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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

Do people still use URL shorteners…? I would guess the usage has declined in the past 10 years or so.

Most relevant sites provide their own short urls now. All 3rd party shorteners are monetized by tracking and selling the data, so I wouldn’t be surprised nobody uses them.

It's good for comments in code, and back in the old days of twitter before they added in native support for url's in tweets

I think it's bad for comments in code. If you have the full URL you could at least try to find an archived version for it on archive.org if the link shortener went away.

The archive.org link should be used in code comments imho. This ensures that the content in question has been archived, and points to the temporal snapshot.

Even that isn't a guarantee though, as the owner of a URL can request it to be taken down/unindexed.

Couldn't archive.org go away some day though? It could disappear before the original site. This seems unlikely but it's possible.

I'd rather link to the original but save it on archive.org as a backup. Of course whoever uses the broken link would have to know to go look it up on archive.org.

I guess it's a question of minimizing risks and it seems likely that

risk of shorturl site going away > risk of website going away > risk of archive.org going away

Well that's always a possibility. The archive.org URL usually contains the full original URL so there's no downside of using it.

In this case though, it's still just code documentation so ideally it should be somewhat possible to figure out what's going on without a link to an external site. It's just about minimizing the risk.

They are useful for transactional SMS messages when you want to remind someone of an appointment or an event. There is a character limit in SMS if you want to keep it to one message and not annoy your customers.

They’re also a great tool for that as transactional sms messages don’t really have permanence, so the urls disappearing in the future is a non issue.

NSW Police need to keep making Facebook posts stating "our last SMS was not a scam" because people keep questioning them. Maybe not use bit.ly links in broadcast messages.

https://www.facebook.com/nswpoliceforce

I built a url shortened in 2016 and still maintain it now:

0x.co

… gets light usage …

Twitter's link shortener gets tonnes of use. Seems like every external link in every tweet is converted to a t.co link instead to save characters.

I’m sure that the real reason for Twitter to use t.co is analytics and more control over the platform.

That’s just Twitter’s redirection proxy. It’s not people using it as a URL shortener. It is Twitter automatically linking all URLs in tweets to go via t.co for tracking.

No doubt that it's used for tracking but "clicks" on the URL could probably be measured in other on-page ways too. One additional reason is probably that if there's a spam URL detected they can just block the short URL and the problem goes away instantly.

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