What if YouTube had slug-based URLs? - James' Coffee Blog

tag of my website.<br>Learn more about h-entry: https://indieweb.org/h-entry<br>-->

Here is an example of a link that, when clicked, sends you to a YouTube video:

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

The URL structure could be so much better. Without clicking on the link, the only context you have is that the site being linked to is YouTube.com. Many messaging services support the Open Graph Protocol 1, but relying solely on Open Graph data is not ideal. What if there is an error in retrieving the Open Graph data?

The URL could convey more context about the linked resource but it is not. *Why not add a little more context? *The URL needs to be shared for someone to access a resource anyway.

The link above takes you to Taylor Swift’s willow music video. If you haven’t heard the song, please feel free to stop reading and go listen. It’s a poetic, relaxing tune!

Now, back to the post.

What if, instead, YouTube used a structure like:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/slug

Like:

https://www.youtube.com/taylor-swift/willow

This structure allows for so much more context to be conveyed. Ideally, users could set slugs themselves. Slug design is part of URL design. URLs are UX.

One foreseeable problem with this approach is that the slug doesn’t say anything of whether the resource is actually by the specified author. YouTube has reputation signals on-page – the “Official Artist Channel” for musicians, for example, view counts, subscriber counts.

I generally prefer readable URLs that follow a clear pattern. But would the more descriptive URL have the potential to be misleading? A URL with an ID says nothing to a human, but maybe that is useful in this case? Two separate accounts could have taylorswift and taylor-swift. Indeed, this is a problem with any username-based scheme, and reputation signals are not available in a URL unless the above UR structure was only available to verified authors.

I’m not sure if my idea Is better or worse than the status quo, but I do find this a fascinating topic to think about.

https://ogp.me/

[↩]

Reference this postPlease reference this post with a link to this page. I prefer to be called James (he/him) or James' Coffee Blog. Learn more

URL for this post:

Go Back to the Top