Comment by fraktl

I'm the creator of the website. It has a simple PHP text file counter. That's all it has, and I'd argue it's enough. I want people to be able to visit this website without any fear of tracking and profiling.

It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D

As the author mentioned, it ended up on HN. Message received. I can scroll to the bottom of the article and feed the trackers bad data. Your argument is invalid because you can't make a foolproof algorithm that'll tell you correctly how the user used the site and if the page was finished reading if the user can simply feed you bogus data.

There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/

And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them.

I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.