URL shortening services are a scourge on the web

I don’t understand the need for services such as tinyurl and others like them. They obfuscate links. I pretty much refuse to use them, either as a consumer or a producer.

They seems to have been started because emailing links to web pages caused a lot of problems. Many email programs will insert line breaks on long lines of text. This will usually corrupt the URL.

But they are completely unnecessary in modern email clients. Now I see some forum moderators are demanding URLs to be shortened when posting content. Again, completely unnecessary because most forum software include tags to allow the naming of URLs.