Does Medium personalize URLs?

Medium links end in an opaque string of characters that doesn’t seem to be derived from the title of an article. The article doesn’t load if you drop the characters, and they’d be a great place to hide a “shared-from” user ID. Is that what Medium’s doing, or are they just a key into their database?

Let’s see. I’ll paste what I see as this article’s URL below, and folks comment if you have a different article URL from me.

https://medium.com/@jyasskin/does-medium-personalize-urls-adbd42ed4ea8