The part that says either ?si= or &si= is only for tracking. You can remove this part of the link and it will still function just the same. It makes the link shorter and also helps protect your privacy. The only important part of a YouTube URL is the video ID. There are two types of URLs:
For this one you can remove everything after and including the ampersand if present.
For this one you can remove everything after and including the question mark.
Note the exception is if you want to intentionally leave in playlist information you might want to keep that part.
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This can be applied to many websites. Google and Meta tag tracking data into nearly every link they bring you for popular sites, namely any shopping site. They’re boasting how many clicks they garnered for a merchant while obviously building your massive online profile.
In Google’s case, there’s also massive finder’s fee fraud for ads. I search a specific few products to research them but don’t buy any. I now get ads all the time for them. I then buy one a week later. Google says to the seller they brought me there and takes a commission. All those borderline-unavoidable tracking tags have tied anl served ad I don’t remember to a product I was going to buy anyway
Anyone know of any method for android to automatically scrub copied links for trackers, or if an android keyboard exists that scrubs them on paste?
Why should I care? Much easier to blindly copy and paste a link than to remember to delete a portion of it. The extra long link is mildly annoying, but even that’s not an issue if you show the video title instead of the URL.
If you’re on Android, URLCheck is an extremely handy utility for cleaning up shared links.
While this is a handy tool, I actually like cleaning up URLs manually. You see a lot of interesting and sometimes malicious stuff in there, like tracking IDs, campaign names, source names, app names etc. It’s kinda rewarding to remove all that stuff and seeing the link is still working.
This utility breaks each one out so you can see them more easily, and selectively remove only the ones you want. It also allows you to directly edit the link manually at the same time, so you’ve got both the full control when you want it, and the convenience when you don’t feel like screwing around. I’d suggest giving it a try before you knock it - it’s quite powerful & flexible. Heck, it’ll even check if what’s left with the server & return the status code without you having to actually try loading the page.
I’m always surprised by how many people have no idea about this and just blindly share the URL that the platforms give them (whether it be YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc). I eventually gave up trying to police them on one Discord server and just made a bot to delete them and resend a non-tracking version.
How is it surprising? If you leave the microscopic echo chamber that is Lemmy, I’m sure 9 out of 100 people know what a URL is. Just because people use something every day doesn’t mean they know how it works.
To be fair, even if you know to remove them, it is annoying as fuck to do so.
A bot is probably a good way around it, although I wonder if the bot could be tricked into sharing an unintended video.
Firefox can do it automatically by pressing “Copy Clean Link” but it only works for certain websites and sometimes I’ve noticed it won’t properly clean the URL even on supported websites. It’s getting better in recent versions of Firefox however.
I know its meant to do it, but I have no idea how it works on mobile. Which is annoying, because its most useful on mobile.
For any android users reading this, urlcheck can auto remove tracking portions if a link, as well as allow to automatically apply the link to a privacy focused front end (is that what e.g. nitter is called?).
Sure it’s still am extra step to share the link to urlcheck first before sharing it to your recipient. But hey it takes out the menial task by a lot.
As in that part and everything after it.
Except if you want to start at a certain time stamp. For that you use “t=“. So arguments are still required in some cases too.
That’s a good point. I updated the post on how to clean YouTube URLs.
Test
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Looks like Tubular automatically removes the ‘?si= and &si’ bits? Or is that for desktop links only?
Just by clicking your link and then going to share it from the YouTube app share button, I get this:
That SI code contains something about how the link has been shared, likely telling YouTube that my specific account has been used to share it to whoever clicks it. It probably has info about how I found it as well, such as direct link, yt suggestions, yt homepage, yt Playlist, etc. Now we’re related. Now my analytics will be buddied to yours. Now it that it knows we both like 80s pop music, it’ll tell you to watch some other things I find fascinating. (at least, if the link is opened by someone logged into their yt account)
Yup, some software will do this, including ReVanced.
Use YouTube patched with Revanced
I’m not entirely sure how well it works since I don’t often send links to others, but I use a uBlock Origin filter list called Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool. It may help those who don’t want to do all of this manually?
Remove everything after and including the first &
