this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Privacy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

IIRC, they originally became popular because they saved characters for microblogs like Twitter. They've outlasted their usefulness though.

[โ€“] pirat 4 points 1 week ago

I think some used them to gain insight in clicks (bit.ly provided stats for numbers, user agents etc.), and to track the origin of clicks by generating a unique shortened URL for each linking post.

Also, the obvious use case of turning a long direct URL to a file into something people can actually be bothered to manually copy from paper...