81–90 of 194 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Goo.gl didn't have customers, it had users. Customers pay , either with money or their personal data, now or the future. Goo.gl did not make any money or have a plan to do so in the future.
One wonders why they don't, instead of showing down, display a 15s interstitial unskippable YouTube-style ad prior to redirecting. That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a link shortener for any kind of long-term link, no matter who hosts it, has never been a good idea. They're for ephemeral links shared over limited mediums like SMS or where a human would have to manually copy the link from the medium to the browsing device like a TV ad. If you put one in a document intended for digital consumption you've already screwed up.
Link shorteners are old enough that likely more URLs that were targeted by link shorteners have rotted away than have link shorteners themselves. Go look at a decade+ old webpage. So many of the links to specific resources (as in, not just a link to a domain name with no path) simply don't work anymore.
That would come off far less user hostile than this move while still achieving the goal of trimming truly unnecessary bloat from their database. It also doesn't require you to keep track of how often a link is followed, which incurs its own small cost.
What amazes me is that this wasn't the original plan. What product manager thinks "the best thing for our customers is to delete their data!". > We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received. How did they think the links were being used?
i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl links. Instead of actually wondering how this would impact the customers. Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.
For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl links. Instead of actually wondering how this would impact the customers. Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.
The Google URL shortener stopped accepting new links around 2018. It has been deprecated for a long time. I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted. They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One wonders why they don't, instead of showing down, display a 15s interstitial unskippable YouTube-style ad prior to redirecting. That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
This is such an evil idea.
Given those options, an ad seems like a trivial annoyance to anyone who very much needs a very old link to work. Anyone who still has the ability to update their pages can always update their links.
What purpose does "deactivating" any serve?
It may help prevent linkjacking. If an old URL no longer works, but the goo.gl link is still available, it's possible that someone could take over the URL and use it for malicious. Consider a scenario like this: 1. Years ago, Acme Corp sets up an FAQ page and creates a goo.gl link to the FAQ. 2. Acme goes out of business. They take the website down, but the goo.gl link is still accessible on some old third-party cont…
What amazes me is that this wasn't the original plan. What product manager thinks "the best thing for our customers is to delete their data!". > We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received. How did they think the links were being used?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Link shorteners are old enough that likely more URLs that were targeted by link shorteners have rotted away than have link shorteners themselves. Go look at a decade+ old webpage. So many of the links to specific resources (as in, not just a link to a domain name with no path) simply don't work anymore.
I think it would be easy for these services to audit their link database and cull any that have had dead endpoints for more than 12 months. That would come off far less user hostile than this move while still achieving the goal of trimming truly unnecessary bloat from their database. It also doesn't require you to keep track of how often a link is followed, which incurs its own small cost.
That actually seems just as bad to me, since the URL often has enough data to figure out what was being pointed to even if the exact URL format of a site has changed or even if a site has gone offline. It might be like:
kmart dot com / product.aspx?SKU=12345678&search_term=Staplers or /products/swingline-red-stapler-1235467890
Those URLs would now be dead and kmart itself will soon be fully dead but someone can still understand what was being linked to.
Even if the URL is 404, it's still possibly useful information for someone looking at some old resource.