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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.
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 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.
I'm not tracking users, I'm tracking engagement
Whose engagement? Anything on your server, you can track it with the access logs, do you know how the internet works?
99.99% of website use a reverse proxy, the target is nearly always hidden. I don't think you understand how the internet works.
Do you know how a reverse proxy works? It doesn't change the user-facing URL like a shortener.
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.
Someone archiving the original content. It's your fault for breaking the link at a whim.
URL shorteners are inherently bad.
Whose engagement?
The engagement with my presentation for instance. I don't care about tracking specific users.
It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.
Where the user-facing URL points can easily be changed! For instance, changing the DNS record or changing where the reverse proxy points. I really don't think you understand how the internet works under the hood.
Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.
I'm not going to optimize my content for lazy archivers. Check out web.archive.org for an example of how to properly archive, they update the URLs so links don't break
Third party (you) tracking the user
No, he's not a third party, he's the second party in this context because you visit his own website, hosted on his own server.
On his own website, hosted on his own server, he has server logs to track whatever he wants, change whatever content he wants to display, and do whatever else he wants.
The only reason to use a URL shortener, is to interpose himself between his server and someone else's server, meaning to become a third party to the relationship between user and other server.
I see zero reason why others would be entitled to archive your content, nor hiding the true target from the user. Those are not bad things.
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.
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.
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
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Why is that? They can be useful - especially if you are including links in something like a print publication
Privacy: trackers, trackers, trackers Security: you can't know where you would be taken with a short link. A legit website? A malicious website? Who knows.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ygrauer/2016/04/20/five-reasons-you-should-stop-shortening-urls/
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
- They are insecure with no way to know what the real URL is.
- If you don't control it you can't guarantee the link will always work (bad for print).
- Register a shorter domain or novelty domain for your print publication.
How are they useful?
Because then other people control the link. Imagine writing a long print article about a community coming together to care for an elderly holocaust survivor that includes a link for more info. And then Musk (or whomever has the control over the link shortener you use) comes along and decides the link in your article should point at a holocaust denialism site instead. You can't change the link that's now printed on paper, but they can change what it points at.
Or the shortened web site shuts down and all that history is lost. Happened to, I believe, the Guardian newspapers shortening service.
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I think Twitter might do it to standardize the number of characters a link takes up in a tweet? 23 characters IIRC
Mastodon manages to do it without a shortener, so I don't believe that's the answer.
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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.
with that asshole in command? Uhm...
Every bad decision there is intentional
i think you should read the replies to the hackernews post, there's some interesting discussion there with more nuance. particularly the thread started by user "kens"
But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.
occam's razor says you should ;)
But Hanlon's razor says you shouldn't.
All right, we got a razor fight!
Hanlon’s razor says you shouldn’t.
yeah, but that applies to a problem where you don't have any additional information. if you do have background information of any kind, you would be wise to take them into account.
All right, we got a razor fight!
my razor is ready, bring it on! 😆
The fact that specific domains and user agents are effected by this says otherwise. Take a look in the link for people discussing curling the urls and their findings.
It's Elmo.
It's definitely malicious in nature.
Posting for no reason in particular.
https://github.com/theAlinP/twitter-link-deobfuscator
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-deobfuscator/
I gotta say though, in my journey to find other ways to access information rather than using the big names, I often find delays and small frustrations to get where I need to go.
Every time I ask myself if it's worth it to not give data or money to these sites; whether it's more important to make sure I'm directing my attention and financial support to other people and other companies? And I take a breath and endure b/c it's the only power I have in all this.
Is 5 seconds worth it? For me it is.
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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