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Comment by soult | Hacker News Reader

While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest.

Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this:

- URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature that bit.ly doesn't have.

- People actually don't care about feature and continue to use bit.ly.

- Spammers discover the shortener and abuse it.

- Owner closes the shortener because he can't deal with the spam.

All that remains are some non-functional links.

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URL shorteners are evil. It's the digital equivalent of stepping into a car driven by a stranger, blindfolded. You don't know where you're going before you're there. It might not necessarily be a pleasant place.

Plus, they are stupid. What, are we short of space for email? Are links people send each other consuming too much disk? I've barely touched my howevermany squigabytes GMail is giving away these days. I can guarantee that there is no "URL shortening service" that has the longevity of DNS either. If you want any more proof of a bubble, it's that it's possible to operate a business doing this.

We're short of space for twitter messages. And maybe IRC topics.

That's not true either, there aren't many 140-char URLs anyway.

Sure, but the relatively short link to your reply, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492783, is already 44 characters, so I'm only left with 96 characters on a twitter message.

With bit.ly, the link is much shorter with 21 characters, http://bit.ly/j8IpC8, and I'm left with 119 characters to describe the link in a twitter message.

Oh, and I'll know how many people clicked on my bit.ly link. I've become addicted to that feature.

But that's a circular argument. If there's no enough room to say what you want to say in a Twitter post then write a blog entry or send an email.

The problem is "I need 20 more characters for my Tweet". This is only solved by URL shorterners, at the moment.

Maybe we should try 'tweet compression'? Im sure you could pack a lot more text into 144 characters using the right compression algorithm.

Dammit i missed april fools day to announce my 'tweet compression' service :(

Yes it is pretty much an artificial problem created by an arbitrary limit.

It would be better if Twitter offered their own way to shorten URLs (or have a separate limit for URL length), so that you could still see where the link pointed before clicking on it.

If you use the Tweet button, either embedded in a page or installed as a bookmarklet, it will run through Twitter's own shortener. A long version of the URL will then be displayed in the Twitter UI.

That sounds like a useful thing to do. Does Urlteam have a website somewhere? A quick search didn't turn up much information.

The "website" is at http://urlte.am , but it only includes a placeholder (the content intended for it currently resides at https://github.com/soult/urlteam-stuff/tree/master/website ). We also have a page at the ArchiveTeam website ( http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam ), but our main communication happens through IRC, #urlteam on efnet.

I created a shortener (for personal control, tracking, etc) and can really, really identify with #3 and #4. I was blocking loads of nonsensical domains each day for weeks before the hosting company pulled the pin and I just gave up and pointed my domain to bit.ly.

FYI, you can prevent new entries from being added to the shortener database without shutting down the shortener altogether.

Yes, that's true and I should've done that but I wanted to keep the service running quickly through that domain and bit.ly pro did that very easily, it "just" meant losing historical links.

Easy to make the wrong decision when you, well-intentioned, set something up with no view to profiting from your time and then get slammed by spammers mercilessly, get no love from your host, etc.

I don't know that I'd be the only one who loses a fair swag of their time and money (work, side projects, etc) either dealing with spam or trying to protect against it. So frustrating.

> it "just" meant losing historical links.

Note that this in a bad idea in general, not just for URL shorteners but also for your personal website and even more for a project or company webseite.

There is a classic article by Tim Berners-Lee on that topic, written in 1998:

"Cool URIs don't change" (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI)

Better to just use your own domain with a (free) bit.ly/pro/ account

How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?

I don't know what the parent commenter had in mind, but perhaps bad spam filters don't follow redirects and bad link filters don't filter certain TLDs?

Why would a link filter want to filter whole TLDs? Shouldn't this be based at least on the domain name rather than discriminating whole countries by blocking their TLDs?

I don't know. I could imagine really stupid spam filters looking for strings matching /http:\/\/.*\.(com|net|org)/ or something. Of course that's no one else's fault but the filter.

Most anything that filters out spam domains doesn't follow shortener links to them. Web forum spam is full of shortener links. Stop making shorteners.

Obfuscating spam links. It is much harder to tell a fake/crappy url when it is hidden through a shortening service.

Like other comments have said spammers use it as a form of obfuscation. They even chain URL shorteners to obfuscate things even more.

I work for an anti-spam company. We see a constant stream of spammy short URLs -- peaking at tens of new unique links per second.

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