Because you're better than being driven by feelings like that.

You're only responding to the people in that demographic who are fighting you. Even when arguing, we should be speaking to the people in that demographic who are watching, who haven't made up their minds about who they are.

I know you mean well. But why are you repeatedly slamming on lower education demographics — who also need help and who we should be working to welcome into a progressive coalition — instead of the people actually making these deceptive AI videos?

I was first introduced to this technique in 14 Minesweeper Variants, which has a mode which will punish you for guessing at unprovable information. They cited some inscrutable academic papers in their credits :)

Much as I might be giving off some Grinch energy here, I am helping with Archive Team's effort to save links before the shutoff.

I went from 0 to archiving in like 5 minutes, they make it super easy. If you want to help, the simplest way is downloading a VM: wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Ar...

6 years is a good long deprecation time. I'm not sure users will really internalize the fragility without at least one big one making a visible impact.

If this reduces how many future links get put behind shorteners, it will be a net positive for the web. If not, it's at least a teachable lesson.

3P link shorteners are unreadable, take time, track users, and offer no benefit to the person clicking them. And they add another point of failure, as Google's shutdown makes clear.

3P shorteners, like 3P JS asset CDNs, are just a pox on internet stability and privacy.

3rd party URL shorteners popped into existence because Twitter, for an absurdly brief time early in its life, would credit you more characters in your tweets.

They stopped that pretty quickly, instead running all links through their own URL shortener instead for outbound links.

It's really good! Makes me nostalgic for Cobalt Core :)