alt Hacker NewsI’m broadly anti-tracking: it’s generally against the interests of the individual.
Query string additions are commonly used to track things. You can see that lots of people don’t want that by the existence of Firefox features like “copy clean link” and Extended Tracking Protection which proactively strips some like UTM parameters.
Some sites happily participate in what I will glibly call the tracking economy. They may benefit because the recipient will see in their logs that lots of people are coming from their site, and do something that helps their site because of that.
My rejecting query strings is a simple form of protest against that system.
I understand being for privacy, but on the flip side, information about you can result in a better experience. E.g. in the case of tracking where a person comes from, that can help those two websites improve by coordinating with each other in some way. Or your ads might actually show you something you didn't know you existed that you end up buying. That's probably better than seeing ads you likely have zero interest in. I'll admit it's creepy when an ad is incredibly tuned to your recent internet activity, though.