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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 &
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?
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.
Unlocking the Secrets to Success and Fulfillment!
Rules
Join us and share your best life pro tips!