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Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

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Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#111

Post by dasil003 »

DenisM wrote: post #110
dasil003 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's well-written PR Todd, but the bottom line is this: your false positives are doing potentially severe damage to third parties. These are people who aren't even using your service. When these things happen you need a way to fix them quickly, or you will find yourselves in legal hot water sooner or later. Also, I might suggest to you that you have neither the power nor the authority to be the link police on the i…

We've been thinking about signing up for bit.ly pro, and I have to say this throws a wet blanket over the whole thing. whitelabel shouldn't be nearly as bad - as long as you control the domain name you can always take your ball and go home.

Yes, definitely whitelabel was already a requirement for us.

My comment was more about the moral aspect though.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#112

Post by mst »

trezor wrote: post #107
toni wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, even running your own URL shortener will not help in any way. Bit.ly blocks any already-shortened URL. Whether it's xrl.in, tinyurl or your own. You can only control your own shortened URL but you have no control when people re-tweet it and pass it through Bit.ly. Which then flags it as harmful.

You can only control your own shortened URL but you have no control when people re-tweet it and pass it through Bit.ly. Which then flags it as harmful. So bitly, a URL-shortening service, is blocking other shortened URLs because they deem shortened URLs harmful? And here I thought the stupidity of twitter and it's ecosystem of useless URL-shorteners had an actual limit.

Only in the sense of the number of characters provided to perpetrate said stupidity.

tweet.im keeps tinyurl-ing my xrl.us URLs. The result is actually longer.

I suspect the closest to a solution here is a "don't shorten this unless it'd be X% shorter as a result" type flag for shortening APIs and then beat client authors over the head until they all pass the flag.

And then beat client users over the head until they all upgrade.

And then ... er ... never mind. I think I'll go stick my head in an oven now.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#113

Post by BrandonM »

bcl wrote: post #61

Gee, how about we stop acting like we need to limit things to 140 characters? This isn't SMS you know. We do have the bandwidth to actually exchange useful information and real URLs. Twitter, bit.ly, et. al. are all pretty damn silly. Even back in the days of 300bd modems and BBS's we weren't this dumb.

This isn't SMS you know.

But isn't it? I have several friends who get their Twitter updates via SMS.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#114

Post by BrandonM »

thenduks wrote: post #41
sjs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a standard http 301 redirect, not a "funky redirection layer". /Users/sjs % curl -i http://xrl.in/33qj HTTP/1.1 301 Permanent Redirect Date: Sun, 09 May 2010 00:38:19 GMT Server: Apache Location: http://www.donationcoder.com/CodingSnacks/index.php Content-Length: 0 Content-Type: text/html

Right, but the problem is this scenario: Bit.ly see's your xrl.in and does a request. They find 301 and the location at donationcoder.com. They conclude "this site is ok". Later, the xrl.in url is changed to . They aren't going to do a request to every url they're linking to on every click, obviously. So they'd only get the one chance. Now, I'm not actually sure that xrl.in lets you change links after shortening. The…

Easy solution: before serving that warning page for shortened URLs, dynamically determine the endpoint. If it does point to a bad site, then serve the warning page. Otherwise, do the right thing.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#115

Post by sjs »

thenduks wrote: post #41
sjs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a standard http 301 redirect, not a "funky redirection layer". /Users/sjs % curl -i http://xrl.in/33qj HTTP/1.1 301 Permanent Redirect Date: Sun, 09 May 2010 00:38:19 GMT Server: Apache Location: http://www.donationcoder.com/CodingSnacks/index.php Content-Length: 0 Content-Type: text/html

Right, but the problem is this scenario: Bit.ly see's your xrl.in and does a request. They find 301 and the location at donationcoder.com. They conclude "this site is ok". Later, the xrl.in url is changed to . They aren't going to do a request to every url they're linking to on every click, obviously. So they'd only get the one chance. Now, I'm not actually sure that xrl.in lets you change links after shortening. The…

I can submit a link to any URL in my control and swap it out for something else later. That can apply to every single link on the web. By that logic they should maintain a whitelist of not only redirection services such as shorteners, but for each and every domain.

I'm all for whitelisting and being paranoid, but it just doesn't make sense here and it seems a bit like they're trying to make the competition look bad. This should really be a blacklist instead.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#116

Post by carussell »

nollidge wrote: post #101
carussell wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I thought the reason people should use a service is its worth, not auxiliary novelties. If I make a pitch to somebody, do you think I should rest assured that they'll go for it if I word it in the following way, "Now I know that by almost all metrics this kind of behavior is bad, but we did some looking into what other people are doing, and it's unique ."?

You seem quite confident that the 140-character limit is an auxiliary novelty, whereas I think it's rather central to Twitter's success. There are any number of other similar services (LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr) that do not enforce any such limit, yet everybody's all over Twitter. And which metrics show that limiting updates to 140 characters is bad behavior ? URL shortening sucks, for sure,…

I know that the gimmick is the cause of Twitter's success as well; I wasn't saying otherwise. But that doesn't make it a gimmick.

URL shortening is bad for humans and bad for machines. Ergo, that behavior is bad.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#117

Post by thenduks »

BrandonM wrote: post #114
thenduks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the problem is this scenario: Bit.ly see's your xrl.in and does a request. They find 301 and the location at donationcoder.com. They conclude "this site is ok". Later, the xrl.in url is changed to . They aren't going to do a request to every url they're linking to on every click, obviously. So they'd only get the one chance. Now, I'm not actually sure that xrl.in lets you change links after shortening. The…

Easy solution: before serving that warning page for shortened URLs, dynamically determine the endpoint. If it does point to a bad site, then serve the warning page. Otherwise, do the right thing.

That isn't so easy when there could be 15 redirects between bit.ly and the malware site.

Re: Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation

#118

Post by thenduks »

sjs wrote: post #115
thenduks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the problem is this scenario: Bit.ly see's your xrl.in and does a request. They find 301 and the location at donationcoder.com. They conclude "this site is ok". Later, the xrl.in url is changed to . They aren't going to do a request to every url they're linking to on every click, obviously. So they'd only get the one chance. Now, I'm not actually sure that xrl.in lets you change links after shortening. The…

I can submit a link to any URL in my control and swap it out for something else later. That can apply to every single link on the web. By that logic they should maintain a whitelist of not only redirection services such as shorteners, but for each and every domain. I'm all for whitelisting and being paranoid, but it just doesn't make sense here and it seems a bit like they're trying to make the competition look bad.…

I'm not entirely sure but I believe the idea is that any 301 will cause bit.ly to show the interstitial. So you're right, it does apply to any site on the internet. It's just that you mostly notice it on other shortener services that haven't been whitelisted (blacklist makes no sense because it would then be bit.ly's responsibility to know of and check every other shortener service out there).
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