A blog does not need “analytics”

Post by ritcgab » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #68

stevage wrote: post #3

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…

Post by chaps » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

stevage wrote: post #14

chongli wrote: post #9

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.

Post by dwedge » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

sim7c00 wrote: post #75

PaulRobinson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

perfect answer tbh just scrap server logs. sites that offer blogging capabilities as service should do that for their users and provide 'local analytics'. its really trivial to do :/ u get tons of info. if u need more a lot of webservers can also dish out additional logs for you. applications can also be trivially configured to track such things themselves at near 0 cost and effort. hell, theres ready to use log coll…

Post by chongli » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

righthand wrote: post #58

chongli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everyone on Hacker News is writing comments for one another without the benefit of analytics. We're having discussion about topics we care about without delving into each other's personal details. If you care about a topic you're going to care about a community you build and participate in around that topic. You don't need marketing-focused analytics to do that. You just need to keep writing and engaging…

Careful, upvotes and karma are analytics.

Post by diggan » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #79

diggan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sounds about as much fun as manual spam filtering, but with worse tools. :(