[rovr138]

I would move away from url shorteners.

- It’s a single point of failure.

- If the database breaks, you loose all your links.

- If they get attacked, they can redirect to malware.

- If they go out of business or gets shut down, you have another issue to solve.

If you’re using markdown, asciidoc, restructuredtext you can create a link and hide the url with text.

Equivalent to,

    <a href=“http://example.com/some/page/here”>Example</a>

[geoelectric]

You can't hide it in plaintext, which is the point.

I think your post got partially eaten by HN as formatting but I understand the []() format for MD--but you can see where that's at least 2 chars longer than just putting in the raw URL, and not super necessary in my editor that auto-linkifies. The markdown formatting is so I can share it with other people and paste into gdocs, but 50 char wide plaintext is the primary format.

It's also an internal shortener service within an established company that maintains it well, but I appreciate your points for public ones.