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

Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

t37.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#71

Post by ipsin »

Link shorteners are bad for usability, but they're also a potential attack vector for targeted attacks. A link might go to the right site 99.9% of the time, and redirect a user to a malicious site the rest of the time.

You can redirect based on the browser fingerprint, IP address, or any number of things.

I have a proof-of-concept of this at http://brokenthings.org/

It redirects to a "friendly" site for preview scanners, etc., and to a "bad" site (Youtube videos, with some stale ones) for users.

It's blocked by Facebook, but still works on G+.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#72

Post by gabrtv »

gedrap wrote: post #66

There's a few more genuine use cases for shorteners, one of them is using links offline (e.g. print advertisements). I noticed my university does that and I kind of like it. It definitely won't remember company.com/section/potentially_a_subsestion/page?someParamters=mayyybe if I see it somewhere. But I might remember bit.ly/CompanyCampaign. Some might say that it's the developers/company fault, they should have made…

Bog standard permalinks to the rescue: company.com/some-promotion

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#73

Post by mareofnight »

spinchange wrote: post #65

So literally scheduling the automated sharing of links from a "read it later" app is a common enough workflow, but simply using a link shortening service is automatically indicative of spam? Come on. Another nit: j.mp and bit.ly are different domains for the same service. If you append a "+" to either URL you see how many times the destination has been shared, clicked, and by all shortened versions of the destination…

I was a bit confused about the spam thing too. Was the intended meaning that URL shorteners indicate the link is spam, or that trading off user experience for analytics makes it spam? (Or in the spirit of spam, or something.) I'd think they meant the second one, except that it doesn't actually make any sense.

I also got a really strong gut feeling of "spam" being used as a "boo!" sign, for some reason.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#74

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

userbinator wrote: post #60
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #38

Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain first, before shortening the URL?

Consider what happens when someone decides to give it a URL that redirects infinitely -- it is possible to make an infinite loop, as someone demonstrated 4 years ago while also complaining about URL shorteners: http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-with... (The infinite loop in that example unfortunately seems to have broken, illustrating another downside to URL shorteners - they can go away rather…

Detect the loop and reject the URL. I'd rather twitter protect me from ever clicking on an infinitely-redirecting link, although browsers tend to handle that case fairly gracefully.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#75

Post by hagbardgroup »

ipsin wrote: post #71

Link shorteners are bad for usability, but they're also a potential attack vector for targeted attacks. A link might go to the right site 99.9% of the time, and redirect a user to a malicious site the rest of the time. You can redirect based on the browser fingerprint, IP address, or any number of things. I have a proof-of-concept of this at http://brokenthings.org/ It redirects to a "friendly" site for preview scann…

Amazing. Thanks for this.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#76

Post by hagbardgroup »

gabrtv wrote: post #72
gedrap wrote: post #66

There's a few more genuine use cases for shorteners, one of them is using links offline (e.g. print advertisements). I noticed my university does that and I kind of like it. It definitely won't remember company.com/section/potentially_a_subsestion/page?someParamters=mayyybe if I see it somewhere. But I might remember bit.ly/CompanyCampaign. Some might say that it's the developers/company fault, they should have made…

Bog standard permalinks to the rescue: company.com/some-promotion

Right. This is the correct way to do it, with natural language related to the ad.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#77

Post by andrewrice »

saurik wrote: post #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;…

While not really a URL shortener in the tinyurl sense, cjb.net offered sub-domains for URL redirection that effectively shortened long URLs (ie: mysite.cjb.net) since the late-1990s; it was a pretty popular in the gaming community.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#78

Post by rikkus »

elinchrome wrote: post #36
dons wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. We used started using tinyurl on #haskell IRC by 2003 because long urls would break line wrapping, get mangled, not be typeable etc.

Please explain your "typeable" concern. I've been using IRC since the dawn of time and I could always copy and paste. Not to mention that links are recognized and you can click them.

Copy and paste didn't work too well on serial terminals. How far back was this 'dawn of time'?

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#79

Post by redbearded »

ABS wrote: post #25
fdevillamil wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for mentioning this, I'll correct the article accordingly. [edit] Fixed

they existed way before 2002. I used to use welcome.to/ back in 1997 or 1998 to give out a shorter URL to my very long geocities one

Good ol' geocities. Now that takes me back!

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#80

Post by dublinben »

chrisBob wrote: post #56

Long URLs hurt the user experience and destroy the Web. If I want to send you a link to a washingtonpost.com article the link looks like: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-root... The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the p…

How is your first URL not easily user readable? It clearly tells me that it is from the Washington Post, in the Opinions section, written by EJ Dion Jr, titled "the roots and lessons of memorial day," published May 25 2014, and then has a (presumably) uuid for the article.

Since when has verbal transmission been an important consideration for URLs?

Post reply on HN