I have the same philosophy. I have, over the last couple of years, stripped Javascript and other external assets from my site. First I removed Disqus from my blog, because Internet comments are a cesspit anyway. Then I removed Google Analytics because the tracking outweighs the benefits. Then I removed an externally-loaded font. I finally figured out the last thing, a little bit of JS that Cloudflare was injecting to obfuscate my email address. I contemplated just getting rid of Cloudflare because fucking with my webpage content is pretty bad, but instead opted to disable the functionality.
I kind of miss analytics but I don't want to force my readers to run Javascript just to satisfy my curiosity. I can go through my logs if I want to see how many people read a page.
My old wordpress blog got so few legitimate comments that I never bother to add a commenting system into my new software. Even when a post got hundreds of reads due to being linked on slashdot or whatever, very few people left comments directly. Perhaps I just have nothing interesting to say.
If you add Disqus then you are just effectively letting other people make money off your content and if anyone makes money off my writing it should be me. I figure if anyone wants to tell me something about my posts they can contact me in many other ways.
Plus, even if I loved Disqus (and it is pretty sweet if you want that functionality), who knows if they are going to be operating in 5 years time? They could go under or get bought out by someone who plasters ads everywhere. Then it is bye-bye to years worth of content in the comments.
Much better, I think, to be responsible for hosting everything your users will see, even if it means forgoing some of the nice functionality third-parties can provide.The cost-benefit ratio just isn't favorable.
I considered obfuscating my email address but I couldn't remember the last time spam actually hit my gmail inbox.
