41–50 of 113 posts
Maybe some people get motivated or improve content by knowing what gets actually clicked. There is a huge difference between reading web server logs and adding third party services to the websites that track everything.
[0] - https://tinylytics.app/
The author lacks imagination or is not arguing entirely in good faith: > I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world. Perhaps that's true for them? But you don't have to try too hard to think of legitimate reasons why basic analytics are useful to any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience,…
Huh, I have always wondered if for these usecases log-based analytics would suffice. No need to intrude on the client when the request itself already includes lots of data. You get visited page, time of visit and a minimal user identifier (preferred locale/user agent, source IP). That should provide enough data for those questions. If you want to make it slightly more privacy friendly and cheaper only store aggregate…
The beauty of sharing things is the feedback you get from others, which then gives you validation that something you're interested in is something others are also interested in or derive value from. When making a blog post, how else do you get this feedback? 99% of people click, read it, then move on. Quantifying how many people have read, how long they spent reading, and where they came from, is an essential part of…
I agree with this, less so with the validation part, but receiving feedback from others is lovely, pretty much always! But with that said, this isn't the goal or even intention for a lot of people who publish their written texts on the internet. Sometimes people just want to unload, share some tip, or any of the other countless of motivations people can have.
There is nothing that makes people who hit "Publish" and never look at the analytics do anything less "essential" than people obsessing over the metrics, they just have different motivations and reasons.
Personally, I don't feel the need of quantifying anything about most of the stuff I publish one way or another. For example, I don't really care about the HN upvotes/points. Sure, it's fun that some people are enjoying what I write, but I'm participating for the discussions themselves and to learn something new, both about myself and others. Upvotes don't really give me that, but thoughtful replies really do!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My favorite musicians and podcasts hate their fans. 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.
If they paid any attention to their fans they would've been playing "Love Me Do" for decades as their millions of screaming preteen girl fans slowly turned into senior citizens.
The web is now overrun and now full of rampant AI agents, bots and crawlers anyway so analytics are more likely going to be fake.
Especially for a blog where nobody is going to visit it except for bots.
This is probably the only time for the author that humans will visit his blog, but author wouldn't want to know that anyway.
The author lacks imagination or is not arguing entirely in good faith: > I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world. Perhaps that's true for them? But you don't have to try too hard to think of legitimate reasons why basic analytics are useful to any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience,…
Huh, I have always wondered if for these usecases log-based analytics would suffice. No need to intrude on the client when the request itself already includes lots of data. You get visited page, time of visit and a minimal user identifier (preferred locale/user agent, source IP). That should provide enough data for those questions. If you want to make it slightly more privacy friendly and cheaper only store aggregate…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, I have always wondered if for these usecases log-based analytics would suffice. No need to intrude on the client when the request itself already includes lots of data. You get visited page, time of visit and a minimal user identifier (preferred locale/user agent, source IP). That should provide enough data for those questions. If you want to make it slightly more privacy friendly and cheaper only store aggregate…
The other problem with logs is that it's very difficult to filter out bots masquerading with browser user agents, of which there are a lot nowadays. I've watched the logs on newly registered domains that aren't published anywhere besides the certificate transparency logs and seen the majority of traffic coming from "Chrome". Yeah I'm sure you are.
It's not very difficult, but isn't not effort-less. Start with something like https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess/blob/master/config/brow... which captures 99% of the crawlers out there. Then, when you notice there is one particular user-agent/IP/IP-range doing a bunch of requests, add it to list and re-run. Doing filtering based on ASNs that you see are being used for crawling lets you filter most of the AI agents too.
We've been dealing with this problem for over 2 decades now, and there are solutions out there that removes almost all of it from your logs.