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This is classic "Tragedy of the commons" behavior where each individual group with a link shortener is benefited by encouraging and enforcing its usage (ability to kill malicious links easily, user tracking, etc)

I'm not sure if this can be resolved until users are educated sufficiently on the long-term adverse effects of link shortening services (link rot, privacy concerns, slow/broken redirects, etc).

For change to happen the demand for direct links (generated explicitly by things like this blog posts, or implicitly by higher bounce rates due to long loading times) will need to be enough to outweigh the benefits to organizations that are building them.

Edit:

Even if there is evidence that shows this, why should _I_ be the one to give up my link shortener service when it will have no significant improvement to the overall problem which involves tens or hundreds of these services?



Twitter or other "end points" of content could simply follow the URLs being posted to the end, then strip out intermediate redirects.

It wouldn't solve it completely, but it'd kill the 7 redirects thing.




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