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After a recent story on HN about all the horrible tracking Disqus started to do after being acquired by an ad-tech company, I ditched it and Google Analytics on

After a recent story on HN about all the horrible tracking Disqus started to do after being acquired by an ad-tech company, I ditched it and Google Analytics on my semi-dormant personal website. The process of fixing it got me interested in working on my site again and I ended up upstreaming the patches into the Hugo theme I use[1], so now everyone with that theme can benefit easily. I ended up using GoatCounter[2] after examining several alternatives in the market, predominantly because it was free for personal sites, but also because it was very no-frills which is all I really needed. I also appreciated that I could control retention rate and other configuration that might affect my visitor's privacy to collect as minimal amount of information as possible. I don't think there's anything wrong with having basic site analytics, but I appreciate that there are now alternatives to Google Analytics that don't try to do the pervasive tracking that's become commonplace online. [1]: https://tristor.ro/blog/2021/02/05/ditching-google-analytics-for-goatcounter/ https://tristor.ro/blog/2021/02/05/ditching-google-analytics... [2]: https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/

dna_polymerase 6y ago
Congrats, now you give your visitor‘s data to goatcounter instead of Google. If that catches on we might see this article about them in the future. Remove stats altogether, pay for your website stats, or roll your own. Just exchanging the free script isn‘t doing anything.
- LocalH 6y ago
  It's open source and can be self-hosted. It doesn't require relying on their hosting.
  - dna_polymerase 6y ago
    Sure, but that‘s not what OP is using.
- notsobig 6y ago
  have you heard of FOSS?
- tristor 6y ago
  Removing stats altogether is certainly an option, but one of my motivating factors for expanding and working on my personal site is to write articles that people find interesting or helpful. Stats are one of the best ways to identify what those things are. Rolling my own or self-hosting is also an option, but breaks my current flow which is based around using an SSG and hosting only static assets which can be CDNified. My intention with my site design is not to require any sort of dynamic structure or backend services, everything is just static HTML, CSS, and JS. As such, things like comments, analytics, etc are most easily integrated via a SaaS. Given that GoatCounter doesn't use cookies, doesn't do any cross-site tracking, and provides me controls to limit what data is collected and how long it's retained, it seems a fair option given my constraints. I'm open to other alternatives, but I don't think it's a reasonable or tenable position to say that people shouldn't have website stats. Fundamentally the stats I'm collecting are basically the same information which would be contained in a http server log, hardly egregious, and something any user should expect to be collected if you're connecting to a server on the open internet.
dillondoyle 6y ago
Another example people might not know is/was ShareThis. They became a pretty big 3p data 'ad tech' provider
abelaer 6y ago
I can second this, Goatcounter works really well, and is very easy to set up on e.g. Jekyll pages.

dna_polymerase 6y ago

Congrats, now you give your visitor‘s data to goatcounter instead of Google. If that catches on we might see this article about them in the future. Remove stats altogether, pay for your website stats, or roll your own. Just exchanging the free script isn‘t doing anything.

LocalH 6y ago
It's open source and can be self-hosted. It doesn't require relying on their hosting.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  Sure, but that‘s not what OP is using.
notsobig 6y ago
have you heard of FOSS?
tristor 6y ago
Removing stats altogether is certainly an option, but one of my motivating factors for expanding and working on my personal site is to write articles that people find interesting or helpful. Stats are one of the best ways to identify what those things are. Rolling my own or self-hosting is also an option, but breaks my current flow which is based around using an SSG and hosting only static assets which can be CDNified. My intention with my site design is not to require any sort of dynamic structure or backend services, everything is just static HTML, CSS, and JS. As such, things like comments, analytics, etc are most easily integrated via a SaaS. Given that GoatCounter doesn't use cookies, doesn't do any cross-site tracking, and provides me controls to limit what data is collected and how long it's retained, it seems a fair option given my constraints. I'm open to other alternatives, but I don't think it's a reasonable or tenable position to say that people shouldn't have website stats. Fundamentally the stats I'm collecting are basically the same information which would be contained in a http server log, hardly egregious, and something any user should expect to be collected if you're connecting to a server on the open internet.

dillondoyle 6y ago

Another example people might not know is/was ShareThis. They became a pretty big 3p data 'ad tech' provider

abelaer 6y ago

I can second this, Goatcounter works really well, and is very easy to set up on e.g. Jekyll pages.