Zohran and the Short Link

152 points34 comments6 hours ago
jancsika

> click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer

I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.

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cosmic_cheese

This makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth.

Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.

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lzy

This is similar to Singapore’s https://go.gov.sg links.

Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.

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thoughtpeddler

The meta on this post is that the minimalist blog design by iamwillwang.com is itself really cool. Great work!

gravypod

People are discovering go links from first principles.

ewwe

Mamdani+ his team are genius at PR

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SwellJoe

Given how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium.

Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.

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amazingamazing

I like click to cancel. Should have a year at least in url

micromacrofoot

this is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access!

hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise

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GauntletWizard

The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.

Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

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slopinthebag

This seems so amateur hour. The way the links work in this post are broken on mobile, and the first one I managed to make work was full of trivial grammatical errors.

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jimmydoe

does it matter?

big tech has long canceled url on phones.

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WarmWash

I'm not a huge fan of Zohran, but man, I will admit that it is so refreshing to have a leader that isn't senile and is actually in touch.

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