I had one that would turn the urls into wild news stories. I had news-sounding domains like nyeveningpost.com and an auto-generation of bogus stubs such as nyeveningpost.com/breaking/mit-demonstrates-time-travel

Then it would either redirect humans like a normal service or serve a page with meta tags to the crawlers so the card info on social media would have a thumbnail saying "breaking news" and a markov generated caption such as "Earlier today researchers successfully demonstrated time travel at MIT" with the stub matching the title just to increase the chaos.

Ran it a couple of years. Not only did nobody use it but the response was universally discouraging and negative.

Lesson: People enjoy facsimiles of things they find repulsive when it becomes too real. All things have an uncanny valley. It's why people, for example, don't go to butcher shops and pick up animal organs for Halloween decorations.

I find the uncanny valley to be a wonderful artistic experience, like a psychological rollercoaster where there's always something new. But that's a very niche response

The partner project to shadyurl.com was hugeurl.com, which is exactly the same concept as here. hugeurl.com seems to have gone down.

It's the perfect con.

If it were TRULY shady, no way they'd use such an obvious URL. Must be safe and a joke!

That's hilarious.