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Comment by Rjevski | Hacker News Reader

Just wondering, what's the actual use-case for an URL shortener in 2018?

I would understand maybe like 10 years ago when SMS was still king and you were limited in characters, but now?

URL shorteners now look shady (and can be used to conceal malicious links), could track you, and even if they have no nefarious intentions it's still an extra DNS lookup, HTTPS negotiation and redirect.

TLDR: good project as a proof of concept, but seems completely irrelevant nowadays.

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It's true that URL shorteners use has changed how it was used a few years back but it's still very relevant.

One very good use case of link shorteners is marketing & sales campaigns. A lot of marketing companies like to share short and branded custom links on social media and later check the click and other stats to see the conversion rate.

I have also seen companies using URL shorteners for internal link sharing.

I have two real cases where my project is used are:

- One of the schools in Spain uses the project website(pygy.co) for creating secret links and sharing with students in school competitions. They share the password with the winners(I received an email from them). - One of the company is China has forked the project and are using it.

Anyhow, I created this as a personal project for learning purpose but I can see it's use cases.

> A lot of marketing companies like to share short and branded custom links on social media and later check the click and other stats to see the conversion rate.

True, but as an user it does not serve me (quite the contrary actually, as it invades my privacy), so my point (and habit) of never clicking into shortened links still stands. I’m actually surprised brands would prefer shady-looking links over linking to their own domain directly.

Not to mention, you can do analytics server-side on the page you’re linking to without having to have an intermediary system & extra redirect.

> Anyhow, I created this as a personal project for learning purpose but I can see it's use cases.

Quite impressive actually, seems very feature-complete and well built. Keep up the good work!

Just to add on, sometimes it's useful to be able to link to large query strings without large numbers of characters in situations where there's no way to copy and paste (for example any form of print media).

Many internet giants have set up their own link shorteners for this very purpose: see https://goo.gl/ and https://t.co/

Presentations linking to the demo, links to an exam sign in, or some other type of event where the person giving the link does not necessarily have a contact with the person who needs to be clicking on it, but having the full link would be onerous to jot down.

When I worked at Twitter, they had an internal URL shortener that made it easier for employees to visit internal sites. Using an easy-to-remember customized short URL is easier than navigating the internal wiki or looking up the link in your e-mail.

My company does the same, and it can be convenient.

Twitter's public link shortener, t.co, is one of the worst, imho, because it ubiquitous (so you can't just treat all t.co short links as junk) and yet they make it really difficult report spammy short links. Often these short links get used outside Twitter's platform.

This kind of project allows companies to host their own shorteners, which is an entirely different use-case than some random shortening service used by the public.

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