
Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web - fdevillamil
http://t37.net/why-link-shorteners-harm-your-readers-and-destroy-the-web.html
======
saurik
> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140
> characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network
> was almost impossible.

No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in
2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because
URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby
difficult to type; they also have tons of puncutation, and are at danger of
being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and
character mapping.

~~~
robert_tweed
Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width
limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling
was a common and pretty annoying problem.

IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that
seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the
first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the
first to be popularised by Twitter.

~~~
dfc
What is the _ironic_ reason that explains tinyurl supplanting
makeashorterlink?

~~~
heinrich5991
That makeashorterlink is unneccessarily long I guess.

~~~
dfc
I like my irony served with less inevitability.

------
ipsin
Link shorteners are bad for usability, but they're also a potential attack
vector for targeted attacks. A link might go to the right site 99.9% of the
time, and redirect a user to a malicious site the rest of the time.

You can redirect based on the browser fingerprint, IP address, or any number
of things.

I have a proof-of-concept of this at
[http://brokenthings.org/](http://brokenthings.org/)

It redirects to a "friendly" site for preview scanners, etc., and to a "bad"
site (Youtube videos, with some stale ones) for users.

It's blocked by Facebook, but still works on G+.

~~~
hagbardgroup
Amazing. Thanks for this.

------
pdkl95
> t.co -> j.mp -> pocket.co -> getpocket.com -> bit.ly -> $PROPER_URL

Wow, so many different people tracking a single link.

These are super annoying once they changed to storing the actual URL on the
server. The old "redirect?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com" style could be re-
written on the client to remove the click-tracking, but by storing it on the
server, you _have_ to be tracked to get the URL. These seriously need to go
away - that's way too many tracking databases just waiting to get a subpoena
or "national security letter".

\--

side note: The only time I ever used a url shortener was for a meme that
unfortunately never went anywhere:

[http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-
imbroglio](http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio)

edit: typo

~~~
newaccountfool
It seems really strange that the person would use this many link shortners,
are you sure it wasn't a malicious link? Back when I used to clickjack we used
to mask our website by using multiple link shortners and other tricks to hide
the website from Twitters automated checker.

~~~
CHY872
It's the Pocket to Buffer to Twitter workflow. Pocket adds getpocket.com and
pocket.co, Buffer adds j.mp, Twitter adds t.co.

------
nicky0
A useful service to "unshorten" links is
[http://longurl.org/](http://longurl.org/)

Paste in a shortened link and it will tell you the original URL, listing all
the intermediate steps on the way. It also has an API.

~~~
cbaleanu
I couldn't find a working Chrome extension so I created a basic one [1]

[1]: [https://github.com/codrineugeniu/chrome-
unshortener](https://github.com/codrineugeniu/chrome-unshortener)

------
WillKirkby
It's even more annoying on mobile (I'm using Android).

If I click an Instagram link in a tweet (since Instagram images no longer show
up inline on Twitter), it loads the t.co link in my web browser, and then
launches the instagram app to show me the photo. If I then press my phone's
"back" button, it takes me back to my web browser, and I have to press "back"
again to get back to the Twitter app. It also leaves the t.co link in my web
browser's list of active tabs, so the next time I open my web browser, it
hijacks me and launches me back into Instagram. It would not be difficult for
the Twitter app to resolve t.co links before launching anything, mitigating
this issue entirely.

~~~
dublinben
The problem here is that Twitter has hijacked every URL posted on its service
with the t.co redirector. Even if you post an already short link, it will be
wrapped in a useless t.co, which causes problems like what you've described.

------
chrisBob
Long URLs hurt the user experience and destroy the Web.

If I want to send you a link to a washingtonpost.com article the link looks
like:[http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-
root...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-roots-and-
lessons-of-memorial-
day/2014/05/25/64a36fb2-e2ae-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html)

The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could
tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad
URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the page they want
to see. I used to love NBC.com because they would let me type things like
nbc.com/parks to get to [http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-
recreation](http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation), but that is no longer
true. Now everyone just assumes that they need to google something to find it,
and they can't even imagine that apple.com/ipad would be the page they are
looking for.

~~~
notatoad
user readable and user typeable aren't the same thing. your WaPo url is
perfectly readable - it includes the author, the source, the name of the
article, and the date. if you click on it, it takes you where you want to go.
if you see it in a context where you don't want to click on it but want to
read the article later, you can still find the article because it gave you all
the information you need to google for it. if for some reason the link breaks,
you can use the information in the link to find an alternate source for the
article.

apple.com/ipad is a good URL because it describes the destination. so is
nbc.com/parks. but there is a practical limitation to that sort of url scheme
- you only get a couple hundred pages max before you exhaust your namespace.
you couldn't use a URL like that for every single article a newspaper writes
without an absurd number of collisions. so you have to start using unique IDs.
and if you only use the ID, you lose the memorable/describable aspect.

------
lisael
Anything that silently sends informations about your users to a third party is
nasty by nature, including google analytics, gravatar, disqus, +1/like buttons
and many more. Please, web designers, think twice before selling all your
users to gain little convenience.

------
DanielBMarkham
_They use a URL shortener to track trafic and « engagement » to their content:
how much clicks were generated from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin… without an
access to the site’s Google analytics. That’s because figures are more
important than people who read their content. In other words: spam._

Okay, I know that ranting content beats happy or deep-thought-out content, but
we got into hand-waving territory a little early here and without, well,
knowing what the hell we're talking about.

I use bit.ly, and gad, I hope I don't spam. There are a dozen good reasons. I
just like knowing in real-time how many people are re-using the links I share
online. Gives me some idea if anybody is paying attention. Over time, I can go
back and look at all the links I've shared, from my own stuff to MSM material,
and see what my friends liked and what they didn't. That's great feedback for
me -- just like a "like" on Facebook, except it's entirely passive on the
consumer's part.

I'm not saying there isn't a problem. The problem here is that everybody and
their brother want as much data as possible from the user, so there's this
cascading thing going on where you almost never click on a link that actually
describes where you're going. Many times the redirect can be several deep, as
the author points out.

So yes, there's a problem. But please don't jump from "there's a problem" to
"Spam! Spam! It's all about spam!"

No, it's not. There can be a problem with something without there having to be
an evil villain involved.

------
myfonj
Another evil that roams interwebs are "farewell" gates for outgoing links; eg
dA [1].

Unlike URL shorteners which could be in rare cases useful [2] I see not a
single benefit of this.

[1]
[http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.devianta...](http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing)
[2] [http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable-
datauri](http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable-datauri) (yes, this one is
a misuse, but whatewer)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
What's bad about them? Blocks referer and warns of phishing.

~~~
myfonj
1) Referrer obscuring: If I wanted not to enclose referrer, I'd have told my
browser not to do it. (I don't want to disable this so I don't like some sites
forces me to do something very similar by their design.) 1a) (Rhetorical
question:) If you were site owner and were interested in incoming traffic,
would you rather see 'someportal.com/outgoing?yoursite/page' or
'someportal.com/certainpage' referer header in access logs of yoursite/page?

2) Phishing protection: assuming such outgoing links are checked with Safe
Browsing API or something similar (I doubt it), again, that's what my browser
does by default. (Incidentally, sometimes I do not want my browser to do this
either, so again I like to switch this off: things are a bit faster and free
disk space bigger sometimes.) It might seem nice that some page makes this
effort too, but again, I don't see a big deal in it.

------
buro9
Not all link shorteners are evil and are destroying the web.

Here are some scenarios in which I like link shorteners:

1) Removal of the referrer (the anonymising redirect)

2) Redirects within a site when content moves, but the redirect service offers
a permalink shortened URL. As only they can generate the URL you can trust
that the destination is as safe as the source (the intra-site trusted redirect
with vanity URLs)

3) Self-healing of the web, if a URL becomes broken the redirect service may
be able to figure out or suggest a replacement, or offer a cached version of
the destination or a link to the web archive (the self-healing redirect)

4) Protect users against malware and spam by cancelling a redirect if the URL
is reported (the 'for the user' gateway redirect)

Not all redirects and shorteners are inherently bad. I suspect the author just
dislikes the tracking side of things, but there's always
[http://unshort.me/](http://unshort.me/)

~~~
JetSpiegel
1, 3 and 4 almost never happen in real life.

2 is the only thing remotely useful.

~~~
buro9
#1 is used by a lot of sites, mostly torrents and the like to protect their
users and themselves from obvious liability. But I even built one to help a
forum that discussed philosophy and politics to help them avoid being invaded
by trolls just because they discussed (and linked to) content on far-right
sites, etc.

#2 was the one I couldn't think of a great example for, but thought that maybe
the BBC were doing this (I have no citable source for this hunch but recall a
page discussing programme identifiers and moving all existing URLs to this new
structure using redirects).

#3 I agree does not happen in real life. Which is a shame.

#4 Twitter claim to do this
[https://support.twitter.com//entries/109623](https://support.twitter.com//entries/109623)
, and I believe Google are doing this.

Edit: Citable source for #3
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/radiolabs/2007/11/urls.sht...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/radiolabs/2007/11/urls.shtml)
. The BBC use a URL shortener in addition to the equivalent of mod_rewrite to
normalise all of their content behind permalink short URLs.

~~~
Piskvorrr
#3 actually happens in reverse: link shortener dies or the shortened link
expires, while the actual URL lives on. This way, shorteners are
_accelerating_ link rot.

------
oneeyedpigeon
Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain
first, before shortening the URL?

~~~
userbinator
Consider what happens when someone decides to give it a URL that redirects
infinitely -- it _is_ possible to make an infinite loop, as someone
demonstrated 4 years ago while also complaining about URL shorteners:

[http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-
with...](http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-with-url-
shorteners/)

(The infinite loop in that example unfortunately seems to have broken,
illustrating another downside to URL shorteners - they can go away rather
quickly.)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Detect the loop and reject the URL. I'd rather twitter protect me from ever
clicking on an infinitely-redirecting link, although browsers tend to handle
that case fairly gracefully.

------
spinchange
So literally scheduling the automated sharing of links from a "read it later"
app is a common enough workflow, but simply using a link shortening service is
automatically indicative of spam? _Come on._

Another nit: j.mp and bit.ly are different domains for the same service. If
you append a "+" to either URL you see how many times the destination has been
shared, clicked, and by _all_ shortened versions of the destination. So it's
like both of those are the same link.

Final nit: The Internet was designed to survive nuclear war. The "X destroys
the Web" trope is popular, but getting incredibly tired. That's not to say
there aren't totally legitimate criticisms of URL shorteners - there are! -
but their use clearly pre-dates Twitter and obviously has numerous legitimate
use cases as lots of comments here attest to.

~~~
mareofnight
I was a bit confused about the spam thing too. Was the intended meaning that
URL shorteners indicate the link is spam, or that trading off user experience
for analytics _makes_ it spam? (Or in the spirit of spam, or something.) I'd
think they meant the second one, except that it doesn't actually make any
sense.

I also got a really strong gut feeling of "spam" being used as a "boo!" sign,
for some reason.

------
chrismorgan
Pet peeve: articles that start with the word “why” where “how” is what they
meant.

 _Why_ link shorteners do this is a completely different question with
completely different answers.

~~~
gooseyard
thank you.

------
userbinator
If I have to repost content that contained shortened links, I always replace
them with what they redirect to, and scrub out what's unneeded (e.g. session
IDs, referer querystrings). I wish more people would do this, as it will help
in reducing the amount of nested redirections. IMHO link shorteners are only
for extremely space-constrained applications like Twitter.

As for some sites having extremely long _required_ URLs: Sometimes they are
necessary, e.g. parametric searches, but many other times they could've been
better designed to be either shorter or more informative. Whatever the form, I
don't think link shorteners should be used to hide them, if there is enough
space available to hold the full URL.

------
devolute
In my experience, from working amongst marketeers, bit.ly is still used not
because of its link-shortening abilities. It's used because of the analytics
and insight it can provides.

Even on sites with comprehensive analytic packages integrated, bit.ly (and
services like it) will be used because the people doing the "social media"
work an the people responsible for the performance of the website online are
sitting in different places and not talking to each other.

The result is this division of statistical data for each party to beat each
other with.

------
drixle
Not to mention it's a great way to spread other unwanted nasties.

------
darkhorn
I have been in
[https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE...](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_-_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD)
and
[http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%8F](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%8F)
also I should note that I am
[https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D1%86%D0%B8...](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D1%86%D0%B8_%D0%B2_%D0%91%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F)

~~~
gioele
Did you enjoy your stay in
[http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя) ?

IRI FTW.

~~~
darkhorn
Yes, it had a pool with naked people.
[http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя](http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя)

Edit: Oh, it needs some editing in the URL and done, cool.

------
gedrap
There's a few more genuine use cases for shorteners, one of them is using
links offline (e.g. print advertisements). I noticed my university does that
and I kind of like it.

It definitely won't remember
company.com/section/potentially_a_subsestion/page?someParamters=mayyybe if I
see it somewhere. But I might remember bit.ly/CompanyCampaign.

Some might say that it's the developers/company fault, they should have made
the URLs more friendly/configurable. Yeah maybe, but it's often easier just to
use a shortener, let's be realistic.

I also use them when I know I will need to open some link directly (i.e. by
typing in URL). For example, I prefer bit.ly/myPresentation to logging into
google drive, getting 2FA text, finding the presentation...

So yeah, while they are evil in some cases, they have a bunch of genuine use
cases.

~~~
gabrtv
Bog standard permalinks to the rescue: company.com/some-promotion

~~~
hagbardgroup
Right. This is the correct way to do it, with natural language related to the
ad.

------
marcin
URL shorteners provide one of the two values.

\- short link that is easier to share/doesn't break in the process (when you
send it via email, need to copy-paste on your mobile or just want a cleaner FB
message

\- tracking that will give the poster insight on the number of clicks and
other performance indicators of the message

No one in their right mind would use 302 redirect, because you then loose
things like Twitter share counts, or card implementation.

There is an odd case of someone using the shortener for marketing purposes (I
do it for my product), but it usually will be a by-product of something deeper
that offers value to the user. And, as many of those services are free (as
your referred Pocket), it's a small price to pay for an otherwise great
product IMO.

------
endgame
My favourite link shortener was mug.gd, which could also manipulate the page
it was being sent. I remember seeing a version of a PG essay trumpeting the
benefits of learning Visual Basic over Lisp :).

It's dead now, demonstrating another problem with URL shorteners.

~~~
ozh
A problem with _3rd party_ URL shorteners.

If you use and host your own, you've got things covered for as long as you
need.

------
lazyjones
Link shorteners fix one apparent problem with Microsoft Outlook: people
sending text emails with long links will typically break them for the
recipient and the common workaround, setting the line length setting very
high, is terrible too.

------
chanux
I'm not quite sure it's a URL shortener but
[http://linkis.com](http://linkis.com) shortens the URL anyway (as ln.is). I
never click a ln.is url anymore. It takes you to an intermediary page that
only worsens your^H^H^H^H my life.

PS: Can anyone see what's the point of this service?

------
czottmann
Here's one reason for me to use an URL shortener in my (German-language)
newsletter: URL length. When you send out HTML + plain text emails, some URLs
will break the text layout.

So I shorten them sparingly, for simple layout reasons. But I don't track the
clicks or anything. I might be in the minority here, tho.

------
alkonaut
Wouldn't it be quite easy for a link shortener to find the final target url
and just point to that instead of pointing to another shortener url? It could
even heuristically try to search further if the pointed to url looks like an
already shortened one (i.e. it's shorter than a treshold).

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I also wondered this, and commented before I read your comment. The shortener
can just follow the HTTP status chain until it gets a 200; no need for length
heuristics.

------
morituri
Short URLs are not just for the web - they are incredibly useful for sending
links via broadcast SMS.

------
gulbrandr
This scripts [1] searchs for links in the user timeline and replaces shortned
URLs with the original (stored in the data-expanded-url attribute).

[1]
[http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801)

~~~
pestaa
Userscripts has been down for months, as far as I know.

~~~
gulbrandr
It can still be accessed on port 8080:

[http://userscripts.org:8080/scripts/show/186801](http://userscripts.org:8080/scripts/show/186801)

~~~
pestaa
Good to know, thanks. Sorry to see it go that spammy route.

------
hakcermani
Link shortners are useful. There is possibly one other simple way to avoid the
latency. t.co can resolve the link all the way to the end at the time a tweet
is posted (ie run through 1-5). The latency hit is taken once and and not on
every access to the shortened link.

------
_asciiker_
The problem is not the link shorteners but the amount of (often slow)
redirects that come with them.

Getting users to long URLs is a good thing if done directly.

------
hellbreakslose
It is true at least for me. I never click on a shortened URL, whatever it
might be...

I tend not to trust it.

~~~
Yardlink
Why do you need to trust a website before clicking the link? If your computer
has some vulnerability to virus/hack just by visiting a website then you need
to upgrade!

~~~
zimpenfish
Upgrade to what? If you're vulnerable to a 0-day exploit, you're screwed. If
you're vulnerable to a known exploit that the vendor hasn't patched yet,
you're screwed. If the page delivers a virus the vendors can't block[1],
you're screwed. etc.etc.etc.

[1] [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/antivirus-is-dead-long-
li...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/antivirus-is-dead-long-live-
antivirus/)

