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Comment by weikju | Hacker News Reader

Soo this seems to be when you use the "share" button on Youtube rather than doing the simple universal old-as-www thing of.. copying the URL from the URL bar. Of course, people these days have no idea what a URL or URL bar is, as it's often hidden anyway... :(

https://nitter.net/OldRowSwig/status/1732112446943269347

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Of course, people these days have no idea what a URL or URL bar is, as it's often hidden anyway

...and if you didn't think this wasn't one of the goals of that trend, now you do. Those in power hate it when people can consume information from and communicate outside of their sanctioned methods.

We saw it coming when they started dumbing down browsers and hiding things from users --- not because the majority wouldn't use them, but to deliberately make users less inclined to learn.

Nearly 10 years ago(!) when that started happening, I made a comment here about how many YouTube users at the time realised what was the important part of the URL (the video ID) and began to use that in comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729

If you use the mobile app, the Share button is the only way to get the video ID.

This pattern has led me to avoid apps and use the websites on mobile.

YouTube Revanced is awesome though, even if parts can be replicated via mobile web with extensions.

Revanced still has ?feature=shared tacked on to the end of links created with the share button. But no user identifying ID.

Google has been working with great deal of effort for decades to stop people from using urls. From the integration of the search function in the address bar to the famous mangling of links returned by Google searches. It's why sites like urlclean exist.

I just looked at the full URI of very simple google search and it includes my browser for one thing... Why do they need those 387 characters beyond the original query...

No wonder Chrome wants to hide all that...

It's 100% so they can somehow correlate the data available in the adsense/adwords dashboards given to the site owners.

When I share links, I often want a timestamp in it. Adding that is pretty annoying without the share button.

If you right click on the progress bar at the bottom of the video, one of the options is: "Copy video URL at current time". (Although YouTube might also start adding extra IDs to that URL in the future.)

You can do that right click anywhere on the video

How do you right click on your mobile device?

That's like asking how to right click on a television. Mobile devices are designed primarily for mindless content consumption and personal data collection so basic functionality is crippled by design

I get that "Use a real computer" isn't helpful though, so I'd recommend getting an app like NewPipe since you can use the "share" button there to copy the video's URL with the current timestamp included to your clipboard or paste it directly into apps of your choosing.

?t=4m20s

I may be mandela effecting, but was there a time you could do ?t=wadsworth or some other param to skip the first 30%.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant

Yeah, I remember that. Specifically what I remember is a discussion on reddit about how a lot of youtube videos have useless stuff in the first ~30% and someone who joined the comments -- wadsworth -- also happened to work at youtube. Apparently with enough freedom to have an extra parameter check deployed to production. Probably around 2012. The parameter I remember was wadsworth=1.

Edit: Got the story wrong. Wadsworth was just a commenter with an opinion and someone who worked at youtube had a sense of humor.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/kxfxy/and_so_ends_20_...

Wadsworth's constant lives on in spirit via SponsorBlock blocking all the intro BS and allowing users to set a timestamp as a highlight with a button to skip to said highlight. I use that feature all the time.

Yes, this was possible before but doesn't seem like it works now.

Post on reddit by person who added this feature: https://old.reddit.com/r/wadsworth/comments/l461y/today_i_ma...

What a coincidence I was thinking about this feature just a couple of days ago and couldn’t remember the name of the Wadsworth Constant.

Slight nitpick: &t=4m20s

YouTube will have ?v=[SOME ID] so you can't reuse the question mark.

>Of course, people these days have no idea what a URL or URL bar is, as it's often hidden anyway... :(

The vast majority of users have no idea what an address or address bar is, let alone a Universal Resource Locator. Hell, most users don't understand files and folders in a computing context either.

As much as I hate how iOS, Android, MacOS, and presumably even Windows these days are obfuscating the file system and nearly everything pertaining to it, I do think it's a necessary step in the right direction. Most users do not address, and as computing hardware and software engineers, designers, and nerds we have an obligation to provide computers that all users can easily understand.

It is not a good idea to assume that users are stupid, uncurious and can’t learn. The end-state of this philosophy is that citizen can’t get informed and can’t vote properly, we need to tell them who to vote for, and do it instead of them.

What differenciated the Middle Ages from the Enlightenment periods is the understanding that people aren’t that stupid, we don’t have to hide the Bible behind Latin, we can translate it to the local language and they’ll learn by themselves instead of going through clercs, and the same goes for law, physics, sciences and philosophy.

And we’re much better off with populaces able to make decisions for themselves (ie copy from the URL and drop one letter by mistake) than dumbing down everything to have control over them.

But... people might come to conclusions I don't like! Or agree with!!

Knowing how to navigate to websites directly seems important for laypeople to understand.

There is point where dumbing down technology doesn't make it meaningfully more accessible but just serves to harm users. Hiding the URL bar is past that point.

I'm a computer nerd, I just use Google to look up and go to most websites I want these days.

Why? Because I'm not confident I can type their URLs properly and any typos are a one-way ticket to Scam City. Chances are reasonable Google has the correct website URL. Bookmarks, you say? Can't be arsed.

Between inconvenience, unintuitiveness, and "I ain't got time for this" mentality it's no surprise why file system structures are obfuscated away.

>URLs properly and any typos are a one-way ticket to Scam City. Chances are reasonable Google has the correct website

googles no1 spot has become scam city hundreds of times for big namens just this year alone

>Bookmarks, you say? Can't be arsed.

in the time you complained about this problem of your own creation you could habe bookmarked your top 20-50 visited sites.

off topic but i see more and more "I'm too lazy to do x" where the solution would be easier than just being "lazy"

Look boy, my time only becomes ever more valuable as I age. I literally ain't got time for 'puter nonsense anymore.

Did I really type in amazon.com correctly? Not amazn.com? amazon.cm? Or some other stupid typo that will send me straight to Scam City?

In that time I could have gone to Google (which is my browser home page), typed in something vaguely resembling "amazon", and the first or second link will be amazon.com 99% of the time.

I ain't got time.

What about almost any other website? Google aggressively abstracts away search terms and very often gives you something irrelevant.

Same, shaking my head. Your “users” are full grown adults with full time jobs and kids. They dont have time to understand nothing. iOS model of simplifying everything is far more intuitive and better.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for a dev-switch which would enable scripting and open up everything in OSes. But tell me how you are gonna do that without scammers telling grandmas “Copy this thing to here, yeah…”. Currently the dev switch is e.g. a Mac and $99/year, for iOS.

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