude, you keep saying that "it's the same problem we've always had", but it simply isn't. You seem like a smart guy otherwise, so I don't know why you persist in making this assertion. The difference is simple: url shorteners introduce a middle man, another point of failure or abuse, and one that can't be fixed by the person who made the link (because they may forget the original target and not know who to contact) or the person who manages the target (because they can't set up a redirect from the old url).

mynameishere 17y ago

OTOH, they could be used as failsafes. If a normal link dies, tinyurl or whatever could go to a page that says, "This link seems to be missing. Do you know where it moved to?" The responses could be published as long as the 404 continue. I have to think someone has already thought of this.

martey 17y ago
If the link is missing, the author/website admin should use a 301 code, not 404. See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.2 http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10...
- jacobolus 17y ago
  That doesn't work so well if the server/author/company goes away altogether.
- mynameishere 17y ago
  "should"