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Comment by ljk | Hacker News Reader

> I upload stuff to imgur just for the nice, short URLs.

genuinely curious, why is that important? is it common to memorize the URLs instead of copying and pasting?

When I want to share an image over chat with a friend, the long, odd looking reddit image urls disrupt the natural flow. It's like virtually slapping someone on the face. A nice, short and sweet URL is much nicer in text conversations.

Also, being a developer and security conscious, I inspect URLs before I click on them. The longer they are, the more frustrated I get examining them.

The flow comment is interesting, especially because it's one I resonate with. Every time I want to hotlink an image from Facebook I cringe at the multi-line horror in the clipboard.

Reddit has short URLs; they're in the sidebar of every submission, e.g., http://redd.it/6idi12

That goes to the post, when I'm sharing an image I don't want it to load Reddit.

Oh; I'm the opposite: when I come upon a bare image link, I prepend `reddit.com/` to get taken to its reddit discussion. :)

> being a developer and security conscious, I inspect URLs before I click on them. The longer they are, the more frustrated I get examining them.

it doens't really matter if a url is long or short, right? as long as the domain looks good then there's no reason to check every character in the url? not sure why it's more secure to have a shorter url if the domain is safe

*not a security expert

Short URLs are nice. Less to go wrong for starting. Slashes, and any non \w character, is potential mistake in sharing, due to copy paste errors, bad decoders, etc. Plus they look nice and can literally be typed out from a screen shot or something.

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