I've been using URL Check on Android to clean links of crap like this.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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"everything after the ? Symbol can be removed without issue" is a bold statement to make. Reminds me when the TV news had a specialist telling people to look at urls before clicking and check if it ends with ".php" as that would mean it is a virus.
There is also copy clean link option in firefox and brave
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.
After removing them (or even if there was nothing to remove) I test out links I'm sending in a private browser window to check that they would work for other people.
Add this URL Shortener filterlist to uBlock Origin.
This removes the fast majority of these query parameters.
I honestly couldn't determine if it was a typo or not, but it's not "fast" but "vast majority."
my brain autocorrected it to "vast," but I like "fast majority" as a phrase
Can I ask how do use this? Do I just copy/paste this into the "my filters" tab in uBlock? ;
Go to the "Filter lists" tab in the dashboard. At the bottom of the list click "Import" and paste the URL ( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt ) in the box. Then click "Apply Changes" to save it.
Why is this a shitpost? It's absolutely correct and factual.
It is correct and factual. Unfortunately it doesn't really explain anything. There's plenty of situations where you wouldn't want to delete content because they are necessary for functionality.
Must be the giant red circles and mixed fonts
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.)
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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.
Legitimate concern, called URL tracking. There's browser extensions for that.
I usually change the parameters to things like utm_source=yourmom, just for kicks.
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.
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
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.
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Everything after the "?" symbol can be removed without issue
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg >>> https://youtube.com/watch
How about I just don't use you tube? I should be ok.
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.
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The only way to be safe and private online is to not be online.
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...
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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.
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