whats the point of url shorteners in 2026

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example.com or https://example.com
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Obfuscation, mostly.

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Analytics, also.

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The same point as always, some things have ridiculously long URLs.

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We use shortened URLs in physical marketing materials like flyers, billboards, etc.

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Good for you. You must be one of the last holdouts against "QR all the things!".

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I think short urls are still memorable and good. My phone doesn't surrogate all of my recall.

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Short URLs are good. Memorable URLs are good. URLs spat out by URL shorteners are something entirely different.

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Ah, the randomly generated ones. Yeah, agreed.

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The longer the text you need to store, the bigger a QR code needs to be in order to scan reliably. Also, you might be more confident in being able to keep a short URL stable (it's already a step of indirection, so if you want to reorg your site you can just update where the short URL points to). But people don't really take care to maintain short URLs anyway, apparently.

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