That is a disingenous strawman. Not every user here knows how to do that and he was not even talking about himself. Actually, large part of the community here probably does know, but I would not bet that it is majority.CertainlyWicked wrote: Sun Mar 29, 2026 11:30 am An IT security guy who doesn't know how - or at least consider it hard to impossible - to deobfuscate a shortened link, sorry but that's hard to believe, it's like you'd say a batch file is hard to check while every - even the most simple - text-editor is able to do so
The fact is, most people who do know, won't bother. They will simply skip clicking on these and move on, because they do not want to spend energy to see if what behind a shortlink is safe.
You did not even try to relate to people by stating why you like shortlinks, I could understand that you care more about having control of the links, or counting clicks, or whatever reason you have, you do not have to state it, but, and perhaps you already know that, this will reduce amount of clicks you get by non-marginal amount, and it should come as no surprise to you that it will. I know because I have seen it before, and people will refuse to check them, not only because some over-anxious antivirus warns them but also because they don't want to connect to vpn just to click an unknown link that might be logging their ip address - they will not go and research whois for an unknown domain and then trace and redo it for the redirect just to download a video. Even famous link shortener like bit.ly will be avoided because users do not want to take the risk of the target being something they do not trust, and not feeling like spending energy to check it in a safe way.
This is a niche community where many members still bear shame associated with their sexuality or kinks and trust is important - you can't expect that people will blindly click through shortlinks of new member who registered practically yesterday and has no other participation in community. Many people here already know that shortlinkers are able to geo-target visitors and pass them to different address depending on where they come from, so even if it led to mega once, the link is never safe since it can pass through different shortener/logger depending on where they come from, so what is safe for one user might not be for all.
