Nobody should be using URL shorteners in the first place.
- URL shorteners are but inherently bad. I find them useful. I self host them on domains I own. So they're secure, trust worthy, I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be.
  Plus, I'm pretty sure Twitter forces you to use their shortener. My URL http://gho.st was "shortened" to a longer https://t.co/blahblah URL 😂
  
  I can track engagement, and I can update them if need be
  That's inherently bad as in:
  Third party (you) tracking the user
  Hiding the true target from the user
  Destroying any attempt at content archival
  They're not inherently bad "for you", just for everyone else.
  
  I work for a college. We use our internal link shorteners to make sure a given link points at the latest version of a resource and measure engagement by seeing what is the best way to get important information to our students and faculty. (Did people actually click on that announcement in our LMS?)
  They’re terribly useful for us.
  
  You being able to track engagement is bad, actually.
  
  I self host them on domains I own.
  I’ve been trying to get a short domain to do exactly that, do you know any good brokers?
  
  You can do that already with something like cloudflare
- Why is that? They can be useful - especially if you are including links in something like a print publication
  
  Privacy: trackers, trackers, trackers Security: you can't know where you would be taken with a short link. A legit website? A malicious website? Who knows.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/ygrauer/2016/04/20/five-reasons-you-should-stop-shortening-urls/
  
  It doesnt matter how short a link is on paper, I am probably not going to take the time to type the whole damn thing on a shitty phone keyboard.
  QR codes aren't great either, but I would prefer those in a print publication than a shortened URL. Just give me the full URL in a QR code thanks.
  
  They are insecure with no way to know what the real URL is.
  If you don't control it you can't guarantee the link will always work (bad for print).
  Register a shorter domain or novelty domain for your print publication.
  How are they useful?
  
  Because then other people control the link. Imagine writing a long print article about a community coming together to care for an elderly holocaust survivor that includes a link for more info. And then Musk (or whomever has the control over the link shortener you use) comes along and decides the link in your article should point at a holocaust denialism site instead. You can't change the link that's now printed on paper, but they can change what it points at.
  
  @HeartyBeast @trashhalo @hypelightfly Maybe it's a good idea to include the original URL too. In case the link shortener goes offline or something else happens to it.
- I think Twitter might do it to standardize the number of characters a link takes up in a tweet? 23 characters IIRC
  
  Mastodon manages to do it without a shortener, so I don't believe that's the answer.
  
  That used to be the case, don't think it is anymore. I don't remember though, I ditched that shit hole.

Eh I don't think it's malicious in nature but can't prove it either is or isn't. They might be doing more analysis on some outbound links or users for something or just A/B testing some additional methods for gathering more data. Unsure. But I wouldn't immediately jump to intentional.
- If adding some analytics adds 5s to the load time, then they need to fire their developers.
  There's no way this is accidental.
  
  That's kind of the problem, they did fire their developers.
- with that asshole in command? Uhm...
  Every bad decision there is intentional
  
  i think you should read the replies to the hackernews post, there's some interesting discussion there with more nuance. particularly the thread started by user "kens"
- But I wouldn’t immediately jump to intentional.
  occam's razor says you should ;)
  
  But Hanlon's razor says you shouldn't.
  All right, we got a razor fight!
- The fact that specific domains and user agents are effected by this says otherwise. Take a look in the link for people discussing curling the urls and their findings.
- It's Elmo.
  It's definitely malicious in nature.

Posting for no reason in particular.
https://github.com/theAlinP/twitter-link-deobfuscator
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-deobfuscator/

I gotta say though, in my journey to find other ways to access information rather than using the big names, I often find delays and small frustrations to get where I need to go.
Every time I ask myself if it's worth it to not give data or money to these sites; whether it's more important to make sure I'm directing my attention and financial support to other people and other companies? And I take a breath and endure b/c it's the only power I have in all this.
Is 5 seconds worth it? For me it is.