Ask HN: Why does YouTube now trim channel URLs?

7 points by DonCopal 5 years ago | 1 comment

For example, go to https://www.youtube.com/c/MichelvanBiezen

It will be trimmed to https://www.youtube.com/c

Then if you do refresh, bookmark it or reopen last closed tab, it gives an error.

The same is for URLs of type user: https://www.youtube.com/user/professorleonard57

This is in both Opera and Firefox.

I'm seeing a https://www.youtube.com/user [ETA: that URI is literally "/user"] in Firefox when I go to a channel now. My guess: they've decided they don't want people bookmarking channels in their browser.

Pretty dirty trick. I've noticed that a lot of the newer channels tended to be put behind long URLs of random characters as well, so they aren't easy to remember.