It is kind of an unnecessary step. I forgot why I even used it. I'll try without next time.

By the way, if you're curious, you can see how many people click that link by going here: http://bit.ly/50qA6s+

I remember it had something to do with people complaining that you were asking users to upvote, but I don't really understand how switching to bit.ly would have fixed that.

Using bit.ly doesn't change the text of the links. I think the problem was that a long link broke something on my site once and so I used bit.ly ever since. Plus I like stats and bit.ly gives great real-time stats.