Everything must enshittify.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
90 points (97.9% liked)
Privacy
33992 readers
1488 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
QR codes mostly solved that.
Not when you are working in a CLI
Your comment prompted me to search and I found this util: https://github.com/fumiyas/qrc
Obviously results in a larger ASCII blob than a shortened URL, but would allow use on any terminal.
It's the other way around, I need to get long links to the CLI
Shortening the URL makes it possible to have significantly lower resolution QR codes, which is almost always more useful. Able to be rendered on more mediums, able to be read with lower quality readers.
Service-specific link shorteners are alright, like youtu.be, a.co and goo.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.
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...
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.
Laughs in Ublock Origin
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.
I haven’t seen a Bitly link in dog’s years and assumed it had died.
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.
Or just don’t shorten links? Shortening them just makes linkrot much more likely and also obfuscates where theyre going
I’ve had these losers DNS blocked for years. Don’t respond to abuse reports? Get NXDOMAIN’d.