IMHO, forums such as this should practically pay members, not the other way around. The only value of the forum is from the input provided FREE by members (just like facebook and all the other social media sites). No members, no value, no ad revenue. You can see why I find it difficult to fit into society with my perverted thinking.
Funny you should mention that. I have stopped regularly posting at DBSTalk, where I used to be one of the more active contributors on technical topics, just because that site became too amenable to the commercial interests it now profits from. The remaining technical contributors there are a bunch of retirees who think they are auditioning for a job offer from DirecTV.
I Googled duckduckgo (Oh no!, Now my searches for an invisible search engine will be tracked!) and found this article on a British website:
Little known search engine that refuses to store data on users doubles web traffic amid NSA tapping scandal
DuckDuckGo, based in Pennsylvania, does not share user data with sites
This means fewer advertisements and results that are not skewed for users
Firm saw web traffic double in the wake of Snowden NSA tapping leak
Pro-privacy search engine one of several companies growing in this arena
By Helen Collis
PUBLISHED: 03:43 EST, 11 July 2013 | UPDATED: 02:14 EST, 23 July 2013
Other companies have had more success, however, and Duck Duck Go is not the first search engine firm to tap into the pro-privacy market.
Competitors include Ixquick, a Dutch meta-search engine firm, based in the Netherlands and New York. It returns private meta-search results from other providers.
I edit the host file( http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm) in linux and use Hostsman in windoze. Besides no tracking, If you're on a slow connection, it really speeds up page load times.