I understand that it's a sensitive topic, but given that here is a place for startups to introduce their projects, wouldn't it be also the place where you find more people prioritize gaining insight about users above that? So if that's indeed not the case then I'm surprised honestly

Most HN people don’t seem like startup founders, so this is more a community of early adopters, just one that is allergic to certain practices.

You can’t convince large swaths of the hacker news community that insights are anything other than spying.

Consider Fig and their HN intro.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27277819

After a few top comments about other things, the next bunch are all about telemetry or even what their website asks for. If you see the main edit, it is also people complaining about telemetry. One highly upvoted comment is complaining that they required an email for signup.

You’re asking for a lot of hassle including a tracking parameter.

Side question, I notice that you don't use UTM parameters for your submission link. I wonder if you know about it, and if yes, then why don't you use it? I also gather all my knowledge about this and ask in this question: [What would be the reasons for not using UTM parameters?](https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/q/144604/52079)

Thank you for your feedback, I will consider this issue.

R. I. P.

The owner is no more.

what do you mean? It seems that I'm not banned yet?

Note: by [UTM parameters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters "UTM parameters - Wikipedia") I mean any kind of parameters is used to track website traffic. One can have their own set of parameters and I still count them as using. Or they can use a link shortener to hide the long, ugly and awkward tail.

Occasionally I see a marketing/seeding link that doesn't have UTM parameters, just the bare link. I think some of the reasons are:

- *They don't know about UTM parameters.* Perhaps they are just a regular writer on their domain and not knowing about any sort of web analytics

- *They don't define their success on how impact their websites are on the internet*

- *The benefit of having web statistics isn't worth the effort.* Perhaps the effort of adding the parameters manually (even via link builders) outweighs the benefit

- *Their main sharing platforms have built-in traffic tracking methods.* If they don't run a lots of channels they could just be using a more singular channel pixel or conversions API to provide measurement. If you only have one source of traffic then UTM parameters may be overkill

However, there are cases that I can't assume any reason for not doing so. For example, while the link in [this answer](https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/141639/52079) is genuine, I presume that: - The author knows about UTM parameters well - Their success is defined on how impact their websites are on the internet - It's likely that they have their own tool to generate the parameters effortlessly - They have multiple source of traffic

Thus I find no reason for them to not use UTM parameters.

It's possible that the author's company has some methods of analysis that don't really rely on traffic data, like [attribution modeling (MTA) and media mix modeling (MMM)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5We-HR9_uM "Attribution modeling (MTA) vs media mix modeling (MMM). Whats the difference? # YouTube"). They use probabilistic approach to correlate changes in impressions across channels with changes in revenue. This seems to be only possible for established companies, where they have a dedicated team for expensive and sophisticated data analysis. I understand that this reduces the need of using the parameters, but isn't that the more data the better for them? I don't see why using these models make the benefit become completely futile.

So what would be the reason to not doing so?

Please don't copy the whole post as a comment. People are expected to read the article.

> So what would be the reason to not doing so?

Some people hate beeing tracked.

thanks. I'm new to HN and don't know much about the culture here.

> Some people hate beeing tracked. I know, but except that the posters really want to respect that, then usually the readers have to deal with that. I guess the number of respectful posters are small in compare to the number of people just want to know the traffic