Goodbye Ads! Hello Privacy!

Few things in life are as infuriating as searching for something, finding an article with a title that perfectly matches what you need, only for you to land on a crappy site that immediately says something like:

"Hey! We're free, and I know you want to read this free article, but I need you to create an account and maybe pay a subscription if you're reading too many things here."

Or maybe you're trying to read a full paragraph, but you can't even finish the first sentence without having to scroll past a few ads and trying to close a video ad floating around the page.

Annoying, right?

For the cherry on top of this, there are also things like Google Analytics, facebook pixel, and many, many other trackers that will syphon every single drop of data they can to use for some obscure, nefarious purpose.

The other day it dawned on me: I'm part of the problem! Albeit the ads here were not invasive, I was still contributing to the thing I hate so much.

So I decided to make a few drastic changes and improve things here:

1. Removed all ads!
2. Removed all tracking!

I also started using Cloudflare to help me improve the performance of the site and save my Bandwidth on Netlify, and updated Hugo to the latest version, but that's unrelated.

Possibly you might be asking yourself: "Are you really against ads? Removing it will hurt your business model, right?" Well, when used right, ads can be a great way to make money. I have nothing against it, and it is a good trade-off when someone is offering a free service. What I dislike is the overuse of ads, and when it happens at the expense of content quality.

As for a business model, My goal here is to share knowledge and hopefully help others. I don't want to get sucked into having to post frequently, or writing in a certain tone, just to keep ad people happy. So, to me, helping readers keep their privacy is more valuable than a handful of ads or a paywall.

That's it! Thought it would be nice to share this with you all, especially because some might have experienced problems accessing the site while I was setting up Cloudflare (before everything was properly propagated).

Thanks everyone! Talk to you soon!