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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Where and why are you guys still seeing/using shortened URLs? I don't think I've personally made a shortened URL since Twitter built one into their service, and I stopped seeing shortened URLs around the same time.

There are two exceptions:

• I still see service-specific short URLs, e.g. goo.gl, nyti.ms, etc. Because these can only be created by the service in question, they don't introduce security/privacy concerns.

• When a URL shortener is used to create a sort of vanity link to e.g. a Google doc. (OP's service could be useful for these!)

Outside of those times... why would you use a URL shortener? When are you limited by number of characters?

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If you use an tracker blocker, you’ll find a slew of app to app and site to site links and callbacks fail because they went through a tracker that sometimes is a short URL service, but often just a long URL redirector.

These are definitely not curated by the service in question.

On iOS, examples include:

    [business].app.link
    [business].onelink.me
    [hash].ulink.adjust.com
    [business].bttn.io
    branch.io
    etc...

Link shorteners are a subclass of this, that do something useful (shorten link) while doing something unhelpful (obscuring the link). But it’s all the same problem.

I use one inside of a big corp so I can put memorable urls like myco.co/news on posters or email signatures. Especially when the real url is some terrible long thing I cannot control, like some internal wiki.

Link shorteners are also used to ubfuscate tracking urls. E.g you can hide https://fb.com/?utm_source=hackernews&other_tracking_paramet... behind a nice looking bit.ly/fb url.

In my research I also found that it is a quite nice thing for phishing to fool you into opening a shady website.

• I still see service-specific short URLs, e.g. goo.gl, nyti.ms, etc. Because these can only be created by the service in question, they don't introduce security/privacy concerns.

This isn't necessarily true; I've seen companies that offer to do the 'custom shortlink' thing for various companies. It's safe to assume that there are privacy concerns with at least some of them.

Bitly runs nyti.ms, so yes, you aren't trusting just the NYT.

Yes, and nyti.ms only ever pints to New York Times, a well known entity (well, that's what's intended, right?)

Sure. Noting that you have to trust that bitly isn't fingerprinting your browser and tracking you across their domains.

I use them all the time to transfer URLs between devices that enxode a lot of state in a long url. For example, Firefox Send pits the password in the URL. Of course, I'd never do this with something I didn't watch associated with me.

On youtube every so often complementary materials are linked via shortened urls, but youtube also tracks those in turn via their redirect urls.

Some subreddits use them to track which links people click on in their sidebar. /r/listentothis in particular.

SMS spam.

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