That's a bit harsh - wanting to know whether you get 0 visitors to your blog post or 2,000 yesterday isn't just about ego; it helps you understand the value of your posts (and whether you should bother). Knowing how many people visited isn't the same as bragging about it.
3. I've just about talking myself into going with log-based analytics here. I find ga's omnipresence too worrisome to contribute to it, even with consent.
Thanks for that link, that's essentially the policy in my head before I started thinking about things like comment support. It's way better written than I would've come up with.
Can't say I would disagree. A lot of folks these days just seem to append an HN/Reddit link to posts that get discussions on those sites. There's the blog as an expression of author's personality, and then there's the discussion space as an area with a life of its own.
1. All local. Unless you don't want and a 100-200kb JS file is too much of a strain on your server bandwidth. Or are you serving 15Mb of JS files?
2. Screw Disqus. Screw Facebook Comments. Start thinking about your visitors, as someone said on another related thread, you are responsible for the tracking of your visitors by 3rd-party sites. Local comments or turn them off if you don't care about what others are saying. Don't save any information about the commenters except what they enter in the boxes. One-way hash the IPs if you need to compare for spam reasons.
3. If you need your ego stroked when you see you had xx visitors on your site, go ahead, use Google Analytics and screw us all. We're gonna block it anyway.
[1] This is a privacy policy I use and respect very much when interacting with the visitors/commenters on my personal blog.
1. https://vox.space/pages/106/privacy-policy