91–100 of 113 posts
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Current direction seems to be rather banning ad blockers. I am still amazed how anyone can stand surfing the web without.
Another direction is that more and more content is directly put on social media. I found I am visiting websites less and less, I even dont care about ad blockers anymore (YT is an exception).
If a service is good, I see no wrong on paying for that.
I mean - it's fine to not have analytics if you like to write but be honest about it at least. You don't care about what writing your audience engages with. If you were giving presentations you'd get questions and comments at the end. Since a blog is typically read/delivered in async fashion distributed across regions the only feedback you get is via analytics. Seems to just be one more link in the kooky "everyone is…
If only there were a way for readers to post questions or comments back to the authors of blog posts, there could be feedback without the indirection of analytics. Too bad no one has, in the history of (either standard- or micro-) blogging thought to provide such a mechanism.
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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…
At least in the EU, you still need consent to go down this path, so you end up rebuilding the existing analytics tools to manage that.
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I have always thought of blogs as being written primarily for the author. Maybe they write because they enjoy writing, or to think through something, or to leave notes for later. When someone does it for the audience I always consider it more of a publication. Maybe that just semantics, but that's been the distinction for me.
I write primarily as a means to collect my thoughts and outcomes around projects. I keep analytics on my site not to optimize for any particular audience but because it feels validating and that I'm contributing in another form. I still see high traffic on a post explaining oddities in some of Route53's unintuitive behaviors and hope I'm making someone's day a little better in giving them a solution. That drives me t…
I’m more on the side of the author. I write to get my own ideas out of my head. I don’t even publish them, not yet anyways. But if I ever do, I also won’t use analytics. I fear it would somehow bias me into writing for bigger numbers, and I don’t want to do that.
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,…
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Careful, upvotes and karma are analytics.
They aren't. They're feedback. Analytics is demographic information used for marketing purposes.
Ranking comments by quality is absolutely tangential to analytics. It’s processing feedback, and rearranging the pangs in orders to make it more pleasant to readers… it’s real close to a-b testing.
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Another direction is that more and more content is directly put on social media. I found I am visiting websites less and less, I even dont care about ad blockers anymore (YT is an exception).
I see youtube being behind a subscription model. I would pay. If a service is good, I see no wrong on paying for that.
Unfortunately those willing to pay, are the most valuable tracking and advertisement target.
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At least in the EU, you still need consent to go down this path, so you end up rebuilding the existing analytics tools to manage that.
You don't: the ip, user agent header are necessary for you to serve the request and for you to protect from malicious usage. Both are fine use for gathering data under the current legislation. You can still convert those datasets in analytics.
Lots of precedent on this and it's clear cut.
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You don't: the ip, user agent header are necessary for you to serve the request and for you to protect from malicious usage. Both are fine use for gathering data under the current legislation. You can still convert those datasets in analytics.
No, you're wrong. You need consent to use IP address for analytics, even if lawfully collected for another reason under a different legal basis. Lots of precedent on this and it's clear cut.
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I see youtube being behind a subscription model. I would pay. If a service is good, I see no wrong on paying for that.
"If a service is good, I see no wrong on paying for that." Unfortunately those willing to pay, are the most valuable tracking and advertisement target.