- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- hypelightfly ( @hypelightfly@kbin.social ) 85•1 year ago
Nobody should be using URL shorteners in the first place.
- gelberhut ( @gelberhut@lemdro.id ) 63•1 year ago
Afaik, originally they solved the problem twitter has created: URLs were counted together with the tweet text - with overall limit of 140.
- Greg Clarke ( @Greg@lemmy.ca ) English28•1 year ago
URL shorteners are but inherently bad. I find them useful. I self host them on domains I own. So they’re secure, trust worthy, I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be.
Plus, I’m pretty sure Twitter forces you to use their shortener. My URL http://gho.st was “shortened” to a longer https://t.co/blahblah URL 😂
- jarfil ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) English60•1 year ago
I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be
That’s inherently bad as in:
- Third party (you) tracking the user
- Hiding the true target from the user
- Destroying any attempt at content archival
They’re not inherently bad “for you”, just for everyone else.
- Greg Clarke ( @Greg@lemmy.ca ) English14•1 year ago
Third party (you) tracking the user
I’m not tracking users, I’m tracking engagement. I’m not Zuckerberg
Hiding the true target from the user
99.99% of website use a reverse proxy, the target is nearly always hidden. I don’t think you understand how the internet works.
Destroying any attempt at content archival
Who would archive a shortened URL and not follow the link to its target? It’s not my fault if people don’t know how to archive my content.
URL shorteners are not inherently bad.
- jarfil ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) English5•1 year ago
I’m not tracking users, I’m tracking engagement
Whose engagement? Anything on your server, you can track it with the access logs, do you know how the internet works?
99.99% of website use a reverse proxy, the target is nearly always hidden. I don’t think you understand how the internet works.
Do you know how a reverse proxy works? It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.
Who would archive a shortened URL and not follow the link to its target? It’s not my fault if people don’t know how to archive my content.
Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.
URL shorteners are inherently bad.
- Greg Clarke ( @Greg@lemmy.ca ) English2•1 year ago
Whose engagement?
The engagement with my presentation for instance. I don’t care about tracking specific users.
It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.
Where the user-facing URL points can easily be changed! For instance, changing the DNS record or changing where the reverse proxy points. I really don’t think you understand how the internet works under the hood.
Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.
I’m not going to optimize my content for lazy archivers. Check out web.archive.org for an example of how to properly archive, they update the URLs so links don’t break
- redcalcium ( @redcalcium@lemmy.institute ) 8•1 year ago
Third party (you) tracking the user
No, he’s not a third party, he’s the second party in this context because you visit his own website, hosted on his own server.
- jarfil ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) 10•1 year ago
On his own website, hosted on his own server, he has server logs to track whatever he wants, change whatever content he wants to display, and do whatever else he wants.
The only reason to use a URL shortener, is to interpose himself between his server and someone else’s server, meaning to become a third party to the relationship between user and other server.
- 👁️👄👁️ ( @mojo@lemm.ee ) English3•1 year ago
I see zero reason why others would be entitled to archive your content, nor hiding the true target from the user. Those are not bad things.
- jarfil ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) English5•1 year ago
Read up on Archive.org and “link rot”.
- 👁️👄👁️ ( @mojo@lemm.ee ) English2•1 year ago
I know what that is, and I believe in the right to be forgotten.
- jarfil ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) English4•1 year ago
The right to detach your (private) personal information from some content, doesn’t mean you should have the right for your content to be forgotten.
- 👁️👄👁️ ( @mojo@lemm.ee ) English2•1 year ago
Yes you should…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
Privacy is a big reason why. Archiving is also a very common way to dox people. Not to mention, I just don’t want my shit to exist online indefinitely. I want my data to be forgotten. In what way is this bad. Hoarding everything indefinitely is bad.
- deepthaw ( @deepthaw@lemmy.sdf.org ) English8•1 year ago
I work for a college. We use our internal link shorteners to make sure a given link points at the latest version of a resource and measure engagement by seeing what is the best way to get important information to our students and faculty. (Did people actually click on that announcement in our LMS?)
They’re terribly useful for us.
- buckykat ( @buckykat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 4•1 year ago
You being able to track engagement is bad, actually.
- Greg Clarke ( @Greg@lemmy.ca ) English10•1 year ago
This obviously depends on the context. For instance, I’m speaking at a public event and I put a link up on a presentation to my website. The website is running on my nginx server so I could already track every visit. Having a shortened URL helps me gauge the value of my talk. It’s not black and white
- buckykat ( @buckykat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 4•1 year ago
Real name and face on the internet guy doesn’t get to have an opinion on tracking.
- mom ( @mom@discuss.tchncs.de ) 2•1 year ago
I self host them on domains I own.
I’ve been trying to get a short domain to do exactly that, do you know any good brokers?
- viking ( @viking@infosec.pub ) 3•1 year ago
Not the OP, but if all you need is a domain, namecheap.com is solid and very affordable.
- Greg Clarke ( @Greg@lemmy.ca ) English3•1 year ago
No sorry, I was just lucky and persistent
- 👁️👄👁️ ( @mojo@lemm.ee ) English1•1 year ago
You can do that already with something like cloudflare
- HeartyBeast ( @HeartyBeast@kbin.social ) 8•1 year ago
Why is that? They can be useful - especially if you are including links in something like a print publication
- Mannivu ( @Mannivu@feddit.it ) 28•1 year ago
Privacy: trackers, trackers, trackers Security: you can’t know where you would be taken with a short link. A legit website? A malicious website? Who knows.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ygrauer/2016/04/20/five-reasons-you-should-stop-shortening-urls/
- Hot Saucerman ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) English19•1 year ago
It doesnt matter how short a link is on paper, I am probably not going to take the time to type the whole damn thing on a shitty phone keyboard.
QR codes aren’t great either, but I would prefer those in a print publication than a shortened URL. Just give me the full URL in a QR code thanks.
- wagoner ( @wagoner@infosec.pub ) 6•1 year ago
How about a QR code that takes you to a shortened link
- hypelightfly ( @hypelightfly@kbin.social ) 18•1 year ago
- They are insecure with no way to know what the real URL is.
- If you don’t control it you can’t guarantee the link will always work (bad for print).
- Register a shorter domain or novelty domain for your print publication.
How are they useful?
- 👍Maximum Derek👍 ( @Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ) English7•1 year ago
Because then other people control the link. Imagine writing a long print article about a community coming together to care for an elderly holocaust survivor that includes a link for more info. And then Musk (or whomever has the control over the link shortener you use) comes along and decides the link in your article should point at a holocaust denialism site instead. You can’t change the link that’s now printed on paper, but they can change what it points at.
- wagoner ( @wagoner@infosec.pub ) 5•1 year ago
Or the shortened web site shuts down and all that history is lost. Happened to, I believe, the Guardian newspapers shortening service.
- atocci ( @atocci@kbin.social ) 6•1 year ago
I think Twitter might do it to standardize the number of characters a link takes up in a tweet? 23 characters IIRC
- wagoner ( @wagoner@infosec.pub ) 8•1 year ago
Mastodon manages to do it without a shortener, so I don’t believe that’s the answer.
- 👁️👄👁️ ( @mojo@lemm.ee ) English1•1 year ago
That used to be the case, don’t think it is anymore. I don’t remember though, I ditched that shit hole.
- PenguinCoder ( @Penguincoder@beehaw.org ) 23•1 year ago
Eh I don’t think it’s malicious in nature but can’t prove it either is or isn’t. They might be doing more analysis on some outbound links or users for something or just A/B testing some additional methods for gathering more data. Unsure. But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.
- Shadow ( @Shadow@lemmy.ca ) 62•1 year ago
If adding some analytics adds 5s to the load time, then they need to fire their developers.
There’s no way this is accidental.
- HarkMahlberg ( @HarkMahlberg@kbin.social ) 57•1 year ago
That’s kind of the problem, they did fire their developers.
- Moonrise2473 ( @Moonrise2473@feddit.it ) 50•1 year ago
with that asshole in command? Uhm…
Every bad decision there is intentional
- frogman [he/him] ( @frogman@beehaw.org ) English6•1 year ago
i think you should read the replies to the hackernews post, there’s some interesting discussion there with more nuance. particularly the thread started by user “kens”
- PenguinCoder ( @Penguincoder@beehaw.org ) English4•1 year ago
- 14th_cylon ( @14th_cylon@lemm.ee ) 9•1 year ago
But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.
occam’s razor says you should ;)
- Sinnerman ( @Sinnerman@kbin.social ) 10•1 year ago
But Hanlon’s razor says you shouldn’t.
All right, we got a razor fight!
- 14th_cylon ( @14th_cylon@lemm.ee ) 7•1 year ago
Hanlon’s razor says you shouldn’t.
yeah, but that applies to a problem where you don’t have any additional information. if you do have background information of any kind, you would be wise to take them into account.
All right, we got a razor fight!
my razor is ready, bring it on! 😆
- PenguinCoder ( @Penguincoder@beehaw.org ) 5•1 year ago
- Luci ( @Luci@lemmy.ca ) 7•1 year ago
The fact that specific domains and user agents are effected by this says otherwise. Take a look in the link for people discussing curling the urls and their findings.
- katy ✨ ( @cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 6•1 year ago
It’s Elmo.
It’s definitely malicious in nature.
- katy ✨ ( @cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 20•1 year ago
Posting for no reason in particular.
https://github.com/theAlinP/twitter-link-deobfuscator
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-deobfuscator/
- Talaraine ( @Talaraine@kbin.social ) 12•1 year ago
I gotta say though, in my journey to find other ways to access information rather than using the big names, I often find delays and small frustrations to get where I need to go.
Every time I ask myself if it’s worth it to not give data or money to these sites; whether it’s more important to make sure I’m directing my attention and financial support to other people and other companies? And I take a breath and endure b/c it’s the only power I have in all this.
Is 5 seconds worth it? For me it is.
- TheRtRevKaiser ( @TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social ) 1•1 year ago
Commenting here to test something. Please disregard.
You can’t tell me what to do! You’re not even my real Dad!