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.
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.