Bitly Changes: Link-Shortening, Now with Advertising
Bitly Changes: Link-Shortening, Now with Advertising
tedium.co
Bitly Changes: Link-Shortening, Now With Advertising
19 comments
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Laughs in Ublock Origin
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Shocking. That's what we get for expecting companies to be benevolent stewards of the internet. They tricked us for a decade and a half but the sheep's clothing are coming off.
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I haven’t seen a Bitly link in dog’s years and assumed it had died.
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Host your own URL shortener with Yourls. It's great, loads of useful plugins too. (dot)ink domains are cheap so you can have fun with namel.ink like I did.
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I’ve had these losers DNS blocked for years. Don’t respond to abuse reports? Get
NXDOMAIN’d.
19 comments
Everything must enshittify.
Have link shorteners ever not been shitty? It obfuscates a link for the sake of making things look pretty for people who can't format text
Link shorteners have absolutely been useful when you need to go to a long URL on a entirely different device you can't copy a link to easily.
I've used them to make it easy to get to scripts.
Service-specific link shorteners are alright, like
youtu.be,a.coandgoo.gl/maps. At least know roughly where you're going.For anything else, I rather see the full URLs, and if I need to share a link on a paper medium, I also make it available in a QRcode form.
IIRC, they originally became popular because they saved characters for microblogs like Twitter. They've outlasted their usefulness though.
When it comes to email I just have my server reject any containing links that point to URL shorteners. I’m not stupid enough to click them anyway but it’s safe to assume you’re just a scammer or some other lowlife, even if you’re otherwise considered a reputable business.