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https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/
A quick search on lore.kernel.org:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F
...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.
@corbet
Good. I think those shorteners created more problems than they solved.
@tofugolem @corbet sure, but Google must have the resources to simply make it read only rather than breaking all those links
@andrewt @tofugolem @corbet They did, they made it read-only 6 years ago. And now they're giving another 12 months warning, adding a little pain to links using it, even more chance for those using it to do something about it.
@hatter @andrewt @tofugolem @corbet the point is it's breaks every archival post ever for posts that used it, it's a huge loss
@vitriolix @andrewt @tofugolem @corbet Someone maintains goo.gl, someone maintains those archives. When the people still maintaining the shortener stop caring about the shortener, it's time for the archivist to do the work to preserve what they care about. Also, other archivists are doing what they can to preserve all links, regardless of immediate value that anyone else gives to each link. Likely very little will be lost in such a long deprecation cycle, and even less of value will be lost.
@hatter @vitriolix @tofugolem @corbet oh yeah, it's definitely costing them money to run it and they're going about it in as good a way as you can expect — most of the old Twitter-era services just quietly stopped working while nobody was looking. To be fair OP was right, really this is Twitter's fault for creating an artificial need for these silly forwarding services in the first place, although I'm sure analytics services would have normalised it anyway
But it does feel a bit odd. Like, Google's core business is (was?) a constantly updating, publicly searchable live index of almost every page on the internet, and they really find it too expensive to maintain a static index of a billion or so string-string key value pairs you can only look up by the primary key with exactly zero UI that's already set up and presumably doesn't do much traffic any more? It's going to cost them more to shut it down this gracefully than it would to run it for another decade, surely?
Google is in the business of harvesting human behavioural data from its users and selling results from human prediction models to the highest bidder. They are also in the business of using their knowledge of said users to influence user decision-making and opinions, also at the behest of the highest bidder.
It is likely that the URL shortening service offers no additional behavioural data for them to harvest. Therefore, it is useless. So, shut it down as it consumes resources above 0 and running anything carries with it operational risks (however minimal) that they can do without.
@hatter @vitriolix @andrewt @tofugolem @corbet If no one writes a script for this, I’d say they don't even care about their archives? I mean, I would if I needed to. I bet it could be done with a oneliner!
@tagomago @hatter @vitriolix @tofugolem @corbet I mean they *don't* care about that, we know that. They've clearly long since decided that old services, even well liked and used ones, are going to get shut down and it's up to users to deal with that. And that's mostly fair enough, they used to experiment a lot but that means most of them would fail sooner or later, and I'm sure as much as we complain when they do it, most people don't care and it doesn't really hurt Google's numbers. But I mean, their propensity to sunset everything has got to be a big part of why more businesses don't use their cloud offering. I even run Gmail from behind a forwarder in part because I don't entirely trust it will exist in five years or I'll want to use it if it does.