I was going to share a link to one of my SO questions when I realised that the actual question URL (without the human-readable title) is the same length as the "short permalink" URL after my user ID has been appended to it. I imagine my user ID is appended for a good reason, however the outcome isn't a very "short" URL. Why aren't the permalinks using a shorter domain, and why aren't the IDs within converted to a higher-base number system to actually shorten the URL?
As an example, this question's actual "short" permalink is:http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/170533/211113
A 45 character URL isn't very short. I imagine this could quite easily be shortened to:http://meta.exm.pl/29A25/338A9
, or simply:http://exm.pl/6/29A25/338A9
, where "6" here could be an ID relating to meta
.