Yeah, I don't know. I don't like ads and tracking either, but this post just seems to argue to throw them away without <i>any</i> kind of replacement.<p>I can kinda agree with the section describing all the problems with tracking, but there is not really an alternative approach presented.<p>The last paragraphs through in lots of buzzwords and lofty ambitions ("holistic approach") but don't give any indication how to realize those except for "go by your feelings".<p>I consider myself a good developer with useful debugging skills. I often "went by my feelings" when trying to find the root cause of a bug - however, to be able to do that, I need <i>some</i> information about the program and usually some way to interact and test hypotheses. If I've gathered enough information like this, <i>then</i> I can use experience to make educated guesses about what is going wrong.<p>Likewise, in the "real world", we always have a minimum of observable feedback that helps us judge our own actions: How people react to what we do, their body language, etc.<p>This is true both for individuals and for businesses: If you run a small corner store, you'll also be able to get a rough measure of success of your store just by watching how many people make come in and how many it to the counter.<p>In contrast, on the internet, there is, by default, <i>no feedback at all</i> - if you make a website and upload it to a server somewhere, it's more like running a radio station: Talking to the void, not knowing if hapf the city is listening, or only a handful or no one at all<p>So in order to get any information about whether what you are doing makes any sense, you need feedback.<p>I don't think intrusive tracking and surveillance is the only way to get feedback though. I think very basic analytics, such as counting the page hits, referral and "user journey" throughout your site are ok - those aren't very different from counting customers in a physical store.<p>For more detailed information, I think there should be more approaches to gather <i>active</i> feedback - i.e. give users a way to leave a message, point out issues they see themselves, etc.<p>It used to be hard to analyse this kind of written feedback at scale, but maybe LLMs could help with that in the future.