"It’s my website: I can do what I want with it. "

Right on! It's so liberating having your own wee corner of the internet.

This is not the first site to do so. A few years back, scarygoround.com started blocking query strings, although it seems to have stopped doing so now. Back then, Facebook had started to add ?fbclid=... to every outgoing link.

>Right click a youtube video from the results to copy the URL. I would have liked a short URL ready to share with people in chats, but no, I get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFfLCuHSZ-U&pp=ygUNcmF0Ym95I...

>Want to share an amazon product on a chat to discuss about it. I would have liked a nice short url that I can copy, instead I get a monstrosity, it forces me to manually select only the id portion of it if I want to share it.

YouTube couldn't do that

Just referrer policy of strict origin when cross origin gives host level referer (sic) header in most mainstream browsers unless user has configured otherwise right? That’s usually enough for web authors to know what audience they’re appealing to and privacy-maximizers can turn off that header sending.

This url worked fine:

https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings#:~:text=So%20I%E2%...

but this one was too long:

https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings?a=1

Most of the sites that still use GET queries around here are the tax collection sites run by local governments, which pass those variables around after you login the way your mom... uh, it's HN, skip the mom joke.

I actually get a lot more annoyed by routing parsers that do the same thing Get requests do only by pretending to be a real URL.

This is cool and creative!

It uses 4xx, but not just 400 :)

https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings?why=unknown

YouTube is also quite famous with their source identifiers, especially with the short urls, the tracking part is longer then the url I’m trying to share.