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Posted by wxw 5 hours ago

Zohran and the Short Link(iamwillwang.com)
150 points | 46 comments
jancsika 1 hour ago|
> click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer

I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.

fny 35 minutes ago|
Flame wars. City council will soon debate two vs four spaces between traffic cones.
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago||
This makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth.

Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.

mmooss 2 hours ago|
At least some traditional link shorterners let you choose the string.
lzy 3 hours ago||
This is similar to Singapore’s https://go.gov.sg links.

Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.

NSPG911 3 hours ago|
it would be nice if they added a link preview

not sure why they have never done that before

gravypod 4 hours ago||
People are discovering go links from first principles.
ewwe 4 hours ago||
Mamdani+ his team are genius at PR
markdown 1 hour ago||
In an age where cameras are everywhere, all one has to do for good PR is good.
hackernud3s 38 minutes ago||
It's an url shortener. I implemented 3 of these this year and nobody is calling me a genius.
SwellJoe 4 hours ago||
Given how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium.

Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.

toomuchtodo 2 hours ago|
https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov
zhivota 1 hour ago|||
A little sad that it's often posting screenshots of X posts there. At least the screenshot has alt text, but if you're doing alt text, why a screenshot in the first place?
SwellJoe 2 hours ago|||
As I understand it, Bsky doesn't punish posts for including a link off-site, and doesn't require you to be logged in to view it. Whether they'll continue to behave in a responsible way forever remains to be seen, I guess.
radicalriddler 1 hour ago||
The great thing about Bsky is that feeds can be user-run (and the for you feed is a great success story). So if Bluesky Inc. wants to derank links on their discover feed, there are a lot of user driven feed options to counteract that
toomuchtodo 1 hour ago||
NYC could also pipe their own PDS right into NYC mobile apps, email notifications, etc. in this context.
amazingamazing 4 hours ago||
I like click to cancel. Should have a year at least in url
micromacrofoot 4 hours ago||
this is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access!

hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise

jachee 4 hours ago|
What if I told you there’s an existing protocol for doing Really Simple Syndication?
tadfisher 4 hours ago||
Sorry, we're on the wrong timeline. The worse one, in fact.
kevitivity 4 hours ago|
[flagged]
sanid 4 hours ago||
Your comment adds literally nothing to this discussion. You can't form an opinion on the topic discussed because of your opinion on someones politics. Great, don't comment.
Aboutplants 4 hours ago|||
What specific policies do you disagree with out of curiosity
arijun 25 minutes ago|||
I'm not from NYC (nor do I have the same difficulty seeing past politics that gp seems to have), so I didn't research this stuff so closely. But from what I saw, it seemed that a lot of his policies seemed populist.

- Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't find much.

- State run stores are pretty bad at their jobs. Someone on here mentioned state run liquor stores as an example of where state run stores work, but in my experience, they are the opposite. I suspect that the store will work well for the first several years, while there is a lot of media attention on it, but when it falls from the foreground, the oversight will slacken and it will go the way of many other of these projects.

- I am not an expert but I suspect the wealth tax won't work the way they hope.

On the other hand, the attention that he's bringing to issues that were previously swept under the rug (like transportation) is great, and the way he energizes the populace is amazing.

klipt 3 hours ago|||
Government subsidized groceries seems like something that was already solved by food stamps. Having the government run entire grocery stores at a loss seems like a worse implementation of the same thing.

I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).

If you really want something different to food stamps, India's subsidized canteens seem like a much more interesting idea: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/inside-indias...

mardifoufs 2 hours ago|||
Isn't the issue a lack of grocery stores in those areas? How would food stamps help with that? The issue isn't really affordability but rather absence of stores. It might not be profitable to run a store there but that's the point of a city run store in this case.
the_gastropod 3 hours ago|||
I have my suspicions about what’s going to happen. I worry the demand is going to be too high to realistically deal with. But dammit am I excited to see someone try something a bit different to address a very obvious need.

State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.

klipt 3 hours ago||
Exactly what problem does it solve that food stamps cannot solve more simply?
bakies 2 hours ago|||
It's not discounted groceries. It's stores in food deserts.
the_gastropod 2 hours ago|||
Respectfully, maybe spend 5 minutes reading about it from the horse’s mouth. The Mamdani admin has done a pretty good job, imo, of laying out the case, and explaining the plan for these 5 grocery stores.

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani...

livinglist 4 hours ago|||
At this point I care more about decency than politics.
the_gastropod 4 hours ago|||
Go on, dawg! Be specific!
mjmsmith 4 hours ago||
It's ok to keep our personal problems to ourselves.
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