Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lacraig2 1620 days ago
It seems like lot of URL shorteners have shut down over the last few years. Is there a common reason? Malware?
2 comments

More likely (though malware can contribute to this) they just can't justify the cost. There's always going to be a terse response that someone could build one in an afternoon and a $5 Digital Ocean VM, but bandwidth costs can be significant at scale.
Twitter doubled their character limits in a tweet while Twitter users adopted the concept of multiple tweets to form a thread. No other services (to my knowledge) impose character limits that would require url shortening.
Twitter automatically shortens URLs so what are you even going on about?