cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/31187638
Earlier today I came across a Reddit comment with a link to an Instagram post. The link had
?igsh=at the end.When I clicked on the link, I got this popup. It had a name and profile photo that was different from that of the post being shared.
Join Firstname Lastname on Instagram
See photos, videos, and more from Firstname Lastname.
[ Open Instagram ]
not now
I avoid link trackers. However, I did not realize it was this bad.
To my knowledge, TikTok does the same thing and lists the name of the person that shared the link. Assuming this increases engagement, any website could enable such a feature, even on old links that you shared in the past.
You should manually remove any trackers before sharing, or use an app for it.
Generally anything that comes after a questionmark in a URL can be safely stripped out, though not always. The random string of characters you get after a youtu.be link is tracking, the ?t=123 is a timestamp.
YouTube has an even better example of it being problematic to strip the parameters. The original video links look like this:
The thing is, the stuff after the question mark isn’t inherently bad, we just have the convention that the path (
/watch) should identify a static resource on the server, whereas the stuff after the question mark is more variable or user-specific.But YouTube is older than that convention. If YouTube got built today, that URL would look more like this:
On the other hand, the URL of a specific search result page would still look the same, even with today’s conventions, because it doesn’t identify a static resource:
Nice example link you used there
Thanks, although I don’t believe there’s any other link I could’ve used. 🙃