• NutWrench@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 hours ago

    This. The question marks and ampersand in youtube URLs are separators and can include your entire playlist, as well. If you just want to share the video, then everything from the first ampersand onwards can go.

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          4·
          2 hours ago

          This is what I meant by the “non shortened” ones. If you’re using it through the app you can only press share to get the link and that’s how it comes when you press share. (Or if you press share on the website instead of copying the URL from the address bar.)

        • utopiah@lemmy.world
          21·
          2 hours ago

          Even better: PeerTube or InternetArchive or (Web)Torrents but definitely not a Google website fueled by surveillance capitalism.

          • cley_faye@lemmy.world
            1·
            8 minutes ago

            Call me back when the experience as a content creator is not a nightmare, the experience as a user browsing for content is not a nightmare, when it can handle the load of an even moderately popular video.

            The issue with streaming video online is not a technical one; making a “clone” of youtube, anyone can do so (and indeed, peertube exists). The issue with streaming video online is that if it gets traction, you need a lot of bandwidth and processing power to make it available when it needs to be available. One-two instances and “hopping P2P picks up” does not cut it.

            And, as usual when anyone says anything bad about peertube: the idea is great, but almost by construction it lacks what’s needed to be a valid replacement for centralized, yet HUGE existing platforms: traction, and a truckload of CDN-like instances that can handle the load. If someone putting highly anticipated content online could just “put” their video somewhere and send a link so people can watch it, immediately, and without issue, some would likely do so. Unfortunately, we’re very far from that yet.

          • baatliwala@lemmy.world
            3·
            1 hour ago

            For a viewer: serious lack of content

            For a creator: extremely unlikely to make a living

            I want them to succeed but it’s an unfortunate position

    • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
      61·
      3 hours ago

      I judge people based on whether they can understand youtube (which you should be changing to invidious or something else anyway) urls. It’s a useful and very short way to see if people have ever paid attention to repeated patterns. The moment I saw the t=XYs, I was amazed.

      • Medic8teMe@lemmy.ca
        1·
        37 minutes ago

        It is and it should stop. I’m honestly almost to the point of leaving so much interneting behind so I can regain my skills at old school communication and information gathering. It must be so hard to do that now. It used to be so normal.

        I already have bonked all traditional social media including for my small business for reasons like this. I went back to posters and flyers and only promoting online solely in spaces like the fed. It’s been hard but worthwhile I feel and after only about a year I am again getting more traffic. It’s just a small income source but it’s been an interesting foray into change.

  • Memetic@lemmy.ca
    121·
    4 hours ago

    It’s not always nefarious.

    I work for a non-profit. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the click rate on a mass message.

    We don’t provide data to third parties and use a self-hosted oss analytics platform.

    So I think folks should understand tracking and manage it but it’s not all bad. Just almost always bad. Really bad.

    Worse: a lot of links can’t be fixed or modified since they use click-through services to obscure the destination.

    • Soulcreator@programming.dev
      21·
      3 hours ago

      I’m a web developer in a marketing department and agreed UTM tags aren’t really nefarious. We generally use them to track campaigns, and to see the effectiveness of our paid campaigns. (As in how much of a return on investment did we have, are people continuing to traverse the site after hitting the landing page, etc) That said those codes generally don’t give us any info about the user other than what parts of the site you are hitting, (which we can find out through other means anyway). There are tools out there which can give us a creepy amount of data about the users on the site, but UTMs aren’t it.

      Removing them when sending out links is good practice as you probably only really need a fraction of the characters in order to get to the site, so your links are cleaner, you look like less of an idiot, and ironically marketers will end up having cleaner data (I doubt you care about this, but it’s true.)

      That said, if you really want to prevent sites from getting your data when browsing turning off JavaScript in your browser would probably have the biggest impact.

  • Muehe@lemmy.ml
    4·
    3 hours ago

    PSA if you are worried about link parameters giving away where you came from, you should really be worried about HTTP Referrer headers, which are of course turned on by default in most browsers. Be advised turning them off may break some (parts of) certain websites, but most still work fine in my experience.

    In Firefox go to about:config page and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0.

    • Saledovil@sh.itjust.works
      9·
      5 hours ago

      Actually, it’s a a bit of a shitpost. Anything after the ‘?’ is an argument for the html request. Can and is used for tracking, but is also used for website functionality.

      • Master167@lemmy.worldEnglish
        62·
        4 hours ago

        IMO, any developer who uses URL parameters for required functionality is short sighted. They should use the path as required parameters.

        • cley_faye@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 hours ago

          Sure, because it’s super fun to parse a path with multiple keypair that can be repeated, be non mandatory, etc. You must work for the GS1 project.

          Developers are known to enjoy whipping themselves all the time, constantly trying to do obtuse things with the wrong tool when there’s a perfectly working, perfectly standard way of doing something that’s supported by literally every solutions under the sun.

          /s, just in case.

  • Tick Dracy@lemmy.zip
    2·
    4 hours ago

    On iOS / iPadOS , you can use a Siri Shortcut called Clean URLs.

    Just share the URL with the shortcut, through the share sheet option, and your clean url is automatically copied into the clipboard.

  • Samsy@lemmy.ml
    13·
    9 hours ago

    There are URL shortener Apps on F-Droid. Simple share the link to this app and get a short link without this privacy mess.