When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.

I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.

This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.

  • cereals@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    28·
    12 hours ago

    On android, urlcheck is a great app to modify URLs before sharing or opening. For this problem, you can use the json editor, and add the following two entries with small a regex I wrote:

      "shorten Youtube": {
    "regex": "^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z0-9-]+\\.)*?youtube\\.com\/(.*)&.*",
    "replacement": [
      "https:\/\/youtube.com\/$1"
    ],
    "enabled": true
  },
  "shorten Youtu.be": {
    "regex": "^https?:\/\/(?:[a-z0-9-]+\\.)*?youtu\\.be\/([^?]*)?.*",
    "replacement": [
      "https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=$1"
    ],
    "enabled": true
  },

    A button to shorten the link appears in urkcheck when the pattern matches. You can all auto shorten them by replacing “enabled”: true
    With
    “automatic”: true

    • codapine@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      Wow. This is awesome. Thank you! I will have to see if the dev has a donate button.

      FWIW I had to noodle with the spacing of your json after copying from Lemmy (Voyager android app) but I got it to work. Thanks for sharing!