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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

I care about the privacy implications, but not the length. Out of curiosity, why do you care about the URL length at all? What is the cost to you?

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For the same reason people use link shorteners at all. It’s much more pleasant to look at and makes people more likely to press it compared to a paragraph-long URL full of tracking garbage.

Please. The URL above is pretty short, this is not the kind of URL link shorteners were made for, in fact it’s already shortened, as @alecco pointed out.

Pleasant? I could not care less about the pleasantness of the video code, but a shortened URL in this case would not be more pleasant, and it would be functionally worse, and barely shorter; all you’d be able to trim is the “?si=“. I’m baffled by this thread.

My point is Google engineers go to the trouble of setting up a URL shortener service on one hand, but on the other hand it seems ad the business anti-privacy executives can override anything. This points out it's a dysfunctional company.

The point is whatever group controls the money controls the power.

Also, only the domain is shorter

Actually, it's not just the domain:

https://youtu.be/X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X

You’d rather have the video code and the tracking code baked into the same code just to save a couple of characters? Why? That would result in a longer code than the video code alone, you would save very few characters. It would not be nicer to look at or functionally any different, and it would obscure the fact that it’s being tracked and prevent people from being able to edit the URL to remove the tracking. I appreciate the fact that I can see that the URL has a tracking ID and that I can edit the URL and remove the tracking ID. I do not want a shorter URL if I lose that ability. What you’re complaining about and wishing for would be MUCH worse than what it currently is.

I didn't say that.

Then your point eludes me. You complained about the length. If you don’t want it shorter, then what do you want?

To me, the fact that the tracking code is visible and separate from the video code is evidence of the complete opposite of your conclusion - it’s evidence the ad business does not get to override either engineering nor what’s left of privacy control. Ad execs would surely prefer that the tracking code is not visible nor manually removeable.

I didn't complain about length per se. I pointed out Google's contradiction. As my previous comment clarified. Jesus.

It’s not a contradiction, as my previous comments clarified. You’re rationalizing, making assumptions, and jumping to a conclusion.

That's what both Pinterest and Tiktok do with their mobile short links.

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