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A comment on Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web. Parent comment

Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by robert_tweed on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:23AM (#7803867)
Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a common and pretty annoying problem.

IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the first to be popularised by Twitter.

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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by dfc on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:08PM (#7805170)
What is the ironic reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by heinrich5991 on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:23PM (#7805244)
That makeashorterlink is unneccessarily long I guess.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by dfc on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @09:48PM (#7807953)
I like my irony served with less inevitability.
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