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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

It somewhat matters aesthetically, but mostly people are going to ignore long random strings.

UUIDs are at least visually kind of white noise, companies have no problem+with+links?that=look&like=this, so why do they care about UUIDs?

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Cause some links are more likely to be shared, meaning they'll appear in a comment or SMS rather than just in your URL bar. Like if I copy a link from YouTube into HN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Uw9kgZ4QM

I'm sure they put some thought into not making it ?v=f6dde15a-3485-4f36-b0b9-a3b56fbc12ae.

apple.com/iphone

You can't beat that. Or would you rather receive texts that include the following?

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09V3HZ8B5/?pd_rd_w=DAycy&content-id=amzn1.sym.04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f:amzn1.sym.04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f&pf_rd_p=04e31e32-5e01-4048-8b59-a557891d595f&pf_rd_r=M1KXM468KNZJV189JBE7&pd_rd_wg=3O1uC&pd_rd_r=e51c1edc-213f-4c6d-b081-e23afa6bf4ab&ref_=vn_s_iwp&qid=1694453553

> companies have no problem+with+links?that=look&like=this

Let's not match the lowest common denominator, shall we?

Sure, if Amazon sold about 10 products, such a URL scheme would work great. Additionally, this constantly redirects to the latest version of the iPhone, whereas Amazon's URLs are pointing to a specific version.

A more "apples to apples" comparison (pun intended) would be the MagSafe charger:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHXH3AM/A/magsafe-charger...

You only really need this part:

https://amazon.com/dp/B09V3HZ8B5

Yes but that's irrelevant, I used a real URL that you will receive in your texts. It's real life, it happens and it sucks. Let's not normalize it.

No. It's not irrelevant.

As you have been told apple.com/iphone = www.amazon.com/dp/B09V3HZ8B5

The rest of what you posted on the Amazon link is tracking bullshit. Now, THAT is irrelevant !

Users aren't expected to manipulate URLs manually. If your URLs have extra stuff, that's what people are going to copy/paste into messages.

Amazon product URLs are looong, but maybe people don't share them enough for Amazon to care. YouTube and Twitter put more effort into making them short.

I wonder if this is something Unicode could address. You could have something like quote marks that mean "Anything between these is data that shouldn't be seen in digital media but should be printed"

So you could have urls like:

example.com?<a single icon>&productname=somethinghumanreadable

The browser would also have to understand not to copy that part by default. But HTTP disallows unicode chars in URLs. There could instead be some "sharable URL" web API, but it seems like a small enough problem that sites are content just providing a custom share button if needed.

Apple doesn't need to create pages for millions of arbitrary items for sale.

The point is that you can always always always do better than a 100-character URL.

Some of us will strip off the crud to get the base URL, to avoid being tracked.

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