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Comment by stilwelldotdev | Hacker News Reader

Test yourself, they link to their site from their profile and it's definitely delayed.

Just tried this - loaded almost instantly. But that's only the link in the profile. Not shared links in tweets.

Leaning towards there's something else going on deep in the DNS/ad servers/cdn/who knows. Not the first I've seen/heard of resolving delays with t.co... maybe it's even just something with legacy non-SSL links being redirected etc

You’re really twisting yourself into a buzzword cloud there aren’t you?

The link you clicked in the NYT bio is not a t.co link - I assume you noticed that but still are using it as counter-proof?

Both the nyti.ms link and nytimes.com are actually t.co links for me. First one was slow, second one was fast.

On mobile, a quick test didn't even look at where the link pointed..... Because all links on twitter are t.co aren't they? Weird you think any links aren't t.co. It's how they track analytics on everything

No buzzwords there, just suspicion there's something else underlying with various technologies that are in play even on a 'simple' link click

A good test might include a bunch of domains. And checking the timing on each. Could we demonstrate the delay is on t.co and not on NYT?

I mean, a good test is to go to go to their website in another browser tab and click around. You're over-complicating this.

I went through my own Twitter feed, and found 10 non-NYT links. All redirected almost immediately through t.co via wget, only lagging on the destination sites.

I also tried 5 NYT links. All had a very consistent 5 second delay through wget.

I could do more, but I don't care to. Everyone knows Elon has gone redpill, so it wouldn't surprise me if he's "owning the libs", but there also could be a dozen other reasons Twitter might do something like this (including plenty that are not nefarious). I just don't care to dig more...

Edit: I suppose I could have given the specific URLs, but I don't know if/how much t.co links leak info, so I'm not keen to do that. But the delay is absolutely on t.co and not the destination sites, at least as far as external users are concerned. It's possible that t.co queries the sites first before redirecting, and if e.g. the NYT is throttling their traffic that's what's delaying things. I don't know how to disambiguate that, but it's definitely a theory worth considering...

Actually, re: my edit - I think it really is worth considering whether there might be an accidental delay here that's on the NYT side. It's totally possible that Twitter is hitting the sites it redirects people to before it actually sends them there, for either analytics purposes or otherwise, and I'd trust the NYT devops less than Twitter's w.r.t. making sure things were fast.

Incompetence before malice, etc...

It's not.

If you use wget, you see that the delay happens during the first hop with t.co

It also happens with threads.net, instagram, facebook, blueskyweb.xyz

That's extremely slow..

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