When you share a YouTube video using the share button it adds “si=some_unique_code” to the URL. If you don’t remove that it shows your personal account to anyone who receives it so that they can chat directly with you. For a lot of people this is their real name.
I’ve seen it all over Lemmy so I figured I’d mention it here! You only need the stuff before the question mark in the URL to let others see the video.
This can also be turned off in your YouTube settings under the privacy section. The setting is “channel visibility for shared links”. It will still add the si code for tracking though.
FYI on desktop you can right click on the video and select “Copy video URL”, it doesn’t include the tracker string. Wish they’d let us remove it from the Share button, I’ve simply removed that button with uBlock Origin.
It’s also missing from my patched YouTube app’s Share on Android, not sure if that’s one of the patches.
Yeah, that’s certainly a patch. NewPipe, PipePipe, etc. all also remove
?si=.