71–80 of 113 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just ban ads. There will be no surveillance capitalism if the data wasn't monetized through targeted ads.
Current direction seems to be rather banning ad blockers. I am still amazed how anyone can stand surfing the web without.
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,…
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…
How do I frame it? Is this for a math audience or a programming audience? If for programmers, are we talking about tricks to make it faster on modern x86_64 platforms or when you need to do voodoo on a microcontroller? If for modern x86_64 platforms, is this a short, punchy article empowering people with a new trick? Is it a long, dry article empowering other experts with nitty, gritty details? Do I frame it in terms of some other problem (like randomized, weighted sort for example)? If so, which problem?
All of those are just questions about "what" I intend to write, after I've ostensibly already chosen what to write about using my expert knowledge and opinions. "What" questions aren't the only unknowns which are improved in the face of knowing your audience though. For the content to land successfully you need to know something about who's reading it. Should you use Python/F#/C/Zig/curl-braces-pseudocode/python-pseudocode/JS/... to deliver the examples? Is it worth incorporating the resulting assembly into the article? If targetting programmers, do they have enough of a math background that you can or should include a derivation or two? Is this the sort of audience who would appreciate seeing all the tricks and solutions which _don't_ work?
And so on. Analytics are a powerful tool for ensuring your article will actually be useful to somebody, even predicated on your assumption that the best content is written by passionate experts (a statement I largely agree with) -- and the hidden, implicit assumption that somebody informing their writing decisions with analytics is _not_ acting as a passionate expert for the resulting work (a statement I wholeheartedly disagree with).
Diving slightly into that point of disagreement, my niche isn't logarithm approximations; it's using a wealth of math, old-school ML, and low-level CPU knowledge to push computers well past their ordinary limits. I don't have near enough time to write. When I do find time, what should I write about? I'm a passionate expert about a lot of things if our yardstick is the length of a blog post, and I don't have time to write about all of them. If I were to write that logarithm article in today's world I might instead write its dual, fast approximate softmax, signalling some sort of expertise to the "AI" people. Or not. Unless I know who's reading my stuff I only have the vaguest of inklings about the specific topics people might find interesting.
In my mind at least, that choice isn't pandering in the same way as the least-common-denominator drivel being shovel-fed on LinkedIn. I still have my own unique ideas and unique takes on those ideas. You can imagine a Venn diagram of the things I'd like to write about and the things the hive mind wants to consume. I'm definitely biased in that I'll pander to the intersection of those two things, but I think your complaint is about people who exit their own bubble completely.
I don’t think server side analytics are surveillance at all. It’s like if a shop is doing inventory and knows which product is bought how often. There’s no information for the visitor to volunteer, because every visitor should know that the shop/webserver knows when a visitor visits. > The other reason you might put analytics on your site is to know when someone links to your writing. Again, if the linker doesn’t int…
Oh come now, that's putting the onus on the user who might not know the first thing about headers or browsers. The refer(r)er header is a relic from a distant past when the internet was a very different beast, and when people had very different concerns.
I would like to know how many people visit the blog and from which countries. It can be used to measure it reaches people at all.
BTW: This video pushed me over the edge to finally start a homepage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDzAAjzbV5g
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,…
You can do this with server side logs. You don’t need to track users to get this insight, you can get all that insight from tracking server requests. You may ask what’s the difference. Well, if I track you with in browser tech I can see everything you do. If I look at the logs I’ll most likely just see a load of people from a single IP at your ISP which is a reverse proxy cache. I’m fine with that. I don’t run any tr…
hell, theres ready to use log collectors that will give u even nice dashboarding capabilities if you want to provide more fancy offerings in analytics. if ppl like that so much isnt it an easy sell? non invasive analytics?
(should be noted some platforms do this ofc.. :) )
I wrote that plugin and the backend service. That wasn’t my original idea. It started as something else: a plugin for adding your blog to a traffic ranking site called Blogs of the Day. It didn’t focus on analytics for bloggers, it published lists of blogs ranked by traffic. It was meant to help readers find interesting blogs. It was good until it got gamed by low-quality content with iframes and scripts. Automattic bought it and hired me and then I wrote the Stats plugin.
I agree with the author. But this is just an attitude about personal publishing, not a fact. It’s also fine to hold the opposite attitude and to seek validation through data, and even to adapt oneself accordingly.
There is a hierarchy of informative audience reactions to a blog. A page view is an extremely weak signal carrying very little information. Likes and other emoji reactions are slightly more informative. Comments are even more. If you aren’t getting comments and likes on your personal blog, maybe the page views are enough validation for you.
I don’t know, I just don’t care for my own personal blogging anymore. When I did, I was probably seeking human connection out of loneliness. Before blog analytics existed, I made friends through blog comments.
Analytics didn’t result in social connections but it did tickle the reward function. That’s why it exists.
Back in the 90s I had old school visitor counters on all my websites (the kind that looked like an odometer). I got rid of them after I was displeased with how few visitors I got, and it felt like a badge of shame more than anything else. IMO you lose a bit of authenticity when you start pandering to your audience to boost your numbers, which seems like a silly thing to do for a personal blog. I'm totally fine with p…
:) I recently read something in my tech feed about avant-garde perfumes and it ignited a new interest for me. I used to hate perfumes but now I enjoy them. I’m still going down that fragrant rabbit hole and grateful to have one less thing to dislike in the world.
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…
>I want to read blogs by people who are passionate about their topic [...] I didn't downvote but want to try to explain some of the mindset of some of the authors who do care about analytics and how it affects what they work on. The 2 different activities need to be separated: (1) passionate about a _topic_ vs (2) passionate about _writing_about_ a topic. Some people need some validation from a growing audience (i.e.…
This is information that’s irrelevant to a person who is merely passionate about a topic and wants to write and share about it. It’s information used solely for increasing engagement and making money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The other problem with logs is that it's very difficult to filter out all of the bot traffic. 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 filteri…
The maturity to shrug off this need for validation reaches some faster than others. I broadly agree that GA-level stats aren't helpful, but also if you're going into writing, having feedback mechanisms can help, even if it's just a hit of dopamine when you boastfully weather Digg and /. at the same time.