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Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's A/B testing? if so, I'm in the same "sAQA" bucket ...

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.

Weird they need URL params when they know who you are anyway from the browser thumbprint :-)

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.

They're 80% assumptions and fiction in any case, so it's OK.

What fraction of the YouTube userbase do you imagine manually edits URLs?

I always strip youtube links of an ampersand and everything that follows when I give them to anybody.

especially fbclid

If I forget to do that I like to say "pardon my url"

I manually edit "utm_" URL parameters to at least feel like I'm sending harmless easter eggs to analysts somewhere. utm_campaign=helpimabot

Congrats, you’re in the 0.0001% of youtube users who actually does that

That number is way too high.

Most likely quite low. I let my addons handle that.

https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls

Didn't work...

Some.

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