6 ms·

Just wondering why you’re removing it?

gojomo 6y ago
I often remove such appendages because I prefer clean, compact, semantic URLs that narrowly reflect my specific intent when sharing an article: "this article is good". I don't want any other website/software agendas overlaid into my communication in ways that (1) leak info about what tools I'm using, even seemingly-innocuous info; (2) dilute any salient aspects of the URL by layering on excess (or even worse opaque) tracking info. I've deleted that damn "?s=21" from the end of Twitter URLs hundreds of times.
jessriedel 6y ago
Makes URLs longer and harder to read at a glance, and the reader cannot easily judge how much info they are leaking when they click it.
mlinksva 6y ago
I always attempt to remove cruft form links before sharing/publishing/including. Cruft is in bad taste, and sharing it is bad manners. This assertion may well reflect my bad taste, and even bad manners toward people analyzing the provenance of clicks! Maybe https://docs.clearurls.xyz/ https://docs.clearurls.xyz/ (extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers) will strip wprov from URLs at some point https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/-/issues/920 https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/-/issues/920 Another thing that ought to be built in for browsers to live up to being agents for users.
gpvos 6y ago
Short, clean URLs. I hate all those fbclid&utmz&affiliateid&xyz parameters with a vengeance, often they end up longer than the actually meaningful part of the URL.
jchw 6y ago
While techniques like these are undoubtedly handy for analytics, advertising, affiliates, etc. in my opinion they go against the actual purpose of a URL. Removing such suffixes makes my URLs cleaner and defeats the purpose of the tracking mechanism, a practice which hopefully some day will be so commonplace that this kind of tracking is abandoned. (And there are tools that automate it, so it could some day become a tracking blackhole the way adblock is, if such a feature is ever integrated into a popular piece of software.)
distances 6y ago
I think it's very rude to share any URLs with tracking parameters, so I do that for all links. Added bonus is that it makes the links much more readable like the other commenter said. Some of the most annoying ones are Amazon links. The product base URL is actually very compact, they just add an amazing list of tracking params that is pretty unwieldy to truncate on mobile.

I often remove such appendages because I prefer clean, compact, semantic URLs that narrowly reflect my specific intent when sharing an article: "this article is good". I don't want any other website/software agendas overlaid into my communication in ways that (1) leak info about what tools I'm using, even seemingly-innocuous info; (2) dilute any salient aspects of the URL by layering on excess (or even worse opaque) tracking info. I've deleted that damn "?s=21" from the end of Twitter URLs hundreds of times.

jessriedel 6y ago

Makes URLs longer and harder to read at a glance, and the reader cannot easily judge how much info they are leaking when they click it.

mlinksva 6y ago

I always attempt to remove cruft form links before sharing/publishing/including. Cruft is in bad taste, and sharing it is bad manners. This assertion may well reflect my bad taste, and even bad manners toward people analyzing the provenance of clicks! Maybe https://docs.clearurls.xyz/ https://docs.clearurls.xyz/ (extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers) will strip wprov from URLs at some point https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/-/issues/920 https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/-/issues/920 Another thing that ought to be built in for browsers to live up to being agents for users.

gpvos 6y ago

Short, clean URLs. I hate all those fbclid&utmz&affiliateid&xyz parameters with a vengeance, often they end up longer than the actually meaningful part of the URL.

jchw 6y ago

While techniques like these are undoubtedly handy for analytics, advertising, affiliates, etc. in my opinion they go against the actual purpose of a URL. Removing such suffixes makes my URLs cleaner and defeats the purpose of the tracking mechanism, a practice which hopefully some day will be so commonplace that this kind of tracking is abandoned. (And there are tools that automate it, so it could some day become a tracking blackhole the way adblock is, if such a feature is ever integrated into a popular piece of software.)

distances 6y ago

I think it's very rude to share any URLs with tracking parameters, so I do that for all links. Added bonus is that it makes the links much more readable like the other commenter said. Some of the most annoying ones are Amazon links. The product base URL is actually very compact, they just add an amazing list of tracking params that is pretty unwieldy to truncate on mobile.