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Comment by creatonez | Hacker News Reader

There's something poetic about abusing a link shortener as a database and then later having to retrieve all your precious links from random corners of the internet because you've lost the original reference.

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Shortening long URLs is the intended use case for a ... URL shortener.

The real abusers are the people who use a shortener to hide scam/spam/illegal websites behind a common domain and post it everywhere.

These are not just "long URLs". These are URLs where the entire content is stored in the fragment suffix of the URL. They are blobs, and always have been.

Didnt they just use the link shortener to compress the url? They used their url as the "database" (ie holding the compiler state).

They didn't store anything themselves since they encoded the full state in the urls that were given out. So the link shortener was the only place where the "database", the urls, were being stored.

Yeah but the purpose of the url shortener was not to store the data, it was to shorten the url. The fact that the data was persisted on google's sever somewhere is incidental.

In other words, every shortened url is "using the url shortener as a database" in that sense. Taking a url with a long query parameter and using a url shortener to shorten it does not constitute "abusing a link shortener as a database."

Except in this case the url IS the data, so storing the url is the same as storing the data.

Its incidental. The state is in the url which is only shortened because its so long. Google’s url shortener is not needed to store the data.

It’s simply a normal use-case for a url shortener. A long url, usually because of some very large query parameter, which gets mapped to a short one.

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