*Acided.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Microblog Memes
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I'm tired of being tracked by these urchins
You can remove (most) parameters with uBlock Origin and adding this to your Filter List. https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/ClearURLs%20for%20uBo/clear_urls_uboified.txt
For a few months now my phone's keyboard will give me the option to paste a link without all of the bullshit. It's pretty nice
That's dope. What keyboard do you use?
Just the stock one on the Pixel. It doesn't always offer the cleaned links, but I think it does it each time you choose "copy to clipboard" from the share menu.
I sometimes share youtube shorts with my wife, and I always edit the url so it plays in the default video mode instead of the shorts interface
Asking for a friend, how do you do this?
Instead of https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<xxx>, do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v<xxx>
There is an equals sign (=) between v and , but for some reason lemmy keeps removing it
You can also use https://www.youtube.com/v/<xxx>. It's the old video link structure, but it still works just fine. It's easier to change it too, since a lot of devices can select text by the word.
You have to escape the = sign, like so: \=
I usually change it to https://youtu.be/<xxx> which works just the same, but is shorter and easier to edit
This is what I do =)
I call these "tainted links" which seems to get the point across pretty well to my friends. Started doing it when youtube began adding tracking info to every shared link
then there is the Spotify way, where every sharer gets a unique link
Spotify and youtube use the same share link formatting, if not the same system.
If two people send you a yt link os it the same link?
I thought I was alone, waging a pointless war in the dark.
Every time I get a share link I’m always pasting it and deleting everything after the /? Like if there’s an extension to auto strip that shit out, I’d be happier
firefox has a "copy link without tracking" option on right click
People who use a browser made by a company who’s business model is tracking them:
“Why aren’t there better anti-tracking features?”
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I noticed tiktok videos my wife sent me would work in the browser if I removed the param queries, since I refuse to download the app. So I made a Firefox browser extension to do it automatically for me when I click one.
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The trick is knowing which parameters are the necessary ones, and which are for tracking.
- general:
utm_source - Instagram:
igsh - YouTube:
si
Just delete that shit. Please add more, people who knows of others!
Everything after and including the ? is unnecessary. 99.9% of the time you can delete that shit (Except for YouTube, cause why the fuck should things be easy)
Ya the fact YouTube hasn't built the ID into the URL by now is crazy. Even porn sites do this.
for youtube you can remove everything starting from the first &. it just needs the v=zBGlI4DKlL4 parameter
I mean, this is obviously a generalization. Search parameters have a legitimate use. But they are abused, of course.
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I have this app URLCheck from f-droid that intercepts all links i click and l3t me clean all the parameters and so. I can also use it to share from so I can always clean the links before sharing.
The only app that dosen't work well is soundcloud that the tracking parameter is not recognized as so and I need to manual add characters to contaminate the parameter
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video.com/watch?v=have-you-seen-this-yet=no&?length=2-fucking-hours
&?length
You don't need a second ?, any subsequent search parameters are added only with &.
I made an iOS shortcut just for sending YouTube links that strips out any tracking codes in the url.
Can someone explain the issue here? Genuinely, please educate me about this.
What are the queries and why don't we like them?
just to add on to what folks have said, here's a specific example:
You copy a YouTube link and send to a friend. The link ends with &sid=12345678
Youtube knows who you are and it knows who your friend is. When it creates the link it knows "Linktank created link 12345678"
When your friend opens the link, now YouTube knows "this person has some relation to Linktank."
With this YouTube can find out who you know and what you share with each other, without you ever having to tell them directly. Whether that's something you're ok with is up to you.
If you browse the web and want to send a URL to a friend.
Make sure to delete the question mark and every single character after it.
Everything before is the real URL and will link to the same webpage.
Everything after are tracking numbers and other parameters that aren't needed. They make the URL longer, but also allow tracking between devices.
There is one unfortunate exception to this rule, and that is "?v=.........."
which, for some video platforms, is the actual reference ti which video it is supposed to play.
For YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ can actually be edited down to https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
Not everything. Sometimes it is needed. So you have to experiment what is working
You ever copy a link and it's like 3 paragraphs long? Most likely, most of that link is has additional query string parameters that's used for tracking. You could probably remove most of, if not everything after the '?' in those URLs, and it will work fine, but remove all the tracking info.
Link-tracking. (the next blog post can explain this 100x better than me)
Tracking, trying to link people together.
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