[1shooner]

As a hypertext purist, I used to think this. But working for a large organization, shortlinks can be an invaluable way to actually maintain the integrity of links that have been deployed to unrevisable media (emails, print, pdfs, etc).

If a resource has been relocated off of a host/url, often part of that situation is that we don't have immediate access to implement a redirect from that host to the resource's new location.

Now I see a shortlink manager as a centralized redirect manager, which is so much more rational and stable than creating a tangle of redirect config across dozens of hosts or hundreds of content applications.

The caveat is that you don't need to use a 3rd party domain or service, you should definitely at least use your own domain. You also don't need to make them unreadable hashes, they can actually be more human-friendly.

[conception]

https://www.golinks.io Interesting product that does this for internal links.