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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

What's the benefit of a link shortener, these days?

It made sense back before Twitter had one of their own. And I know that some people use it to get link analytics. I've also occasionally seen it used for printed materials, to get pretty URLs that are easy to hand-type.

People also use it for malicious purposes, such as hiding malware, or disguising referral links, or otherwise trying to obfuscate where a link is going. (Note: I'm not calling referral links malicious, I'm calling disguised referral links malicious.)

Other than printed materials (which need pretty URLs and thus often need a dedicated first-party URL shortener) and analytics, what are people using third-party URL shorteners for today?

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I have written my own URL shortener. I do it partly to get URLs that are nice to type in printed materials.

I also use it to hedge my risks from using SaaS. For my org, we host some things that we offer to the public on different services. Sometimes a vendor doesn't work out. We use our shortened URLs in public communications, and I can redirect them to our new service if we need to switch. It was a way to address my discomfort with URLs that break too easily when you host on 3rd party services.

^^ this. I wrote one for the same reasons. Also for links to internal tools in chat, as it makes for shorter more concise messages.

URL shorteners never made sense. Twitter was a dumb artificial limit. In 99,9% of cases, it's only used for tracking or obfuscation purposes. And URL shorteners die every day, leaving ArchiveTeam to clean up the mess again.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam

As someone who runs a small discussion forum its a great way for people who like to spam CSAM, malware, and other stuff I don't want in a way that gets past filters.

I think a conservative estimate of link shorteners usage is that 99% of cases are used by bad actors, and if they would all die out my life would be a lot easier. But, every week it seems some new one pops up and theres a new wave of spam to deal with.

At least thanks to this post I can add a new one to the filters before a wave of spam, so yay?

Sometimes reddit (and likely others) will try to parse a URL's valid characters as formatting and deadlink them (e.g. some wikipedia links with special characters)

They are useful for links that need to outlive the infrastructure they are hosted on. Think about them as a layer of abstraction. Ie. Links in paper published to a journal like nature. It might be valid for 10 years but the links embedded in it will rot quickly as organisations change cms's, domains names change. Organisations merge and disappear.

Also places where the cost to change the url is expensive, bus shelter adverts etc.

I think this is important but also hits the trust problem: open shorteners are basically training users to be phished but a controlled namespace doesn’t have that problem. Ideally you can use a domain you control for everything to get full control of your reputation while still retaining the flexibility to redirect links as needed.

> links embedded in it will rot quickly as organisations change cms's, domains names change. Organisations merge and disappear.

A link shortener doesn't solve any of those problems

They do when you control the link shortener

More for vanity and possibly increases engagement. Like you said, if I want a group of people to visit a link. Would you type in

“q.ly/abc” or “website.com/20240229/my-blog-title-here/1”

But as some have mentioned, QR codes have easily replaced URL shorteners for this purpose anyways.

Also I guess for the very small number of people without a device that can’t read QR codes, a shortened url would help them engage

As a user, I’m much more likely to click on the second link. Too many link shorteners come with ads and other annoyances that I’d rather not touch them. redirect-checker.org if I must

Why do blog titles include a unique ID and a worthless slug tacked on?

A unique ID helps avoid broken links if a post's title changes, and avoids conflicts between posts with the same name.

I think the question was why there is even a slug when there is already an ID

People think it helps with SEO, but I’m not sure how accurate that is. SEO seems to be a lot of snake oil and superstition

URL shorteners still benefit QR codes, if you can’t control the length of the URL or want to abuse the QR code by putting some logo in the middle.

I use a link shortener for mailto links that include precomposed to/subject/body. It's handy to have the customer email you, and you reply, since your reply won't ever be marked as spam. If you gathered info via a webform and then emailed the customer, then it would be somewhat more likely to go to spam.

I see most printed things just use qr codes now too. And most phones can go to qr code url pretty easy

Which is most unfortunate... QR/Camera apps usually just show the domain anyways, and QR codes can easily fit large URL's. I imagine shorteners are used just so that they can choose a lower QR version and include a pretty logo in the middle.

Beneficial for shared presentations

I use one to get bookmarks to a service that keeps a significant amount of data in the URL fragment.

e.g. https://mutraction.dev/link/pv

For people without direct control of their domains/URLs some of them let you have a short link that you can keep updating to point to the current.

But most public ones don’t let you change the redirect.

I use them for easy memorization of tools and deployment stuff I use in my day-to-day IT work. It's also nice to be able to track if someone did what they were supposed to do.

My company has one they use to track who clicks on links in emails.

That's the link analytics case I mentioned.

QR codes of shorter URLs are easier to scan.

Sending SMS messages to users/customers

This is a valid use case, my company does this, but I would never outsource it when a link expander isn't difficult to build exactly to the spec you want/need.

Yep. I built my own for a similar reason. It went from "we need a URL shortener" on a Wednesday to "we have a robust URL shortener in production" the next Monday.

This question reads a bit like "What have the Romans ever done for us?". ;)

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