Ask HN: Do you think Reddit will sue me for my URL shortener? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think Reddit will sue me for my URL shortener?

4 pointsyashodhan10 comments

I launched a URL shortening service yesterday for reddit geeks like myself:

http://rddd.it

I'm hoping the community embraces it like they did with imgur.com, but observing Reddit's fickle nature, I'm withholding my expectations. My real concern is that Reddit (or Condé Nast) will frown upon the domain similarity and come after me. Not that they'd get much from my asset-less student self, but I'm not looking for trouble.

I tried my best to give rddd.it a different theme, as to not infringe on Reddit's trademark.

So why did I do this? In a saturated market of URL shorteners, I decided that the best course of action would be to start my own. This sort of logic can only come from somebody who was dropped on his head one too many times as a baby.

And since I'm secretly having an affair with HN, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share it with you guys first. I even gave HN it's own URL for easy access. I hope you like it:

http://rddd.it/hn

The site isn't complete yet, some minor tweaking/polishing still needs to be done. Do wish me luck!

Excuse me but, how do you expect redditors to use your shortener ? Reddit is about sharing links and, for some people, your service may seem to get in the way between them and content.

In the same way they would use bit.ly or tinyurl.

Which, if I'm not mistaken, is really frowned upon since bad things could be hiding behind those urls.

Well, using URL shorteners to submit links to news aggregators is dumb, I agree. But I use URL shorteners to send friends/family to links and that's really the point of rddd.it.

I'm not saying use rddd.it ON reddit. I'm a little confused where that assumption was made.

Why would you do this? I only tolerate it on twitter because of the character limitations. Outside of such a restriction, URL shorteners just get in the way and I find their use quite obnoxious.

I find them very useful when I want to send a quick email to somebody with a link. It looks neater (OCD) when you say: "Look what I found on the internet - rddd.it/xxxx"

Also, I link so many people to interesting reddit threads and I'd rather use a shortened link that allows me to email/tweet and yes, even text to somebody.

I think that's ambiguous enough that it's probably not infringing on their trademark. That doesn't prevent them from saying it does though.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer!

IANAL either, maybe somebody with a bit of expertise in the field can chime in?

Last year I bought devvit.com/net/org for a site I'm working on (has a new name now) and after doing a lot of polling, enough people thought it was too close to risk. Only anecdotal, but devvit is far less similar than rddd.it, and it only takes a mere thought for a trademark holder to try and have a go..

What was the intended purpose of devvit? Social aggregator for developers?

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