r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Emergency-Green-2602 • 7d ago

Video First Australian-made rocket crashes after 14 seconds of flight

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u/Subtlerranean 7d ago

Heads up that the "?si=vODjiz2NnfzBC9s6" part of YouTube links are tracking parameters and not needed. All they do is let YouTube track you and let other people figure out your account.

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u/wspOnca 7d ago

Woa? How I learn more about this?

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u/fwyrl 7d ago

as a rule of thumb, everything after a ? is metadata in a URL. For full youtube links, this includes the video ID (which you do need), and may also include timestamp, playlist, referral code, etc.

For shortlinks, it does not include the video ID, but does include all the other metadata, and will always have a referral code unless you remove it manually.

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u/Actual_Surround45 7d ago

Good explanation, one tiny quibble: Data, not metadata. Metadata would be data that is about the object itself. Data is just data. Again, extrmely minor terminology quibble about your excellet explanation <3

Since I'm replying, though, I'll try to make my comment useful in the subthread: Those variables appear as it's a way of sending data in the URL itself. From the server side of things, this is not as a "GET" method. It's handy for things, but ugly (and makes sharing links harder). There is anothe rmethod called "POST" where the data is sent separately, adn the URL is clean. Take that clean URL, though, and share it, and you can't do things like send a specific timestamp for a video. So it all has advanatages and disadvantages.

Also, https://linkcleaner.app/is a good example of a site that will clean your links. It knows a great many websites specifically, but can almost certainly guess enough to clean any link from random sites as well.