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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I really hate it when websites use shortened links instead of real ones. Twitter’s not the only website that does this; everything from Google to Discourse seems to be doing this these days. Not only is this horrible for privacy, it also makes copying links really annoying.

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There is one reason for this: anti-spam/anti-malicious links

If a problematic link is shared, it can be pulled from the platform without "doing a gigantic grep"

On the other hand, link shorteners are also great for hiding malicious links because you can't see where it's going before you click on it.

Just a note:

On bitly, you can add a + to the end, to get to the stats page for that link; it also gives the destination.

On the goo.gl links, add .info to the end.

This is the theory, but I've never seen it in action. Even those cryptocurrency scam bots that reply to high profile accounts with wallet stealing sites have their links working for hours / days.

I saw some links being pulled already, but I won't click the crypto scams to see if they were or not.

You don't need to do a giant grep. You could put all links in a database, which contains pointers to where the links are used. Then if you want to delete a link, you can delete all those places.

This seems equal or less effort than making a url shortener.

> Not only is this horrible for privacy

Those websites are not funded by respecting their users privacy. Although I think you mean Discord and not Discourse?

Nope, I mean Discourse, which does some sort of stupid link tracking so that it can display a count of how many people have clicked on a link. In doing so, they somehow break Force Touch in Safari, which makes it doubly annoying.

Ah, weird I never noticed till I used Firefox Developer Tools and saw the 302 redirect, when you hover over URLs it works normal, but when you click I guess JS hijacks everything... Does it do it on any Discord hosted forum with their own url tracker or is it just part of the forum itself? I wouldnt want them tracking all my users URL traffic... or else I wouldnt want to use this forum script at all, I often wondered how they track the clicks, seems to me it would of been easier to just increment onclick? Do a POST and once fulfilled, then redirect the user with JS.

Discord doesn't host forums.

When I hover over links, or right click and click "copy link address" in a google search result page, I get the real link, not a shortened link.

I have a Firefox plugin that removes the tracked URLs, this must be a Chrome only thing, and considering they track you as it is, I'm not surprised if they do something special for Chrome to hide the tracking internally (who knows what they bundle with their proprietary rendition of Chrome?).

Which plugin? Does it work on more than just Google?

It's called "Google search link fix" and comes from Wladimir Palant. I use it on Firefox. AFAIK it works with multiple search engines, despite the name.

in Firefox, when I hover over the links in Google results I see the original URL on the bottom left tooltip but when I copy the address, I get the redirect link, and then when I go back and hover over the link the url shown in the tooltip is also changed to the redirected link.

When I copy it I get a lengthened link. It has the destination URL in a query string, along with a "ved" value which includes a bunch of information about the link that you clicked on:

https://moz.com/blog/inside-googles-ved-parameter

If you're looking in your browser's status bar when you hover the link, Google is manually displaying the end destination URL. The link doesn't actually go there directly.

This is using Firefox while not signed in to a Google account. If you're really getting direct links, perhaps if you're signed in or using Chrome they give you real links and track you by other means instead.

Hm, you are right.

Did they fix that recently? Because Iam sure that wasnt always the case.

I think it's been this way for the last year or so. I definitely remember links becoming mangled when clicked sometimes in the past.

Maybe only in Chrome, because it definitely does the wrong thing in Firefox.

LinkedIn also quite good at shortening.

And they are good in being intrusive, too...

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