21–30 of 113 posts
I don’t think all analytics are evil. There’s a spectrum. Those old number of visitors stamps were fun and harmless. On the other end of the spectrum we have megacorps connecting services and building shadow profiles of people. There’s a lot of room in between.
A quick plug for https://www.goatcounter.com/ - a super lightweight visitor counter. Very much privacy oriented ( https://www.goatcounter.com/help/gdpr ). I've set it up on my blog a while ago ( https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2023/using-goatcounter-for-blo... ) and it's been working really well.
After 20+ years, I have gotten rid of all analytics, comments, SEO-thang, etc. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
EDIT: It does have the analytics by Cloudflare. My personal website is reporting 30.91K Unique visitors last 30-days. If I include the ones I have separated and earmarked as documentations, archives of old Knowledge Base, etc. in total says 1.05M Pageviews while serving up over 107GB of bandwidth in the last 30 days. Beware, this is Cloudflare and I'm not privy to their details. I'm also going to assume a lot of them are bots these days.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_(web_analytics_software)
If you look at analytics or the internet or military-born technologies as applied to people in capitalism, you are but cattle to be utilized for your full value. In that way you can easily be mathematically whittled down to a statistic. More importantly so that these technologies are a way to control cattle in their currently applied capitalistic state. A tool of capitalism in brief.
As tools of capitalism, analytics are needed if you're trying to run a business. I believe the popularity of analytics on blogs is a conflation between old ideas (guest books/visitor counters) and an effort to make your blog a passive income earner. Analytics allow you to turn your site into a business which you optimize for your visitors. However this totally shifts a website owner's focus from hobby and interest sharing to blog post output optimization.
But the current state is that society values any increase in income as smart and savvy. Even if the entire indie web shuts down analytics, what about the people stuck on Facebook (et al), TikTok, and Twitter being subsumed by analytics? Someone will build a new "cool place" to hang out that will be the next cutting edge marketing platform for media culture, entertainment, etc. I'm not entirely convinced this change will snip at the root in a meaningful way.
[0] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/swords-into-plowshare...
(btw that quote and blog post is very beautiful explanation of the root)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc. Why would I want to read a blog like that? That's hack writing 101. There's a million of those writers shovelling out that drivel on LinkedIn (which sells them all the analytics they need to do it). I want to read blogs by people…
You could make the counter-argument: Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all? Both of those are extreme positions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc. Why would I want to read a blog like that? That's hack writing 101. There's a million of those writers shovelling out that drivel on LinkedIn (which sells them all the analytics they need to do it). I want to read blogs by people…
You could make the counter-argument: Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all? Both of those are extreme positions.
Some sort of "is this resonating with people" signal is I think useful.
Same reason I look at votes on my old comments. If something gets heavily downvoted then it's probably worth relooking at the comment and trying to figure out why. Maybe my comment was just crap. Maybe it was good but just too contrarian for the audience. Maybe it was ambiguous. Either way there is usually something to be learned from strong signals - both upvotes and down.
There is probably a tendency to overengineer this though. Chances are the default analytics page on your CDN provider is entirely adequate for above basic signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc. Why would I want to read a blog like that? That's hack writing 101. There's a million of those writers shovelling out that drivel on LinkedIn (which sells them all the analytics they need to do it). I want to read blogs by people…
You could make the counter-argument: Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all? Both of those are extreme positions.
Seriously, fans are awful. If they found you for doing what you want to do, keep doing what you want to do. Don't let the fans guide you too much.
I used to have Google analytics on the site but then I decided what for - so I removed that.