I could move that all your examples except forums do not NEED members or users... except to spy on you and spam you.
I mean, a news site needs their journalists to login. Your own personal Wordpress needs a user for editing the site. The blog platform I use (mataroa) doesn’t even have detailed statistics serve many users so they need user support.
Web is a bit different than you envision/think.
> "I mean, a news site needs their journalists to login."
Why can't this site just upload HTML files to their web server?
Why can't this site have their CMS entirely separated from the public facing web site, for that matter? :)
> Eyeball optimization: Different titles, cutting summaries where it piques interest most, some other A/B testing...
Any non predatory practices you can add to the list?
I think you were trying to reply to me.
I'm not a web developer, and I don't do anything similar on my pages, blog posts, whatever, so I don't know.
The only non-predatory way to do this is to being honest/transparent and don't pulling tricks on people.
However, I think, A/B testing can be used in a non-predatory way in UI testing, by measuring negative comment between two new versions, assuming that you genuinely don't know which version is better for the users.
Two operational requirements:
1. Journalists shall be able to write new articles and publish them ASAP, possibly from remote locations.
2. Eyeball optimization: Different titles, cutting summaries where it piques interest most, some other A/B testing... So you need a data structure which can be modified non-destructively and autonomously.
Plus many more things, possibly. I love static webpages as much as the next small-web person, but we have small-web, because the web is not "small" anymore.