There is also copy clean link option in firefox and brave
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Add this URL Shortener filterlist to uBlock Origin.
This removes the fast majority of these query parameters.
They are called query parameters and they are used for other things as well. So you can remove the ones you see similar to these but sometimes there might be important stuff you need to get the page to load in those parameters.
Why is this a shitpost? It's absolutely correct and factual.
Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There's browser extensions for that.
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.
Not everything after the ? can be removed. Obvious and well known example, YouTube videos use the video as part of the query parameters (on non shortened URLs). https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
One small error on an otherwise very useful post! 💜
Fun fact, YouTube has backwards comparability for its video links, so https://youtube.com/w/dQw4w9WgXcQ will go to the same video (granted, it will change format to the up to date one, but it is one way to go to a yt video without URL arguments)
Even better: https://youtu.be/PtSGclOlVmg
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.)
Even better: PeerTube or InternetArchive or (Web)Torrents but definitely not a Google website fueled by surveillance capitalism.
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
Be the change you want to see. Here is my instance https://video.benetou.fr/ even if nobody cares, I tried.
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.
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.
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
The only way to be safe and private online is to not be online.
How about I just don't use you tube? I should be ok.
It's on a lot of links
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.
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.
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.
Add made up data to those parameters. Like source=ericsschmidtspedoisland
Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg >>> https://youtube.com/watch
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.
Or change them to 127.0.0.1 and get rid of some web app firewalls and restrictions
this isn't a shitpost this community is being dragged through the mud by non-shitposts
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.
IMO, any developer who uses URL parameters for required functionality is short sighted. They should use the path as required parameters.
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.
It's shitty advice masquerading as something useful and/or insightful.
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.
There are URL shortener Apps on F-Droid. Simple share the link to this app and get a short link without this privacy mess.
Make sure you choose a proper open source one, else the app might collect data as well...
Time to put new privacy laws in place or force politicans to do it
This is kinda true but also kinda fear mongering. UTM parameters are just to track where you clicked the link from. They're usually not dynamic, and don't contain anything about you personally. The example in the screenshot utm_source=newsletter is probably added to all links in a company's newsletter email, so they can tell that people get to the page via the newsletter.
As someone who has link tracking in our business, yes, some of the stuff after the ? isn't nefarious tracking, like the utm mentioned above.
All the "list-unsubscribe" options you may have noticed starting about a year ago, are actually required to be there for any company that sends out any kind of email newsletter over a certain threshold. (Lists around 5k or more)
If the unsubscribe links aren't there, with the required url-encoded parameters (along with some other requirements with DNS) the email will not be delivered to any of the majors (google, yahoo/aol, hotmail, big ISPs) and we get blocked.
The unsubscribe parameters are being tracked, yes, but we have to have them so we can unsubscribe you "in one click" We are not allowed to require you to sign in to unsubscribe you. (Not that we ever did that, but now there must be a one-click option.)
(We used to just be two clicks to unsubscribe off an encoded link. Click -> this you? If yes, click -> you are now unsubscribed. Or sign-in and manage subscriptions without an encoded link.)
Again, the point is that not all url encoded tracking is nefarious. Some of it is now required to try and minimize spam and nefarious emails.
Source: https://craft.postmark-testing.com/blog/2024-gmail-yahoo-email-requirements
If you're still using firefox, right click -> copy clean link. works most of the time.
edit: on desktop, idk if mobile supports it or not. Good suggestions below though for mobile.
I just searched and found this one:
The code is open source, and it supports several ways to install it on your device (PWA, shortcut, bookmarklet, and more).
URL Cleaner on f-droid.org is a great app too!
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