
Bypass t.co, go straight to real links on Twitter - tonyo
https://github.com/tony-o/t.co-bypass
======
jedberg
One of the decisions we made very early on with reddit was to specifically
_not_ use a redirector. In exchange, we gave up a lot of potential revenue in
the form of selling usage information to people.

I still think that was the right decision, but I can see why Twitter relies so
heavily on t.co.

~~~
eli
Twitter also had link shorteners to deal with, a quirk of their platform. Not
only were they not collecting usage data, but they were giving a big chunk of
it to bitly for nothing.

~~~
jedberg
That's a fair assessment. We banned link shorteners from reddit pretty early
on, so we didn't have to deal with that.

~~~
thisishugo
Were it the case in 2005 that the type of analytics bit.ly and t.co enable
were nearly as big money as they are now do you think you would have
implemented a redd.it or similar shortener of your own?

~~~
jedberg
They actually had redirection in 2005. We turned it off sometime in 2007/8
when it started breaking, right when bit.ly and the other shorteners (and the
business around them) were taking off.

And actually, there is a redd.it link shortener. Every link has a
corresponding redd.it link. :)

------
nuxi7
Google does the same thing, which annoys me to no end. I'm not sure when they
started, within the past few years. They don't even return a Location header,
so the links don't work with things like wget or curl.

A link to google.com from the google seearch results is really:

hxxp://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&ei=LPrOU6a6NYS2yASDzIGADw&usg=AFQjCNG5-9Jej-
ukVeakTgwonqt2narbYg&bvm=bv.71667212,d.aWw

~~~
teh_klev
This is why I started using DuckDuckGo and only hit up google as a very last
resort by adding !g to the search term.

I'm not usually this militant, but that Google link dark pattern truly pissed
me off.

~~~
pandatigox
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo follows the same tactic. You can see a (I think)
r.duckduckgo.com URL before it loads the desired site

~~~
mcovey
It's configurable (you can disable it in settings), and its intention is
supposedly to block sending a referrer header.

------
rajbot
You might also be interested in a browser extension I made to try and make
Twitter more readable.

It hides promoted tweets, 'trending, and 'who to follow' boxes, and adds a
'temporarily hide all retweets' button. It attempts to counteract the myspace-
ification of Twitter by toning down colors and removing custom background
images, and swaps the timeline and dashboard so you can shrink the window and
still see content. It also hides the beginning hashmarks so sentences with
hashtags are easier to parse.

For Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readable-
twitter/l...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readable-
twitter/lckhhllpfhfhkoclilbgcoinfkgbledh)

For Firefox:
[https://github.com/rajbot/readable_twitter](https://github.com/rajbot/readable_twitter)

------
timdorr
I just submitted a pull request that significantly increases the speed and
efficiency of the script: [https://github.com/timdorr/t.co-
bypass/commit/f086870555da1d...](https://github.com/timdorr/t.co-
bypass/commit/f086870555da1dcc4723f0bb220506510bc268d2)

I would normally use Google's awesome Mutation Summary library
([https://code.google.com/p/mutation-
summary/](https://code.google.com/p/mutation-summary/)), but including a 50KB
file into a greasemonkey user script seemed like overkill. Interestingly,
their demo of what it can do also uses Twitter as an example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRZ4pO0gVWw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRZ4pO0gVWw)

------
enobrev
I don't mind redirectors while in a browser as it's essentially invisible, but
I don't understand why so many of these services use them in their own apps.
The client can very easily report clicks without having to detract from the UX
with a redirected link.

Not only is it slow, but it kills the back-button functionality in Android,
where I now have to hit the back button twice to get back to the originating
app. Not life-or-death, obviously, but if people had to tap the "buy" button
twice in your app to buy something, it would be considered a bug and be fixed
immediately. Redirected links are just as much of an annoyance.

------
iancarroll
Some people have a problem with t.co but remember, Twitter builds 100% of
their anti spam and virus protection into t.co, so bypassing it exposes you to
security issues.

~~~
asdfaoeu
This is bullshit, If they wanted to actually do that they would just remove
the links from the actual tweet.

~~~
CaveTech
Not entirely. They'd have to invalidate multiple levels of caching and then
dynamically update all feeds that could have the link displayed.

Or, with t.co, they disable the link from a single source and the problem is
solved.

~~~
bronson
Gosh, then it must be impossible to delete a tweet!

------
plorg
I have created my own set of userscripts which do this and a couple of other
things. They aren't of terribly great quality, but I've put them up on GitHub
in case anyone else wants to mess with them:
[https://github.com/plorg/unescape](https://github.com/plorg/unescape)

Fair warning, though: these have only really been tested on my personal usage
patterns, and might break either some website or website functionality that I
have never used.

------
eridal
CleanLinks:
[https://github.com/diegocr/cleanlinks](https://github.com/diegocr/cleanlinks)
It works with most obfuscated links

------
morisy
Would love to have this for GChat, which also intercepts your links and which
drives me crazy since it seems their service is often slower.

------
overload119
What's the value of this?

~~~
regd006
t.co is incredibly annoying IMO.

It allows twitter to easily track which links you're clicking on, which some
might consider to be a violation of privacy.

On mobile, t.co makes it so that you end up always launching a browser before
launching the appropriate application (i.e. YouTube)

When you copy and paste and send a link to someone, they have no (easy) way of
knowing what you're sending them without description or visiting, and it gives
Twitter a mechanism for tracking who you send the link to. (One could posit a
"malicious" tracking twitter where they serve up t.co links to people which
are dependent on the logged in user to track that user's social network...
fortunately I don't think this has happened yet.)

~~~
RazorCrusade
And as someone not in the U.S. with an unreliable ISP, t.co just flat-out
times out half the time unless you modify your DNS settings to point to
OpenDNS or Google or something.

I understand the value of being able to track click-throughs and quantify
virality or whatever, but there really needs to be a better way to do this.

~~~
lucaspiller
I've seen a similar thing with related services (mainly Google - although they
appear to have removed it for a 'ping' now). I'm not exactly sure what causes
it, but my browser gets stuck on "Waiting for t.co...". Refreshing the page
just takes me back to the page I clicked the link on.

The fact that t.co don't have global servers probably doesn't help, in Asia
and Australia ping times to t.co are 250ms+. Even in Europe it's over 100ms.

~~~
a_bonobo
I can confirm this - I've stopped clicking links in the official Twitter
client on Android when I'm outside in Australia, Australian mobile Internet is
already slow, combined with t.co's huge latency all links just time out.

------
tonyo
Working with tweetdeck now

