[gedrap]

There's a few more genuine use cases for shorteners, one of them is using links offline (e.g. print advertisements). I noticed my university does that and I kind of like it.

It definitely won't remember company.com/section/potentially_a_subsestion/page?someParamters=mayyybe if I see it somewhere. But I might remember bit.ly/CompanyCampaign.

Some might say that it's the developers/company fault, they should have made the URLs more friendly/configurable. Yeah maybe, but it's often easier just to use a shortener, let's be realistic.

I also use them when I know I will need to open some link directly (i.e. by typing in URL). For example, I prefer bit.ly/myPresentation to logging into google drive, getting 2FA text, finding the presentation...

So yeah, while they are evil in some cases, they have a bunch of genuine use cases.

[gabrtv]

Bog standard permalinks to the rescue: company.com/some-promotion

[hagbardgroup]

Right. This is the correct way to do it, with natural language related to the ad.