It doesn't sound reasonable to me, and for obvious reasons I spend quite a lot of time thinking about URLs and how people interact with them.
The truth is that outside of nerd circles most people don't even understand URLs, far less care whether they have extra parameters in them. Major browsers are considering getting rid of the URL bar entirely. The tidiness of URLs is therefore of almost zero concern to major online publishers, but accurate analytics is, which is why UTM tracking is so popular.
It's not just tidiness. There's also a valid privacy concern.
These parameters have nothing to do with serving the content the user wants and are only there to track users and behavior and are metadata about the real url that's attached like a parasite. I understand the value for content providers, but I think stripping them off for archival purposes is appropriate.
Exactly these parameters are the ones helping webmasters identify what the user wants. Knowing what pages are popular, where the users come from and what acquisition channels can you use and at what costs in order to bring eye-balls to your content influence directly what content area is going to be invested into and expanded by the content providers, which makes them do exactly what the user wants.
In a world without analytics you have tons of crappy content written or created at the whip of an executive who thinks she's good at guessing market demand (and nobody in the company can prove her wrong scientifically speaking before the job is done). That content will prove to be a failure when it's launched in let's say 9 out of 10 cases, which means 9 bankrupt projects, 10 times less interesting content on the web at 10 times higher costs of production, which in turn leads to less competition, higher prices (paywalls anyone?), reduced rate of learning/innovation etc.
I have a balanced view on the issue and I know the pros and cons of each side, including the privacy issues involved for everyone when surfing the web. But I'm sad when I see remarks as "I hope your product dies" or when someone chooses to blatantly represent just one side of the story.
"these parameters are the ones helping webmasters identify what the user wants."
That's a completely one sided and biased portrayal. They also help webmasters manipulate the psychology of users, hinder privacy, make an open web more difficult, etc, etc.
Nobody is suggesting we abolish analytics as a practice, but it's misrepresenting the issues to suggest that content providers will die a sad death if they lose out on whatever benefits those querystring params provide.
Content providers already have feedburner for rss metrics (also, now by google) not to mention google analytics (nee urchintracker) and good ol' fashioned server access logs (which you can analyze with urchin proper (or mint, or what have you)).
I can see from a gut-reaction standpoint how you could write what you did, but aside from gawker (who notoriously uses analytics, c.f.[1]), how many legitimate content providers use analytics as anything other than a rough barometer for trends? The problems you describe are problematic for certain types of tabloid publishers (drudge report, ny post, etc.), but they are hardly addressed by a handful of querystring parameters.
> how many legitimate content providers use analytics as anything other than a rough barometer for trends?
Nowadays it's built into Adwords, so the answer is anybody that sets up conversion tracking in his Adwords account.
More details: Google provides a tool called conversion optimizer[1]: it's enough to put a tracking code on one of your objective pages (the purchase page, the signup page etc) and Adwords will use machine learning to see the analytics for ads that convert well to your objective (what keywords did they use in Google, what locations are they coming from etc). This way, you can stop paying money for keywords with 20 clicks and 0 conversions, and instead you can raise your ad bids on those keywords performing well (i.e. 5 clicks and 3 conversions). The publisher is happy (more conversions, less clicks, less money), Google is happy (better targetting means less impressions used means more impressions remaining in the inventory to be sold to others for additional income), the customers are happy (publishers with lower customer acquisition costs can pour more money into the actual content/product).
I do too! It's absolutely the right behaviour for a service like pinboard, and it's even the right behaviour from Google's perspective, since any clicks on that link will be from pinboard, and not whatever the original source was listed in the UTM parameters.
Sounds reasonable to me.