I want to build and refine and improve and make useful and a lot of things, but not add credibility to such practices. And I want people to know what an URL is and how copy and paste works. Everything I write is secretly about wanting people to know what an URL is, anyway, so it would be kind of self defeating for me.

That Facebook ever offered these buttons without warning about the privacy implications in bold red letters put them clean outside any sort of human history I can be arsed to care about. Don't get me started on Twitter, they don't even need to snoop for that, haha. They're toys. Some people can't fit that together with reach or money or whatever, but all FB is proving is that toys can have success, too. We knew that, so in the end there is nothing there, except something with which we can diminish ourselves and those who visit our sites. This is my personal outlook and I know I'm deluded to think this holds any weight in the real world; but my inside weighs more than the world so that still doesn't move the needle for me.

Not right after claiming such buttons "do nothing for the user that a simple link wouldn’t" and assess their cost in "tracking and slowness". You apparently think they do something good. Otherwise you wouldn't include them.

My complaint isn't with your using social media buttons. (I hated them enough to block them; they no longer bother me.) It's in using them right after claiming they are useless and parasitic.

Simply use SocialSharePrivacy http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

Buttons are all turned off by default and the user can turn them on if they care about them.

See https://www.schneier.com/ 's website for a demo.