Honestly, just never use link shorteners. QR codes have basically completely killed their use-case, and various sharing tools take care of what little QR codes do not.
Revenue Stream: Unlocked
Service: Shittified
Userbase: Leaving
Does this break tools that expand these URLs without visiting them?
If so, they’ve just made themselves incredibly attractive to malicious actors since determining what is behind the URL will be harder to do safely and quickly for security controls.
I don’t understand in what circumstances anyone would like to use link shorteners? I can only find reasons why not to use them:
- subject visitors to surveillance
- destination under the control of a third party (potential for ransom for the author, like we see here, and potential of ads for visitors like we see here)
- obfuscation of the actual destination
- how long will the redirect be valid for? It could be deemed unviable for the company to continue support of the redirect, thus rendering the destination inaccessible from all places where the shortened link is used.
- more…?
Nowadays I see them mostly used by creators for sponsor or product links, probably because it lets them track how many people click on it and when
Those are all valid. For me, the two reasons I like to use one is:
- Better for social media with very limited characters
- You can choose the “slug” and make your source link into an easy to remember link that works anywhere (only on certain shorteners, I use one that lets you do this for free)
Bonus reason I guess: - When source link needs to be updated but you want to keep the same destination URL, you can do this via the shortener service and now you don’t have to update that link in the code or data of your websites that use it. (Some shorteners don’t support this, I use one that does)
Anything with a printed QR code.
Using the short link means you can change the destination without having to reprint everything.
Having a short link means the QR code is lower resolution, so you can print it smaller or have it legible at longer distance.
Urls can be too long to be memorable and useful on a audio medium like radio or podcasts. So if you can give them a domain they know and a keyword or phrase it becomes extremely useful.
I hear you, I always see this problem being solved by the link being in the description and the host saying “link in the description”. I hadn’t come across a situation where an audio only format was accessible and there was no way to interact with the content but in some corner cases it does make sense.
Kutt is extremely easy to selfhost and fast as hell (and not written in PHP).
I would prefer sth written in PHP to sth written in js tbh
You can have shit software in any language ✨
