It was a suicide move. He was telling the algorithm to turn its compression on itself. To shorten the link that led to its own existence.
While short links are incredibly useful, they present distinct security challenges. Because the final destination is obscured, bad actors occasionally abuse shortening services to hide malicious destinations or phishing pages.
ACCESS DENIED.
Instead of settling for a random string of characters (e.g., bit.ly/3xK9zL ), customize the back-half of the link to reflect the content (e.g., bit.ly/FreeEbook2026 ).
Whether you are a solopreneur posting on LinkedIn, a marketer running a Black Friday campaign, or a developer documenting an API, CuT URLs
In a fast-paced digital ecosystem, sending an raw, unedited link containing hundreds of miscellaneous characters looks cluttered and unprofessional.
Avoid "daisy-chaining" links (shortening an already shortened link). This slows down page load times and triggers spam filters on search engines and social platforms. It was a suicide move
| Approach | Primary Use Case | Key Advantage | Key Disadvantage | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | Monetizing personal website or forum traffic. | Potential to earn passive income per click. | Mostly defunct; high risk of account ban for fraud; very low trust factor. | | Cutt.ly / Bitly (Shortener) | Marketing campaigns, social media, brand building. | Built-in analytics dashboards; custom branded links; easy-to-use interfaces. | Shorter links hide the destination, a major vector for phishing attacks. | | Classic cut & grep | Quick, one-off extraction in a Unix shell. | No installation required; part of every Unix system. | Extremely fragile; breaks on edge cases; not safe for robust scripting. | | trurl (CLI) | Production-level scripts; URL sanitization for logs and databases. | Stable, secure, and reliable; uses curl 's official parser; excellent for removing tracking data. | Requires installation on systems where it's not pre-installed. | | CleanURL / Ureld | Batch processing massive URL lists (data science, security). | Extremely fast; designed for cleaning and deduplication from stdin . | Specialized tools that may have an initial learning curve for standard users. |