this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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I'm missing something here. What's the big thing people in this thread are hinting at JavaScript being used for that's so sinister? Is it just like, tracking and stuff?
Hey man, I agree with everything you're saying and I genuinely mourn the freedom of expression that the web has lost. I was using "just tracking and stuff" as a shorthand as part of a conversation, cos I was just asking specifically about what I was missing from what people were talking about.
Let’s stop calling it tracking. Tracking can be done server-side. What you are referring to is spying if we’re calling a spade a spade.
Many modern websites won’t work without JavaScript enabled. They purposefully design essential features of the site to fail without JavaScript, so that is must be enabled, so that spying can occur. This is also slow, and bloated.
Yeah, it sucks.
Sorry, I work with a marketing department so it's just normalised to me to call it tracking despite the fact that yes, I agree with you that it's surveillance and targeted ads are gross. What distinction are you making between tracking server-side, and spying? For me, I guess I'm talking about things like Google analytics or Google ads or hotjar or MS Carity when I say "tracking" in this context (JavaScript).
Well, if you sent a request to a web server, it is obviously gong to know that you requested something from it- so in general it should be the expectation of a user that the server owner has a reliable way to track that activity.
Tracking pixels, cookies, etc that follow a user around the web and gather activity that someone did NOT send to a server and relay it back to said server is IMHO spying.
Just because it’s being served into the browser on each payload doesn’t mean it was requested or desired.
All those things you named are spyware, marketed under the guise of diagnostic reporting. And, to be fair, that most certainly are also used for diagnostic purposes. But that’s not how they make money.
A pretty list:
https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs?tab=readme-ov-file#-examples
Also, javascript is quite heavy, slow, and many other shits, but i can't confirm them as i'm not a web programmer
Yeah there's loads of funny little quirks to the language. I actually quite like that about it, I think it's sort of endearing and human, even when I'm frustrated with it.
I don't know if it's slow necessarily, but I do know that a lot of things I build (I have to build things designed by other people, I've tried to push back but ultimately it's my boss designing a lot of it) is overengineered and relies on frankly too many moving parts, which could contribute to annoying UX I guess but with all the caching we have in place I'm not sure it's slow... I'm not a computer science guy though, I might be just too dumb to understand how slow it is