Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#2Not to mention it's a great way to spread other unwanted nasties.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#3> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible.
No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type; they also have tons of puncutation, and are at danger of being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and character mapping.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#4This scripts [1] searchs for links in the user timeline and replaces shortned URLs with the original (stored in the data-expanded-url attribute).
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#5> t.co -> j.mp -> pocket.co -> getpocket.com -> bit.ly -> $PROPER_URL
Wow, so many different people tracking a single link.
These are super annoying once they changed to storing the actual URL on the server. The old "redirect?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com" style could be re-written on the client to remove the click-tracking, but by storing it on the server, you have to be tracked to get the URL. These seriously need to go away - that's way too many tracking databases just waiting to get a subpoena or "national security letter".
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side note: The only time I ever used a url shortener was for a meme that unfortunately never went anywhere:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio
edit: typo
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#6> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible. No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type;…
Thank you for mentioning this, I'll correct the article accordingly.
[edit] Fixed
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#7Not all link shorteners are evil and are destroying the web.
Here are some scenarios in which I like link shorteners:
1) Removal of the referrer (the anonymising redirect)
2) Redirects within a site when content moves, but the redirect service offers a permalink shortened URL. As only they can generate the URL you can trust that the destination is as safe as the source (the intra-site trusted redirect with vanity URLs)
3) Self-healing of the web, if a URL becomes broken the redirect service may be able to figure out or suggest a replacement, or offer a cached version of the destination or a link to the web archive (the self-healing redirect)
4) Protect users against malware and spam by cancelling a redirect if the URL is reported (the 'for the user' gateway redirect)
Not all redirects and shorteners are inherently bad. I suspect the author just dislikes the tracking side of things, but there's always http://unshort.me/
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#8Wouldn't it be quite easy for a link shortener to find the final target url and just point to that instead of pointing to another shortener url? It could even heuristically try to search further if the pointed to url looks like an already shortened one (i.e. it's shorter than a treshold).
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#9Not all link shorteners are evil and are destroying the web. Here are some scenarios in which I like link shorteners: 1) Removal of the referrer (the anonymising redirect) 2) Redirects within a site when content moves, but the redirect service offers a permalink shortened URL. As only they can generate the URL you can trust that the destination is as safe as the source (the intra-site trusted redirect with vanity URL…
1, 3 and 4 almost never happen in real life.
2 is the only thing remotely useful.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#10The problem is not the link shorteners but the amount of (often slow) redirects that come with them.
Getting users to long URLs is a good thing if done directly.