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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

That idea in the second paragraph of your comment is good. Someone ought to do that.

As far as the first, though, I think that you've got it wrong. It's not the same as any old site breaking. Say a person, over time, links to eight sites in his forum comments, and one goes down. Seven links are still valid. If he uses a shortener service that collapses, none of his links are valid.

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Unshort.me is doing it. Look at the following post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577457

[Hi, Billy Mays here for..] TheRealUrl does it too, with JSON/P support and returning page titles as well! ;)

http://therealurl.appspot.com/

(it runs on Google App Engine, so I expect to keep it up as long as GAE exists. I didn't get TLD for it, to keep maintainance/costs at zero. And it memcaches everything, so feel free to query it as much as you like)

http://permanize.org/ too.

Nice one :) I was thinking of adding a downloadable list too - how did you get so many archived URLs? Do you have a cron running on Twitter/etc?

Say a person links to a series of articles, and the site which hosted them goes down. Now all the links are invalid, and this is nothing more than what we deal with every day.

The alarmist rants I've seen against URL shorteners are simply making this argument without realizing that there is no "new" problem in need of solving, only an old one that we already handle fairly well. Though given the level of irrational rhetoric I've been seeing in these discussions (example here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998) I'm not sure there's any point trying to argue with it.

The problem with URL shorteners is that you now have two servers which can go down.

Not only that, but if it's an "original" URL that's broken but at least well formatted you at least have a hint of where to look, for example in the Google cache, archive.org, or elsewhere on the original domain.

Shortened URLs give you no hints as to where the original document was located.

Dude, you keep saying that "it's the same problem we've always had", but it simply isn't. You seem like a smart guy otherwise, so I don't know why you persist in making this assertion. The difference is simple: url shorteners introduce a middle man, another point of failure or abuse, and one that can't be fixed by the person who made the link (because they may forget the original target and not know who to contact) or the person who manages the target (because they can't set up a redirect from the old url).

Adding a link to a chain, any chain will make a it weaker:

Either the link is as strong as all the other links then you have a new element that can fail, which is bad, or your link is weaker than the other links in the existing chain and now the whole chain is weakened to the strength of the new link.

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