It's really tough to read this with any sense of sincerity when it uses Google fonts and "feeds the beast" that is Cloudflare.
What’s wrong with Cloudflare? They’re not an ad company, are they?
Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
381–390 of 401 posts
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#382Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#383Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…
> Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. By instrumenting your product with analytics, you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it. If they're performing a task quickly because it's easy, or slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you find out that customers on a certain mobile device are suffering…
Before the days of the web, we had a solution for this that was better and easier for users and didn't invade privacy: UI design guidelines and UI consistency.
Apple is the only company that still occasionally does this, though even they have driven off into the realm of every application having its own entirely novel interface. Go back in time to MacOS or Windows in the 1990s and you'll find an entirely different paradigm: every application has the same interface... or at least the same interface paradigms. Learn the computer once and you've learned the computer.
Features were remarkably discoverable. They were organized logically in menus. Keyboard shortcuts were always available and usually intuitive. I remember opening a new app I'd never used before on Windows 95 and just unthinkingly hitting a keyboard combo and it doing the general thing I expected, or mousing to where I expected to find a feature I imagined should be there only to find that it actually was there. I never used Mac Classic much but I heard it was similar.
The web is what really broke this. Web UIs overtook desktop UIs due to the difficulty of installing local software and the power of trendiness. Web UIs were never uniform and couldn't be since the web was anarchistic and wild and often driven by designers who wanted to make their product look a specific distinct way.
I remember in the days immediately before the web there being talk of algorithmic generation of UIs from data schema. If the UI is thoroughly standardized then it becomes at least thinkable to examine data structures and generate user interfaces from them, even UIs that aren't horribly ugly or hard to use. This was building on a previous generation of incredible WYSIWYG UI design tools. Then the web came and all that stuff was completely abandoned.
Today's UI design tools in things like Xcode and Android Studio are horrible by comparison to what people were using in 1995. Go back and try Visual Basic on Windows 95. The VB language sucked but the UI designer was aeons ahead of anything we use today.
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#384I’m not really a pro Google analytics, mainly because it is a performance mess, you can’t load it async, even their own PageSpeed insight doesn’t like it, etc. (except if they corrected this), but to say that absolutely everything they do is in order to make more ad revenue feels like a very narrow view.
Google is not an ad company only, right? I don’t want to go on each item this company is doing, I’m sure there are a ton lot but they made $13 billions on the Cloud division alone last year. This is a super young service and it will explode in the next decades. They are also selling a ton lot of smartphones and I’m pretty sure they don’t do that at loss only to get some more ad revenues?
Even YouTube, which is definitely a platform to run ad at first, will surely generate a ton of pure non-ad profit when millions of people will get YouTube premium.
More generally, is it just me or this kind of anti big Corp speech is becoming more and more boring? Or maybe it’s because I’m too old and I want to defend the little search engine that has transformed into a monster?
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking? I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting! I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though…
You definitely don't need client-side anaylitics to know if you content is being viewed. I don't know if Cloudflare Analytics is that but a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that. Or just search for your site to see if people link to it.
> a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that.
I can't do that on Github Pages.
Cloudflare Analytics gives me a tad more information than raw page views—for instance, I can see what sites people came from. But there's zero individual user tracking.
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking? I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting! I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though…
You definitely don't need client-side anaylitics to know if you content is being viewed. I don't know if Cloudflare Analytics is that but a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that. Or just search for your site to see if people link to it.
A log counter on the backend will report the 1000 bots that visited your site as 1000 page views. But that won't give you any information on how well your posts did.
Bots are the reason I switched back from a free backend db based solution to google analytics.
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#387It's really tough to read this with any sense of sincerity when it uses Google fonts and "feeds the beast" that is Cloudflare.
We have GOT to stop confusing the messenger with the message.
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. By instrumenting your product with analytics, you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it. If they're performing a task quickly because it's easy, or slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you find out that customers on a certain mobile device are suffering…
> Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. For the first decade of my career, I really believed this, and spent a lot of time doing split tests, and studying analytics, and trying to "make things better" by understanding the numbers as they were given to me. This was a mistake. I've since learned that these numbers will rarely help me make meaningful improvements to my product, and my business. Sure, they can…
Yup.
Feedback loops. Hypothesis, experiment, compare expected vs actual. Lather, rinse, repeat.
QA, test, analytics are for verifying you're on track, that your predictions are useful. Nothing more.
They're not for charting a course, planning a journey.
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s because that they know it’s not free. It’s a subscription service paid for in information supplied by users. For some, this is an acceptable trade. Others would like to pay for services in dollars instead, but that’s not an option in many cases.
Do you believe that paid services don't collect data? It's impossible to not collect data for web services. These days even local applications you need to pay money for, like Photoshop, collect tons of information, and we don't have a clear picture of why exactly they need it. With Google we know that they don't sell our data and that the only thing they care about is being able to use the data to show better ads. Th…
You are so competent and so clever, but you still say these things. Boggles the mind. Specialisation at work I guess.
Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How many printers does Amazon think I need? I usually buy a new printer when it runs out of ink because it's cheaper than buying a new ink cartridge.
New printers usually come with less than full sized cartridges. Also look at third party solutions like external feeds. Even if it is cheaper, the externalities are not fully priced in, please think of the planet, thanks.
Well, perhaps I should have put /s there. ;-)
Of course, as you note, printer companies realized people were actually doing this (due to the perverse incentives created by their ridiculous razors/blades business model) so now most printers come with pathetic "starter" ink cartridges that run out after about 10 pages.
The irritating bit though is that many cartridges don't last long (intentionally and unintentionally) once you open/install them, regardless of whether you actually print anything. So, if you don't print a lot, it might still make (financial) sense to buy a new printer... ;-[
I am tempted though to get a model with refillable ink tanks, but most of what little printing I do is on an old b/w laser printer which I've had forever. Still looking for the holy grail color laser printer that is cheap, networked, duplexing, compact, and can print photos.