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Comment by stretchcat | Hacker News Reader

> What harm have they "already caused"?

They have already inserted themselves as a middleman by shortening URLs, creating an additional point of failure which will inevitably break sooner or later.

> Will you help financially compensate their time setting up these fail-safes?

How about: Blow it out your ass. He made the mess, so if he has any integrity he'll foot the bill for cleaning it up.

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> [Unnecessary crude remark]. He made the mess, so if he has any integrity he'll foot the bill for cleaning it up.

He [set up a server with a link shortening service pro bono, eating the cost of server maintenance for 11 years], so if he has any integrity he'll [do more free work].

I'd argue it's the user's fault if they decide to trust a small hobby site to last until the end of time. How many link shortening services have you used which promptly died, causing you to find this ridiculous hill to die on?

It's users choice to use a shortener to shorten their long URLs. Calling shorteners middleman is just wrong.

The person who uploads the link is not the only affected party. This affects every unrelated person who might ever want to follow those links long after the shortener is dead and gone.

Any link on the internet - shortened or not - can after some time die. Domain registration expire, websites get shut down. Domain changes ownership and new site goes up. Relax. It's just a lifecycle of Internet resources. Let us end this conversation. You obviously see things differently.

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