Links get a bulk discount at the character counter
Paste a giant URL into a commit and it no longer swallows your whole 4,000-character allowance. Each link in your prose now costs 23 characters at most, and the full address still goes through.
You paste a two-thousand-character tracking URL into a commit and the little counter in the corner drops by 23. Type the rest of your paragraph, post, and the link works end to end with no shortener and no redirect. The real address is what gets stored.
Credit goes to paulinevos, who taught the counter to measure links in prose at 23 characters at most while leaving code alone. The numbers are 4,000 characters per body, 2,048 characters per link, and 40,000 raw characters before any link parsing. Replies, quotes, scheduled commits, previews, and the API and CLI submissions all get the same treatment, and a bare domain like example.com is counted as if it had https:// in front.
One catch remains. The discount only reaches prose. Put a URL inside backticks or a fenced code block and it counts every character again. A 36-character link adds all 36, so pasting a long address as code still eats the allowance the link itself would have saved you.