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 😂
The engagement with my presentation for instance. I don't care about tracking specific users.
It doesn’t change the user-facing URL like a shortener.
Where the user-facing URL points can easily be changed! For instance, changing the DNS record or changing where the reverse proxy points. I really don't think you understand how the internet works under the hood.
Someone archiving the original content. It’s your fault for breaking the link at a whim.
I'm not going to optimize my content for lazy archivers. Check out web.archive.org for an example of how to properly archive, they update the URLs so links don't break
On his own website, hosted on his own server, he has server logs to track whatever he wants, change whatever content he wants to display, and do whatever else he wants.
The only reason to use a URL shortener, is to interpose himself between his server and someone else's server, meaning to become a third party to the relationship between user and other server.
Privacy is a big reason why. Archiving is also a very common way to dox people. Not to mention, I just don't want my shit to exist online indefinitely. I want my data to be forgotten. In what way is this bad. Hoarding everything indefinitely is bad.
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?)
This obviously depends on the context. For instance, I'm speaking at a public event and I put a link up on a presentation to my website. The website is running on my nginx server so I could already track every visit. Having a shortened URL helps me gauge the value of my talk. It's not black and white
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.
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.