Ads are coming to bit.ly links
Enshittification is coming:
Beginning in the next month, when users click Bitly links or QR Codes, they may see a preview page prior to being directed to the destination URL. The page includes information about the link destination and may include advertising.
You all get it totally wrong, it's not part of enshittification, they add the landingpage so you can securely check where tue link is going...
And if there's a landing page, why not use it to show you great deals...would be sad to not use that real estate
That's \s by the way
Short links are bullshit anyway. Don’t obfuscate where you’re sending me, that’s sketch. That’s phishing email behavior. Just because you don’t want me to erase all the tracking bullshit from url. Soon I won’t be able to anyway because most sites are starting to embed it into the url anyway. Fuck you and fuck the internet
They're useful for printed media
"Find more info at bitly/event" instead of "find more info at facebookcom/unnecessarilylongurlthatnobodyisgoingtotype"
Or for a qr code where it needs to be small and somehow your URL is too long
But yes, relying on a third party company for something that needs to last a long time isn't really smart. There are many books that have online content now inaccessible because they used a link shortener that's dead or that doesn't let you update the redirection without paying a ransom (need to pay $120/year to bitly if you need to change the redirection)
There are sometimes reason to use it. It's shorter, so easier to remember. It's also easier to send in text. I use a selfhosted shortener, so I can use these as dynamic links and can change the target if I need to while keeping the shortlink the same. But I agree that most don't use it for respectable reasons.
I remember seeing a zero width shortener, which uses invisible characters to encode your link.
It was bound to happen, and one less reason to use shortlinks.
Hah!
Companies tried to make this a thing 20 years ago, and people just dropped the middle-men like hot potatoes. Bitly thinks it'll be different this time because people have become used to using their service, but all of the pressures that had people using link shorteners in the first place have already fallen by the wayside.
This probably isn't going to end well for them.
I remember blackberry using bitly links in their developer emails in 2013, and at the time it was possible to see the stats of any link by just adding "+" at the end of the link (now requires authentication or maybe only paid users can lock that page)
It was dismaying to see that it got only 50 clicks or so lol
Genius. Millions of links are hardcoded bit.ly links, no one will change them.
What's extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.
Even though something like "download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest-ssl&os=linux64&lang=en-US" is easier to type than "bit.ly/h7387ud-838" imo, because one has a logical structure (that I can adapt on the fly), and because I can probably type those single words faster than I can type single characters.
Well, they give the option to remove the ads altogether for just $120/year 😉
Although literally nobody would pay that ransom (100000x the actual server expense) to remove ads from their own links
I heaven used them in forever, thought they already were using ads.
May Will
I'm extremely OOTL here. Bit.ly rings a bell but I can't tell if I interact with it or how. Guess I'll find out when I see the ads
It is (was) a service that redirected a short URL like bitly/customurl to www.example.com/extremely/long/path/to/share/and/type?parameter=crazy&anotherparameter=long
perfect for sharing
Edit: removed the potentially dangerous link thanks to @dabda@DABDA@lemm.ee
You can escape the . in a URL to break the markdown auto-linking:
bit\.ly/customurl displays as:
bitly/customurl
But it seems there is a 2048 character limit, so unfortunately no storing of files in base64 data URI.
We never learned from Digg huh?
