Enshittification is coming:
Beginning in the next month, when users click Bitly links or QR Codes, they may see a preview page prior to being directed to the destination URL. The page includes information about the link destination and may include advertising.
Genius. Millions of links are hardcoded bit.ly links, no one will change them.
What’s extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.
Even though something like “download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest-ssl&os=linux64&lang=en-US” is easier to type than “bit.ly/h7387ud-838” imo, because one has a logical structure (that I can adapt on the fly), and because I can probably type those single words faster than I can type single characters.
Well, they give the option to remove the ads altogether for just $120/year 😉
Although literally nobody would pay that ransom (100000x the actual server expense) to remove ads from their own links