So you can tell what the URL might point to by looking at it. That’s one of the important things mentioned in the article linked on this HN post: URLs are used by both computers and people.

its for humans I would expect, to know what the page refers to without opening it.

Kinda smart.

Also; taking it from the end means you only need to parse the string as an offset from the end. It can make load balancing much faster in theory.

It's also for crawlers. When doing technical SEO, having a human readable slug in the URL is low hanging fruit that is often overlooked. This, as well as having a <title> structure of `CURRENT_CONTENT_TITLE | WEBSITE_NAME` are things that are quite trivial to implement and provide a significant uplift in both SEO and UX.

It’s for SEO. Perhaps it’s a historical concern and no longer relevant, but the URL is/was used by Google to understand what the page is about.