Analytics Doesn’t Require Tracking
As a very fast follow to my previous post, I’ve now ditched Google Analytics as well. As I noted there, I was interested in privacy-respecting alternatives, so I found quite a few interesting ones.
The options I considered were Plausible, Offen, and GoatCounter. I ended up choosing GoatCounter because it provides a free SaaS tier for strictly personal use websites, which this is. Plausible looks super slick, but is $4/mo even for my minimal traffic, which is almost what I pay every month for hosting. It’s just too much for a low-traffic personal website, unfortunately.
If You’re Not The Customer, Then You’re The Product
You’ve probably heard this statement before, and I don’t know that it’s always true, but it’s become something of an axiom in the web/internet space. It’s true enough in the ways that matter, though, and that brings us to the topic of the day.
Today a post made it to the front page of HackerNews written by Supun Kavinda on his blog entitled “Disqus, the dark commenting system”. Thanks to the comments on HN about this post, I found out that I had somehow missed an announcement that Disqus was acquired by an ad-tech company in 2017, probably while I was still traveling and actively updating this site. I was also apalled by how user-hostile the tracking behavior of Disqus is.