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Comment by vntok | Hacker News Reader

Tracking cookies provide incommensurable value to site owners for improving the quality of their web properties, which ultimately benefits users.

Example abound: finding out where people are the most frustrated (high exit rates), what content drives the most interest (page views), what content is missing or inaccurate (high bounce rate and low visit duration for visitors coming from Google), how they are using the site (browsing patterns from page to page), etc. etc.

Preventing all forms of tracking will definitely result in lower quality websites across the board, so like with all things there has to be a middle-ground found.

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While I understand the need for reliable and granular information on your users, it should technically possible to get most of that without selling your users off to third party services whose practies you never checked for yourself.

Furthermore it should be possible to sell ad space without directly embedding potentially malicious stuff from foreign whose content might change on such a granular level even you as the site owner cannot verify what is served to your visitors.

It is possible to use webfonts without loading it from a foreign servers.

It is possible to verify real users without training the AI models of monopolist webcompanies.

It is possible to link to your Facebook page without embedding a Facebook tracker in an icon.

It is possible to get comments without giving these to other parties.

These are all decisions you take when you decide whether you really value your users privacy.

Of course sometimes you don’t have much of a choice, but I saw sites which decided against all points raised above, and list about 30 trackers that are enabled per default and still claim they value their users privacy. So not only do you not value my privacy, but you also lie to me.

I avoid sites like these like the pest and will close that tab before reading anything.

> It is possible to verify real users without training the AI models of monopolist webcompanies.

Honest question: How?

I'm pretty sure that "verify real users" was about captchas. Solving that problem in general is probably impossible, I grant you that. However, reaching a good-enough solution for a particular site is often doable.

In increasing order of strictness and complexity:

- Use hidden/visible field shenanigans

- Ask questions your audience should be able to answer (chess-captchas, maths-questions, etc.)

- Require registration with e-mail validation

- Require registration with SMS validation

- Make that part of the site invitation-only

- Use some kind of trust-based system (e.g.: users can invite other users)

- Manually approve stuff

- Ask for ID scans and manually check them

- Combinations of the above

Unless you are a juicy enough target (not many sites are), just a few measures will get you to that good-enough point. Of course, implementing any of the above will be harder than slapping a recaptcha and calling it a day ;)

If you can think of it, someone can make a computer automate it.

"To prove you're human, read this source code and determine whether the program will halt" :)

They can, but unless you're a big and juicy target, they probably won't - because why bother?

Sure. On the other hand, I run a blog with a simple to answer question for multiple years now and I didn’t receive a single Spam comment that wasn’t of obvious human origin.

Once that stops to work I can bump it up a notch.

I find it interesting that the proposed solution to "How do I not use a CAPTCHA?" is "Reinvent a CAPTCHA".

Although "Handle very private information instead" is an uncommon twist.

You misrepresented the problem. The problem was “How do I not use a CAPTCHA that grabs your user’s data and is a blackbox to you”.

There are multiple solutions to this: - find a CAPTCHA solution you trust and host it yourself - build your own

If you say you trust google, you should write: We value your security and privacy, but seriously we have no idea what parts of our page really do

Even ignoring the privacy issues, I'm not sure that it would lead to lower quality websites. Websites don't feel very high quality these days, especially the kinds of websites I know are probably doing the most tracking.

It might lead to lower-engagement websites, but that's a different thing. It might improve the quality of your website to stop trying to optimise my engagement with it.

> Tracking cookies provide incommensurable value to site owners for improving the quality of their web properties, which ultimately benefits users.

That can certainly be argued.

It can also be argued that websites optimizing for “engagement”, blindly, in a completely data-driven way, end up implementing tons of dark UX patterns.

And that’s certainly no benefit to the user.

Or you could, you know, ask.

I feel like people have some kind of allergic reaction to sitting down with people and actually getting a person's perspective. It's slow. It takes time. It costs money. But you know, UX professionals do this. In fact, product designers do this.

I think the model where we'll just watch everyone all the time and treat them like lab rats and that somehow the "data" is going to give us insights is a) creepy b) misleading and c) lazy.

Can you imagine if your toaster (company) watched your entire daily routine in order to "optimize" it? Fffuuu....

>I feel like people have some kind of allergic reaction to sitting down with people and actually getting a person's perspective. It's slow. It takes time. It costs money.

They may also tell you things that you don't want to hear: that your website doesn't have good content, your navigation sucks in the following ways, etc. This sort of feedback makes you look incompetent when you collate it and then send it in a report to a manager.

Easily solved:

- sketch out the new design

- add the UX interview report as supporting evidence to the design

- send the design (rather than the report) to the manager.

Total reversal of the situation. You have documented evidence of your proactive approach.

(edited for formatting)

Not all of us want to engage with every web page/app.

In fact I don't want to engage with most of them.

If google search takes me to the site and I find info that I need in 5 seconds, tats a good thing not a bad one.

You can get most of this by analyzing server logs with IP addresses. No cookies required. You might need some JavaScript tracking for more detailed analytics, but there is absolutely no need for external tracking by Google or the likes.

Examples for self-hosted analytics include GoAccess (server log analyzer) [0] or Matomo (JavaScript tracking, formerly Piwik) , although I think it uses tracking cookies by default [1]

0: https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess

1: https://matomo.org

That's still tracking, though. There's no real difference between using a cookie or an IP address. In fact, a cookie may be preferable, because you can make it expire in a relatively short time, making it much harder to link your logs to the user.

Wait, exit points, page views, bounces… Can't you measure these just from the server's log? I don't think you need to track an individual's navigation pattern and store a cookie on their machine to crunch these stats.

An exit point or a bounce is inherently a property of an individual’s navigation pattern.

It is, but you can save just the fact that it happened, without the whole interaction history leading up to it, and without details of who was navigating.

As long as the cookie does not track the visitor across different sites?

I'm way more radical, I just look at what I'm making.

It's kinda like if someone were to survey their audience before a concert on what they should play, that wouldn't lead to better art. Have you ever seen a youtuber talk about how they would prefer to make videos about X, but the audience wants Y, so they're half-assing this other thing instead? Not only does this not lead to improvement, I think the major improvement would be to remove all things produced in such a extrinsicially motivated way, and replace them with nothing.

> Your stuff will start to puff up. Your paragraphs will start to get rotund with all the things you could say if you really wanted, but you can only hint. That's bad. It's bad intellectually and I think it's bad morally. It means that you become.. your contract is no longer with your readers. What I try and do, and the reason I write in longhand and write in isolation, is to say "The only person I have a deal with is the person who might read this. And I'll give them my best, and I don't care what the editor thinks, the advertising department thinks, friends and colleagues think." You try and live, as it were, as if none of these people counted. "What's the best account I can give for customers of this." Most of Washington punditry is nothing of the kind, it's... private letters written to other pundits and appearing in public space.

-- Christopher Hitchens, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsvq4PYdt40&t=35m46s

Say what you would say even if the whole world was against it. I don't live by that all the time either, but I'd rather fall short of that motto than live up to something easy and pointless.

Sure, when I see a page has a lot of hits, and I look at it and think I was being a bit lazy and people who search for that deserve better, I work on it some. If someone told me that the site doesn't work in a certain browser, I would try to fix it if easily possible, and so on. Just like an artist wouldn't say "I don't care, I only care about my music" when the venue they're playing at has no roads leading to it, and no electricity. But that goes without saying, for me that's like a painter making sure their canvas is okay.

This idea that I need to know much more, stuff like which path on the site most people are taking... no. I'm all for other people doing it, as long as privacy basics are respected, but the idea that everybody needs this to make something of quality, that I absolutely protest.

Show me one great thing that was produced that way, by someone or a group just following what people want (which is not the same as people working together as thinking individuals), just one? I can probably easily find you lots that were produced against the violent resistance of contemporaries, or even discovered as treasures of humanity posthumously.

Going just by what is the most popular, I would have ended up a Harry Potter fan rather than an Hannah Arendt fan. I would be watching SNL, instead of missing Bill Hicks. I would probably still care about movies and games instead of reading books and listening to music of the 20th century and realizing just how little value and depth what we currently accept as state of the art even has. I can't even imagine what a wasteland my mind would be if I had followed the masses rather than my instincts at every turn.

The biggest sites we know that currenly optimize for people staying long on pages prove my point so much, I had to avoid that to even get any opportunity to rant. Google search results that get worse, or Youtube and Facebook which are infamous for promoting low-quality or outright toxic and deceptive things that increase engagement. Or Amazon with fake reviews, and so on. It's not working. Just like the idea of ranking comments by clicking buttons to improve the quality of discussions doesn't really work and is much more useful for abuse than use.

Last but not least, I'd rather see a website where I hate every aspect of it, but that was made by a real person with real thoughts in their head, than anything else. Play from your heart, not from your analytics package and what you think the numbers mean.

Beautiful sentiment. I'd love if more people applied some basic thought to their lives, instead of just wandering into the melting pot of dystopia. Not too long ago, people had the freedom to speak their minds without being crushed by the cookie-cutter opinions espoused by virtue signalers. I long for that, I long for when we relished intellectual stimulus, instead of just reaching for what's easy, and fits inside our comfort zone.

> Anyone who doesn't want to belong to the mass need only cease to go easy on themselves; let them follow their conscience, which cries out to them "Be yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire." Every young soul hears this call night and day and trembles, for when it thinks of its true liberation, it has an inkling of the measure of happiness for which it is destined from eternity. As long as it is shackled by the chains of opinion and fear, nothing can help it attain this happiness. And how bleak and senseless this life can become without this liberation!

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

> Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all; but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it. Say honestly, "I love arm-chairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose; not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them."

> But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul, and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle perhaps the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy.

> At the end of life you may close your eyes saying: "I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance, which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance, the immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future."

-- Voltairine de Cleyre

I once read a story in our school text book, I wish I knew the author. It was about some new kind of prison without walls, but instead prisoners had an implant that gave them increasing shocks up to incapacitating them if they moved too far away from the prison. This one prisoner kept trying to escape, at one point getting so far that a truck driver brought him to a doctor, who then called the police IIRC, and at the end, the prison director was talking to the prisoner, asking why do you keep trying, you know it's absolutely impossible, why not just accept it? And the prisoner said, because when I accept it, you won. Right now, I win. We never read that story in class, but it impressed the fuck out of me. Life is short and fickle either way, might as well live it as me, right? And if everybody saved themselves, maybe the world would be saved, but even if the world goes to shit, I can still save myself. That is, only I can ruin myself. I can be shut up, but I can't be made to say "yes". I can't say that's good enough, but that's a good start.

> Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: "We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation" (1976)

And while punk may be generally dead, as long as it still exists in China, nobody is allowed to give up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk4EspwLpzc

Godspeed to you. Or as that one scroller text in an Amiga demo said: grab life by the balls, like a ninja!

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