I thought I was alone, waging a pointless war in the dark.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Microblog Memes
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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
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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 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
Yeah, I have that as my default browser. It's great! I just wish certain apps like Discord wouldn't bypass my default browser and open YouTube links directly in the YouTube app. I have to copy them first, and it's a nuisance.
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I love that app! You can also add custom rules, the soundcloud thing shouldn't be that hard to get rid of.
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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
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 =)
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.
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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)
for youtube you can remove everything starting from the first &. it just needs the v=zBGlI4DKlL4 parameter
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I mean, this is obviously a generalization. Search parameters have a legitimate use. But they are abused, of course.
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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.
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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.
What’s the extension name? I have this exact same issue.
Edit: does it also work for Instagram reels?
It's called noQuery, I think I had aspirations of updating it more to be more versatile lol but never got around to it again. I could look into that though, I need to update it to work with photos on tiktok also not just video.
Let me know if it doesn't work, I never had plans of it really going public lol
Can someone explain the issue here? Genuinely, please educate me about this.
What are the queries and why don't we like them?
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
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Tracking, trying to link people together.
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)
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.
I made an iOS shortcut just for sending YouTube links that strips out any tracking codes in the url.
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 &.
If you send me a link with a question mark in the URL, we ain’t friends anymore.
You must be getting sent to the YouTube homepage a lot
You guys don't pointlessly change watch?v= to v/ just to maintain friendships?
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https://f-droid.org/packages/com.trianguloy.urlchecker
I set this as my default for all links. Its makes doing this kind of thing way easy.
I consider it the best Android app. No qualifiers.
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
I'm tired of being tracked by these urchins
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