I don't want your personal information1.
I bring this up because there was an article linked from "Hacker" ""News"" entitled: The High Privacy Cost of a "Free" Website2. At first I thought it was going to be Yet Another Article™ complaining that if you go to a website and it doesn't charge you money for access, then you're not the consumer, you're the product3. Yadda, yadda.
It isn't that (thankfully), it's something that gets missed a lot when people are talking about ostensibly 'free' websites. That if you use a lot of these off-the-shelf components to cobble together a website, there's a pretty good chance that those components that you're getting for 'free' are actually paid for by harvesting the personal info of the users that actually visit your site. Stuff like having a Disqus comment section or Share on Social Media! bars that float around and get in the way of what you're actually trying to read.
And, I get it. Making a website is hard4. And adding stuff like interactive forms and discussion areas and image galleries and stuff like that is even harder5. On top of that, not everyone is a programmer6, but even non-programmers want to have a totally rad to the max website. And it does kind of suck that if you don't want to take the time to learn how to make and secure a site yourself, your only options are to pay someone to do it for you (with money) or pay someone to do it for you (with your visitors' personal information). And, if you're short on money (web development can be expensive) and you hate learning... well, I guess that narrows your options considerably.
Of course, I did kind of gloss over the main reasons that 'free websites aren't really free' and 'if you don't pay, you're the product' pablum. And that's ad revenue. I've talked a little bit about this before on other websites in previous lives7, but the gist of it is that a lot of people who make websites like to put ads on them for a little bit of passive revenue (or a lot, I guess, if the site is popular enough). There are lots of reasons to dislike ads, most of which I won't bother going into here.
But the thing is, the way I've created this site, it costs very little to run. Part of that is because, yes, I don't have that many visitors as of this writing, but even if readership climbed by 1000%, it still wouldn't cost me that much to cover the expenses. That could change someday, though. I could go virus8 (as the kids say) and suddenly have people hanging on my words and wanting to give me money (a guy can dream, right?). So I might set up a donation system some day, or I might sell merch or something like that.
But I'm making a pledge. Right here, today: As long as it's feasible for me to do so, this site will not have ads. It will not have anything locked behind a paywall. I don't want any of your personal information, ever10.
Of course, I realize that that's easy for me to say now, when my site is unknown and gets very little traffic. How can I guarantee that this will stay in effect in the future once I become mega-famous and this site costs tens or even dozens of dollars a month to run? Realistically, I can't. But I'm sure I have a long time before I have to figure something out.