8 ms·

Ask HN: Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?

109 points by pdkl95 5y ago

YouTube started adding a new parameter "pp=sAQA" to video URLs on most index style pages (e.g. /feed/subscriptions, search results, the /videos page on any channel). The actual video pages (/watch) strip the pp= parameter, and it doesn't appear to be added to the URLs for the "recommended" videos. Does anybody know what this parameter does and/or why it was added? It's really annoying; using YouTube URLs in the shell now requires quoting due to the "&".

EE84M3i 5y ago
Sounds to me like a side effect of an A/B test.
20after4 5y ago
Maybe it's A/B testing? if so, I'm in the same "sAQA" bucket ...
- have_faith 5y ago
  An analyst somewhere who isn't aware that people are literally playing with the test buckets and jumping between them to figure out what the query parameters do is going to write a confident report on why A outperformed B.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Weird they need URL params when they know who you are anyway from the browser thumbprint :-)
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      Sometimes the intention is to detect the param on the way back, regardless of whom it came back from. For example, the param may point to specific time on the video. Or the param may point that the video is part of some playlist, so that when somebody clicks he is brought not just to the same video but also to same playlist. As we don't know anything about this particular param we don't know if it is the case.
  - bserge 5y ago
    They're 80% assumptions and fiction in any case, so it's OK.
  - sltkr 5y ago
    What fraction of the YouTube userbase do you imagine manually edits URLs?
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      I always strip youtube links of an ampersand and everything that follows when I give them to anybody.
      - tester34 5y ago
        especially fbclid
      - Agent766 5y ago
        If I forget to do that I like to say "pardon my url"
      - EForEndeavour 5y ago
        I manually edit "utm_" URL parameters to at least feel like I'm sending harmless easter eggs to analysts somewhere. utm_campaign=helpimabot
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - tsywke44 5y ago
        Congrats, you’re in the 0.0001% of youtube users who actually does that
        warkdarrior 5y ago
        That number is way too high.
    - m-p-3 5y ago
      Most likely quite low. I let my addons handle that. https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls
ricardo81 5y ago
I'm seeing them on the home page, channels, explore, subscriptions but not on searches and 'related videos' while viewing one. /edited for fullness
- sen 5y ago
  I'm seeing it on all pages... Home, Explore, Subscriptions, even History.
- themaninthedark 5y ago
  I see it on the front page, but not on left sidebar when watching a video or in the overlay that shows other videos once the one you watched is finished. I see it in Explore and in all Subscriptions categories(not Subscriptions feed/subscriptions). It is also not appended to mixes/playlists for me. Does show up in Library and History, not in Watch Later and Liked Videos. Shows up in: Movies & Shows, Gaming, Live, Fashion & Beauty, Learning and Sports.
cesarb 5y ago
It's fairly annoying for other reasons than just shell quoting. For instance, I use the browser history to know whether I've already watched some video; this extra parameter makes all these video links appear to be unvisited to the browser (since back when I visited them, that useless extra parameter didn't exist).
- Zealotux 5y ago
  It's not as good, but the history is pretty useful: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
  - Nowado 5y ago
    The absolute future of a proprietary service-specific history.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    That link shows empty to me, since I've never logged into YouTube, and most of the time I'm not even logged into the Google account. (I don't know if it's still the case, but I've heard that if you log into YouTube, and Google for some reason decides your real name is not your real name, you could lose access to your whole Google account; and at least to me, the Google Talk account was more important than being able to comment on YouTube videos.)
    - Kye 5y ago
      I don't think that's been a thing for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars
      - elric 5y ago
        Last I checked, it was impossible to create a YT/Google account without providing a (working) phone number. Which is even worse than requiring "real names" (which can at least be spoofed).
codegladiator 5y ago
atob("sAQA") = "°\u0004\u0000" Although not happening for me
- q3k 5y ago
  Shooting from the hip here, but this ("\xb0\x04\x00") could be interpreted as a protobuf with this IDL: message Foo { optional int32 bar = 70; } that decodes to the following value: bar: 0 (or bar could be bool of value false, or enum at value 0/UNSPECIFIED, or int of any other size) But with such a short message and without other samples it's difficult to prove or disprove that this is indeed a protobuf :). One could try to set &pp=sAQB (bar = true/1), &pp=sAQP (bar = 15), ... and observe what happens.
  - mentat 5y ago
    This seems the most like case to me. Google loves their query PBs.
hollander 5y ago
Just remove it. The video plays.
- scubbo 5y ago
  What an uncurious attitude.
mikewarot 5y ago
That gives a plausible cause to my suspicion that I'm seeing a bunch of stuff I already watched showing up in suggestions again.
- carnitine 5y ago
  Why would this affect YouTube’s internal recommendation system?
  - ttctciyf 5y ago
    YouTube has never been shy of recommending already-watched videos, the issue is whether you can see that you watched them. I think.
HKH2 5y ago
So YouTube is setting environment variables for people who don't do shell quoting. Next they can add "&reboot" to all their URLs.
- hobos_delight 5y ago
  This is how you append query params to a url - nothing to do with the shell.
  - tomerv 5y ago
    The GP complained about shell quoting.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      I doubt it is YouTube's intention to require people start quote URLs in shell, though.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  ....&foo=BAR sets a shell variable, not an environment variable. The value of $foo will not be available to shell-forked processes.
- coldpie 5y ago
  What? Look at the URL in your browser right now. It has a bunch of x=y parameters. That's how URLs work.
  - Sophira 5y ago
    The parent comment is talking about what would happen if, for example, you typed this in bash to try to download a video: $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&pp=sAQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&pp=sAQA In this case, bash would interpret it as "run youtube-dl in the background with the parameter 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ', then execute the command 'pp=sAQA' to set the 'pp' variable". The comment is joking that if YouTube decided to replace "pp=sAWA" with "reboot", they could get a lot of people to accidentally reboot their machines instead because they didn't quote the URL.
aaron695 5y ago
From the source the pp is - "playerParams":"sAQA"
- rasz 5y ago
  Its being added server side. YT does a fetch to https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/browse?key=xxxxx https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/browse?key=xxxxx and the response is subscriptions list, all already with &pp=sAQA attached
__henil 5y ago
Not sure if its something related, I got a wikipedia link from someone which included `&wprov=sfti1` as query string as well.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Unrelated. The Wikimedia Foundation has actually documented the wprov query parameter. It's used to track the source of a link; "sfti1" is "Share a Fact on iOS for text shares, feature version 1". https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Provenance https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Provenance
  - __henil 5y ago
    TIL
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Stripping is nice an all but I want a plugin or greasemonkey script to rewrite that to pp=random on every request.
smw 5y ago
Why don’t we have better magic in shells for quoting pasted urls?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
glow1nthedark 5y ago
Seems like it's being appended to video links shown on youtube that are not from either search results or related videos. I suspect this is a way for them to exclude click metrics, etc. from videos that were not shown as a result of machine learning/lexical analysis/whatever. I'm sure they've been identifying how videos propagate since forever, but my guess is that they recently decided it would be efficient to add some cryptic-looking parameter (that probably just corresponds to a boolean) to all video links shown on channels, the home page, etc.

rasz 5y ago

Yesterday after discovering &pp=sAQA breaking by History tracking (got a custom CSS injected to make sure its distinct) I added this document.querySelectorAll('a[href*=\\&pp\\=]').forEach(el => {el.href = decodeURIComponent("/watch?v="+el.href.match(/v=(.*?)(&|$)/)[1])}) to my userscript injected into YT. I still need to pinpoint reliable DOMSubtreeModified event to make it work without manually reloading the page. Edit: and just now discovered its being added server side. Fetched https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/browse?key=xxx https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/browse?key=xxx already has &pp=sAQA, makes patching even easier, just donna hijack fetch and strip them in the handler... aaand done: const origFetch = unsafeWindow.fetch unsafeWindow.fetch = async (url, init) => { if (url.url.startsWith('https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/browse?key=')) { let response = await (await origFetch(url)).text() response = response.replace(/(\&pp\=.*?)",/g,"\",") return new Response(response) } else { return origFetch(url) } } window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', ()=> { if (document.location.pathname == "/feed/subscriptions") { document.querySelectorAll('a[href*=\\&pp\\=]').forEach(el => {el.href = decodeURIComponent("/watch?v="+el.href.match(/v=(.*?)(&|$)/)[1])}) } })

Sephr 5y ago
Regular expression replaces on content are very fragile. Unfortunately, browsers do not yet provide general request regulation capabilities. Until then, Transcend Consent Manager's API can solve this much more easily with a more robust request-override based approach: self.airgap = { overrides: [{ matcher: '//www.youtube.com/', override(request) { request.urls.forEach((input, i) => { const url = new URL(input, location.href); if (url.searchParams.has('pp')) { url.searchParams.delete('pp'); request.urls[i] = url.href; } }); } }] };
- rasz 5y ago
  Its true URLSearchParams is a proper blessed way of working with url parameters, but its just my tiny userscript working on a serialized JSON, so either I grep and be done with it, or be forced to actually parse it, traverse huge Object looking for 100 individual URL fields to modify "properly", and stringlify once again. Im good with regex thank you :) >Transcend Consent Manager's API what is that? >request-override based approach the idea is to modify those URLs before they get rendered on the page, this way they get applied :visited style in the first place.
  - Sephr 5y ago
    > what is that? A new consent management tool for website owners. We're currently in closed beta. Learn more here: https://transcend.io/blog/defeating-cookie-banners https://transcend.io/blog/defeating-cookie-banners > the idea is to modify those URLs before they get rendered on the page These overrides are applied before the URLs are rendered on the page or trigger any requests.
    - rasz 5y ago
      >DOM nodes by directly patching the prototypes, methods, and accessors of all global element constructors and DOM tree construction utilities. We can write a patcher which overrides the constructor prototype, which allows us to check if the URL is allowed before the DOM mutation is performed. Now I understand. Your product is aimed at corporations seeking more mature? compliance with privacy laws. Sounds like tough market.

qwerty456127 5y ago

I actually find all kinds of browser history pollution a very serious problem rendering it almost useless (only useful the way "recycle bin" is - to recover an address of that useful page you have seen yesterday but forgotten). I wish there were browser extensions capable to smartly sanitize the history by removing duplicate URLs pointing to the same actual page visited multiple times during the day and/or by via slightly different URLs, removing the specific parameters which can be removed without changing what does the link point to, rearranging the remaining parameters alphabetically, removing GMail and alike useless URLs, also normalizing the entry titles by removing everything but the actual article title (e.g. removing website name or moving it to an uniform place - always the beginning or always the end) etc.

loonster 5y ago
I like the way Vivaldi Browser presents history. So much easier to use than other browsers.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  I haven't used Vivaldi before. Can you explain what is eaiser to use?
  - loonster 5y ago
    It's just organized better. There are some screenshots on the help page that show it better. https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/navigation/history/ https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/navigation/history/
pmoriarty 5y ago
I'd prefer that the browser be taken out of the equation completely. The web browser is becoming just a shitty operating system, largely controlled by unaccountable megacorps who are primarily interested not in empowering users but in tracking them and serving them ads.
- folli 5y ago
  You can use curl if you don't like browsers. It just needs a lot of imagination to get an idea on how the site is supposed to look like.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Whatever, pmoriarty is right. Today a browser indeed is an operating system with its own GUI toolkit and a decentralized repository of apps (we call the web, most of the sites actually are apps today). Perhaps if the web servers served something like QML/XAML/whatever (while other web servers serving just APIs for them to get/post the content) and there was an operating system command to run such an app by its URL, both the developers and the users might have a better experience. Or perhaps worse. This way we might even have more than one standard competing: QML, XAML and whatever else would emerge (introducing new would be more viable) vs just HTML.