Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

cranialsoup.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 118 posts

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#51

Post by pyre »

toddml wrote: post #49
spohlenz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While our crawlers do of course follow links through redirections, the inclusion of modifiable redirects in the stream, and our analysis of the preponderance of spam attempts via these vectors have made it necessary and appropriate in some cases to block the URL shorteners. Why not do as tkaemming suggests and follow the redirections to link to the final endpoint URL?

The intent behind the very statement you quoted was to convey that we do precisely that. However, also mentioned was the fact that in a number of cases, modifiable destination redirects are embedded within the chain. In those cases, unless the redirect is crawled on every clickthrough, the integrity of the chain is difficult to assert.

I think the point was to remove all of the intermediate redirects and point all click-thrus to the bit.ly link right at the final destination. That way spammer reconfiguring their middle-man URL to point somewhere else will have no effect.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#52

Post by spohlenz »

toddml wrote: post #49
spohlenz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While our crawlers do of course follow links through redirections, the inclusion of modifiable redirects in the stream, and our analysis of the preponderance of spam attempts via these vectors have made it necessary and appropriate in some cases to block the URL shorteners. Why not do as tkaemming suggests and follow the redirections to link to the final endpoint URL?

The intent behind the very statement you quoted was to convey that we do precisely that. However, also mentioned was the fact that in a number of cases, modifiable destination redirects are embedded within the chain. In those cases, unless the redirect is crawled on every clickthrough, the integrity of the chain is difficult to assert.

Maybe you're misinterpreting me, because the linked post suggests that bit.ly isn't actually doing what I am suggesting.

My proposal is this: when a user submits a link to bit.ly to be shortened, bit.ly follows the link through 0..n redirections until it finds the final endpoint URL. This final endpoint URL is then stored as the bit.ly link.

Of course, this assumes that you don't care about the modifiable destination redirects in the chain, which maybe you do. In this case you would only follow redirects which match a whitelist of followable domains (other link shorteners).

Maybe (probably?) there's something I'm missing that makes this infeasible, but it seems like the most logical solution to me.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#53

Post by qeorge »

I have to agree with the author, this is ridiculous. They even do this to tinyurl:

http://bit.ly/cGLU0o

Tinyurl was without a doubt bit.ly's #1 competitor, especially when their service launched, and they know you can't edit a tinyurl. Seems like a pretty convenient time for an URL shortener to suddenly get preachy about the dangers of URL shorteners.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#54

Post by toddml »

toddml wrote: post #49
spohlenz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While our crawlers do of course follow links through redirections, the inclusion of modifiable redirects in the stream, and our analysis of the preponderance of spam attempts via these vectors have made it necessary and appropriate in some cases to block the URL shorteners. Why not do as tkaemming suggests and follow the redirections to link to the final endpoint URL?

The intent behind the very statement you quoted was to convey that we do precisely that. However, also mentioned was the fact that in a number of cases, modifiable destination redirects are embedded within the chain. In those cases, unless the redirect is crawled on every clickthrough, the integrity of the chain is difficult to assert.

In much the same way that we don't frame links, or permanently remove flagged links, we would never return a short link that pointed to anything other than the link requested by the API, or by the user via an interface. It's a simple, deterministic API. The downsides of the proposed approach are far more extreme than any potential upside.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#55

Post by [deleted] »

toddml wrote: post #48
tyler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "any changes would have to be carefully considered". So, are said changes being considered or are they not?

We always consider ways in which to provide the best level of service to our end users and API users, while preventing unintended side effects. There are pros and cons to every approach, and they have to be evaluated with care.

[deleted]

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#56

Post by pyre »

toddml wrote: post #48
tyler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "any changes would have to be carefully considered". So, are said changes being considered or are they not?

We always consider ways in which to provide the best level of service to our end users and API users, while preventing unintended side effects. There are pros and cons to every approach, and they have to be evaluated with care.

That's a lot of indirection there. He's asking about your current status (i.e. "Are there changes being considered right now?") and you are responding with a comment on the openness of your process (i.e. "We always consider any changes that might benefit our customers!").

I realize that this is just marketing double-speak (as far as I'm concerned) and that you may not be able to comment on the current status of things internally, but it might be better just to come out and say that.

"I can't comment on anything specific that we are doing, but we always are open to new ideas..." sounds a lot better than answering a question that wasn't asked and hoping that it satisfies people. If you don't come out and say, "Sorry I can't comment on that," or, "I'm afraid to comment on that because I like my job," then it looks like you're trying to talk people in circles and hope that they get dizzy enough to walk away feeling satisfied.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#57

Post by pyre »

MWinther wrote: post #42
nhebb wrote: post #39

Does SMS have to display the href? Could Twitter just replace all URL's with the word 'link' and show the real URL on hover, thereby doing away with URL shorteners altogether?

Hover doesn't work well with touch based interaction, which is all the rave these days, I hear. I like the idea of showing them separately somehow, though.

It only has to display 'link' in SMS. I don't necessarily think that it has to still say 'link' outside of SMS. It makes more sense to just strip the links when going through the SMS gateway, and count all URLs as 4 characters in the '140 characters' limit.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#59

Post by docgnome »

toddml wrote: post #54
toddml wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intent behind the very statement you quoted was to convey that we do precisely that. However, also mentioned was the fact that in a number of cases, modifiable destination redirects are embedded within the chain. In those cases, unless the redirect is crawled on every clickthrough, the integrity of the chain is difficult to assert.

In much the same way that we don't frame links, or permanently remove flagged links, we would never return a short link that pointed to anything other than the link requested by the API, or by the user via an interface. It's a simple, deterministic API. The downsides of the proposed approach are far more extreme than any potential upside.

While I see what spohlenz is saying, I think what you've described here is the right way to do it. Once you start changing the target from what I submitted, I would personally be suspicious.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#60

Post by pyre »

alextgordon wrote: post #22
tkaemming wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would happen when those messages are delivered to a user's phone via SMS? There's still a nontrival amount of users having status updates/direct messages delivered to their mobile phones that probably wouldn't appreciate a message with a 50+ character URL (or the URL being stripped, effecting message integrity).

They could apply URL shortening to a tweet when delivering over SMS, if necessary.

Why would the users need to have a URL over SMS though? Couldn't it just say 'link?' Then the user could view the tweet later through another interface to get the actual URL.
Post reply on HN