Up until like a year or two ago, YouTube links always used to be pretty clean. The format was youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]. A year or two ago, they started adding a tracking suffix on, so it would be youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID] &si=[tracking_ID].
Over the last day or so, I’ve noticed links with a different format, youtube .com/watch?v=[video_ID]&pp=[tracking_ID] - only the pp= string is much longer than the si= string. This can only be because they’re including more information in it. What that information is is anyone’s guess.
This is basically a PSA to watch YouTube links more carefully, as people are by and large complacent with them (moreso than other links) and never even realised the si= change, let alone this new pp= change.
It could also be that the change to pp= is meant to circumvent communities, like this one, which automatically filter out the si= suffix. They may have decided to address that, then took the opportunity to make their tracking more severe.
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gotta chop off the pp
Wasn’t their a Firefox plugin that did this? I recall a while ago to help do the same with Amazon but I never installed it and I don’t remember what it was called…
Lmfao, this community has automatically removed the si= suffix in my second link. But it didn’t remove the pp= suffix…
Edit: Fixed, finally. It kept trying to convert my links all over the place. They’re not meant to be links, just a clear description of the syntax.
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that’s interesting. do you perhaps also know what the si param contains?
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Thanks for shedding light on this. I’ve also noticed the same thing on Instagram links. They now have a “igsh=” added to track sharing.
Since a long time, out of respect for others, I only share YT videos like this: youtube,com/embed/[video_ID]
So long as there’s no extra suffix after, it shouldn’t be so bad. So if you have
youtu.be/?v=[video_ID]it’s fine, but if there’s aoror, then that’s most likely tracking and should be removed.?is the start of the suffixes,denotes a change in suffix. Every video has av=suffix to denote the video itself, but everything else isn’t needed.
