Yup! It’s hard to keep spammers at bay, but not impossible. Takes a lot of effort. A big reason to stay away from shorteners that don’t have legit companies/orgs behind them putting in the effort.
We were getting spammed by hundreds of eu.org subdomains. We had no choice but to place a ban on the entire domain as banning a few just led to more popping up.
We ban as we see spam. Most free shorteners end up getting banned as there is no need to double shorten a url other than for double obfuscation which is usually shady.
I’m involved with a URL shortener service. Service had to ban this domain as sub-domains from this domain seem to be loved by spammers/scammers to host their scams…
Coming in cold, that's a very fair concern/comment. I generally believe that products can be privacy-first but still serve the needs of marketers while providing consumer choice. Consumer choice is the key in my opinion. Shareaholic tools do what the customer sets them to do, with opinionated safeguards to prevent customers from missteps with regards to GDPR and consumer choice. For example, Shareaholic is one of the very few that also respects DNT signals (even though DNT is now defunct).
Btw, Share Count Proxy is also whitelisted by Firefox which provides the added advantage of share counts actually showing on Firefox if you use the proxy while direct calls to Facebook.com, Pinterest, etc are blocked.
Shareaholic offers many different types of marketing tools. The product that you're referring to is the URL shortener, which is independent of the Share Count Proxy product -- https://www.shareaholic.com/link-manager/retargeting
This URL Shortener service is also GDPR compatible as retargeting pixels are not set for EU subjects regardless of what customers want to set. In the roadmap is to add an opt-in message on the redirect.
For those that want to show official Share Counts on their Share Buttons while maintaining User Privacy, take a look at Shareaholic's Share Count Proxy -
Compete.com does H1B's. But Compete's not a startup anymore.
You should be looking at startups with at least a few US employees. Currently, I think you'll find it rare for a startup with < 3-4 US employees to be able to sponsor an h1b. Homeland security has been getting pretty strict about this.
I believe it generally costs about ~$6k to sponsor one. More if you premium process.
Several YC companies have created browser add-ons as well. Would be cool to get a discussion going here about browser extension distribution and getting to scale.
---
Shareaholic was just a “nights and weekends project” until its creator reached a big milestone: 1 million downloads.
My goal with this interview was to find out how Jay Meattle, a single founder with no outside funding, got that many downloads for a web browser add-on, when convectional wisdom says that “no one” installs browser add-ons. As you’ll hear in this interview, he did it by creating a tool that was inherently viral, and he helped grow that virility by creating stories for bloggers.
You’ll also hear how Jay has since blown past 2 million downloads, why he decided to take a small round of funding, and why he’s ignoring revenues (for now).
Wish it was not needed, but Compete.com requires it from developers to prevent fraud usage of their API. fwiw, the Compete Stats API is usually a premium/paid service from Compete.com and the stats are generally not made available for free at scale.
Anyways, that is why it was made easy to shut off completely in case people didn't want to deal with it. Also making this behavior very clear in the next update within the extension itself (not just the welcome/upgrade pages). Privacy is critical.
Shareaholic for Firefox does not contain any spyware. Privacy is critically important.
The API call that Michael refers to is related to the "Stats Monitor" feature of Shareaholic for Firefox that can be turned off at any time.
The Stats Monitor shows users the Compete.com stats for the page they are on. The API call is intrinsic to the functioning of this feature. For example, only by knowing which web page the user is viewing can the browser tool show the user information about that web page or Web site.
To disable the Stats Monitor, go to "Shareaholic Options" -> Display Options -> Uncheck Stats Monitor.
And, all users are now made aware of this feature upfront:
Amongst numerous other additions & improvements, we’ve added the option to turn on the Shareaholic button in the URL bar right next to the orange RSS icon. We feel that this is a very natural place for the icon to live within the browser. What do you think? love it/hate it/indifferent?