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LPT: Always remove the si= part of YouTube links. (lemmy.zip)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/lifeprotips@lemmy.world
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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:

youtube.com/watch?v=

For this one you can remove everything after and including the ampersand if present.

youtu.be/(videoid)?tracking

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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[–] 20 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 13 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    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.

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