Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it

Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it by pwg on Sunday February 19, 2023 @10:56AM (#34858626)

The thing is, the premise of the article (new owner of domain can serve whatever they like to existing links) also applies even if a shortener is not used.

Take this URL from yahoo news that I just picked out at random:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-accidentally-breaks-42-000-...

Lets say tomorrow yahoo sells off "yahoo.com" to the highest bidder. The new owner can reply to queries for that url with whatever they like. The only real difference is the URL above has some meaningful text in the title, so if an article on something very different comes up, there's some indication of something wrong. This is vs. gu.com/ABCD having no indicator of anything amiss if a new owner serves different content.

But the story really boils down to: when a domain is sold to a new owner, that new owner can change the content for any existing URL's for that domain.

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Re:Never use a URL shortening service – even if you own it by hyperpape on Sunday February 19, 2023 @11:39AM (#34859105)

I think there is a relevant difference, which is that yahoo.com is basically tied to Yahoo the company in a way that gu.com isn't. You can't sell yahoo.com without selling a major portion of Yahoo, but the vanity URL comes more cheaply.

Companies do break their own URLs, which is bad, but I think using a shortener aggravates the problem.

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