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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

IMO it's less Google's fault and more a crappy tech education problem.

It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something.

And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear on a whim. How many of those shortened links even go to valid pages any more?

And no company is going to maintain a "free" service forever. It's easy to say, "It's only ...", but you're not the one doing the work or paying for it.

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> It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something.

It's a great idea, and today in 2025, papers are pretty much the only place where using these shortened URLs makes a lot of sense. In almost any other context you could just use a QR code or something, but that wouldn't fit an academic paper.

Their specific choice of shortened URL provider was obviously unfortunate. The real failure is that of DOI to provide an alternative to goo.gl or tinyurl or whatever that is easy to reach for. It's a big failure, since preserving references to things like academic papers is part of their stated purpose.

Even normal HTTP URLs aren't great. If there was ever a case for content-addressable networks like IPFS it's this. Universities should be able to host this data in a decentralized way.

CANs usually have complex hashy URLs, so you still have the compactness problem

A DOI handle type of thing could certainly point to an IPFS address. I can't speak to how you'd do truly decentralized access to the DOI handle. At some point DNS is a thing and somebody needs to host the handle.

Ahh classic free market cop out.

if the smartest among us publishing for academia cannot figure this out, then who will?

Not infrequently, someone being smart in one field doesn't necessarily mean they can solve problems in another.

I know some brilliant people, but, well, putting it kindly, they're as useful as a chocolate teapot outside of their specific area of academic expertise.

Nope! There have in fact been education campaigns about the evils of URL shorteners for years: how they pose security risks (used for shortening malicious URLs), and how they stop working when their domain is temporarily or permanently down.

The authors just had their heads too far up their academic asses to have heard of this.

Free market is a euphemism for “there’s no physics demanding this be worked on”

If you want it archived do it. You seem to want someone else to take up your concerns.

An HN genius should be able to crawl this and fix it.

But you’re not geniuses. They’re too busy to be low affect whiners on social media.

Well, is the free market going anywhere?

Who's lost out at the end of the day? People who didn't understand the free market and lost access to these "free" services? Or people who knew what would happen and avoided them? My links are still working...

There are digital public goods (like Wikipedia) that are intended to stick around forever with free access, but Google isn't one of them.

>"It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors"

???

DOI and ORCID sponsored link-shortening with Goo.gl. Authors did what they were told would be optimal, and ORCID was probably told by Google that it'd hone its link-shortening service for long-term reliability. What a crazy victim-blame.

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