Do people actually appreciate URL shorteners?

@catsalad @hpod16 Your phishy URL asked me to come out & play, but my adblocker wouldn’t let me…

@juanejot @hpod16

Let's get creepy then! https://creepylink.com/

@hpod16 @catsalad Yeah, that one worked, but I’m disappointed not to see anything about the free dinner just for listening to a time-share sales pitch, where it linked me to.

@hpod16 theyre nice when i have to share a long url to a device that i have to type it out on, but i know where the link goes and only use open source ones

something something im an outlier and shouldn't be counted

@catsalad @paveljanicek @hpod16 https://support.ic6do.com/Ireqke_invoice lmao

@catsalad @paveljanicek @hpod16 omg @ivpn 's anti tracker blocked it

@hpod16 Yes, in some circumstances: if I trust the shortening service and it’s a printed URL (for inside, on a flyer) that I’ll have to type.

@paveljanicek @catsalad @hpod16 inevitably these end up getting used by scammers sadly

@hpod16 Same goes for links to documents instead of pages. I'd like to see some sort of clear declaration if what I'm about to click/tap will start downloading a file.

@catsalad I’m both surprised and not surprised that somebody went and made one of these.

@hpod16@eupolicy.social
I once liked them, when the character count was important in SMS or on Twitter. But now, there's no advantage but several drawbacks.

@hpod16 @LordCaramac i think its good for situations where people might need to type manually. flyer, presentations, …

mostly replaced by QR codes, i guess.

@dngrs @paveljanicek @catsalad @hpod16 ...why would the scammer use a "make the link more suspicious" button? If their links look like that, it's because these tools are based off of phishing links lol not because the scammers used the tool

@breizh @hpod16 this: I wouldn't mind link shorteners that don't hide where I'm going. If there were more vetted ones, I'd probably be down for those (currently the only ones I trust are corporate ones, which feels icky but also like... People can't really set a youtu.be link to some random scammy shit other than a YouTube video lol)

@hpod16

If it's a preview link, then I'm fine with it. Otherwise it's definitely a security risk that needs to be handled better.

@raphaelmorgan@disabled.social @hpod16@eupolicy.social I know a french podcast that does it properly too.

The full URL is https://cpu.dascritch.net/post/2015/12/10/Ex0012-Ingénierie-d-Internet and the short one is https://cpu.pm/12 (for the 12th episode).

@raymaccarthy @hpod16 To be fair, Twitter originally used to send you all the tweets of people you followed by SMS.

@hpod16 They just add another point of failure, so when you return to a saved link years later you have to hope that the shortening service is still up as well as the site hosting the actual resource.

@hpod16 for instance, not for inside. Sheesh.

@hpod16 The only purpose or value I can see to them is when one has to manually type something in. But there are usually better ways of handling even that. (For example, QR codes so you don't have to type in the first place.) If I need to pass a complex URL over to my phone or something I usually paste it into a QR code generator and uncover the camera.

(As a side note, there are QR code apps that can show the URL before actually loading it and I do appreciate that.)

A lot of people here already know this, but of course URL shorteners can go bad and even URLs get taken over...