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, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc.
They still have valid points against the intrusion of data gathering, but it's simply inaccurate to claim there's no benefit to the data.
_heimdall · 6h ago
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.
TrueDuality · 5h ago
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 to write more.
dgfitz · 1h ago
Extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, makes sense.
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.
echoangle · 5h ago
I would count blogs as a type of publication. I would say that everything that’s published on purpose is a publication.
xattt · 5h ago
People seem to confuse writing in a blog with writing in a personal journal as part of self-therapy. Think “long-winded” posts on Livejournal.
It’s hard to engage in good-faith discussions because individuals may not have thought about the “why” yet, and it would be an embarrassing moment to be caught mid-discussion.
PaulRobinson · 5h ago
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 tracking, but I do look at logs now and again.
ritcgab · 4h ago
This is true if you host your blog on a webserver under your control. If you host from platforms like GitHub pages, this is not an option.
sim7c00 · 5h ago
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 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.. :) )
dwedge · 4h ago
I was confused by your comment until I realised you meant scrape the server logs, not scrap them
c0balt · 6h ago
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 data (visited page counts etc).
The problem here is probably that logs are not always accessible (managed services like GitHub/GitLab pages).
jsheard · 6h ago
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.
diggan · 5h ago
> 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 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.
lazide · 4h ago
Sounds about as much fun as manual spam filtering, but with worse tools. :(
diggan · 3h ago
Literally takes 5 minutes to setup at most, and most analytics tools ships with a "ignore webcrawlers" option somewhere, like goaccess does for example, taking 0 minutes to use :)
closewith · 5h ago
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.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 2h ago
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.
closewith · 1h ago
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.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 58m ago
But you don't need to use the ip for analytics. Aggregate the data and throw it away.
JKCalhoun · 5h ago
My personal blog? Analytics would be an ego thing only.
To be clear, my ego would love to know that people are flocking to read my brilliant prose! Alas, though, I don't even have what we used to call analytics: a number of visitors counter.
So my blog is, as someone on HN pointed out to me, "useless".
chongli · 6h ago
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 who are passionate about their topic and really take the time to become an expert (if they aren't already). They don't need to know anything about me to write about their topic.
stevage · 6h ago
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.
chongli · 5h ago
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 with people in the comments.
righthand · 5h ago
Careful, upvotes and karma are analytics.
chongli · 3h ago
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.
miyoji · 6h ago
I would make the counter-counter-argument: someone who is just trying to make what the audience wants to see to get views doesn't care about the audience either, they just care about the audience's eyeballs and the money/fame/influence they can get from leveraging those eyeballs.
chaps · 4h ago
Today I learned that "caring about my audience" means using analytics against them to understand as much as I can about them without their full consent.
Friend, there are many other ways to care about your audience without being a whimsical stalker from high up.
palata · 5h ago
> Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all?
That's not what you described. You described a blog writtten by someone who wants to increase their reach.
MSFT_Edging · 6h ago
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.
chongli · 5h ago
We need look no further than The Beatles, who famously and repeatedly tried to pivot their music away from what their fans wanted. In the process, they innovated popular music in a multitude of ways and spawned new genres in the process.
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.
breuleux · 6h ago
You can care about your audience without needing any analytics. Usually, I would think that you personally know a few people who are in your intended audience. Just ask them. And if you can't get feedback from actual people on your writing, analytics is a really, really poor substitute for that.
Retr0id · 6h ago
Not caring about the size of your audience is very different to not caring about your audience at all.
plastic-enjoyer · 6h ago
> Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all?
Uh, because you find the content interesting?
jasode · 6h ago
>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. see visitor stats) to continue to work on (2).
An example of this I came across was a analyst who was really knowledgeable about tele-communications, cell towers, datacenters, etc. He wrote some blogs and created videos about how the industry players work. It was really good analytical work. Unfortunately, he didn't gain a big audience following from it and quit after just 10 months.
He's still in the industry and I'm sure he's still "passionate" about the topic of next gen cell towers, etc. Just no longer passionate about blogging into an empty void.
One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.
cosmic_cheese · 5h ago
> One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.
In my case, there’s a social proof element, but it’s also nice to know if I’m basically talking to myself or if there’s somebody out there listening. If it’s the former I feel kind of silly, like someone sitting in an empty room muttering to themselves might, plus writing takes time and energy that I could be putting towards something else. You know how there’s some meals that feel worth cooking if there’s even one other person who’ll be eating, but not if it’s just yourself? It’s like that.
chongli · 4h ago
Keeping a count of how many views and comments a blog post gets is not analytics. Analytics is gathering deep data about the demographics of those numbers. It’s learning about the age, sex, race, income, country of origin, education, occupation, etc. of your readers.
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.
hansvm · 5h ago
Alright, suppose I'm passionate and an expert, and I want to write a blog going into a deep dive about logarithm approximations:
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.
yunohn · 6h ago
Yes, well you want to read one species of blog - while there is a middle ground without it becoming LinkedIn drivel.
scoofy · 1h ago
The essay seems unhinged. Data is useful. What the hell is wrong with that?!?
chaps · 4h ago
I think you're missing the point of the blog that's implicitly spelled out in the title: you do not need telemetry [but maybe you want it].
Do you "need" to have any of the analytics crap to have the same effect? No.
phartenfeller · 6h ago
Can we start distinguishing between basic stats and surveillance? It sounds like this author also disabled web server logs as any knowledge of traffic is deep surveillance. Is this really the way?
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.
skeltoac · 4h ago
> When I started this blog – 17 years ago! – I installed WordPress’s analytics plugin
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.
vedmakk · 6h ago
I stopped using analytics on all of my projects for a while now. I've got blogs and actual saas (non-commercial) out there. And to this day I dont know if zero people or more are actually using it.
The reason is: a) I do these things first and foremost for myself and I share them because maybe they are useful for other people (but I dont mind if they are not). And b) I always intend to publish my "products" without needing a cookie banner.
And it also gives me a lot of peace of mind.
stevage · 6h ago
I tend to be the same, or I roll my own very basic analytics - essentially a hit counter.
It's nice to know whether people use your stuff or not. Particularly so you don't turn off something that actually do care about.
turnsout · 3h ago
I'm in the same boat. I look at graphs of traffic generated by my server logs just to get a general sense, but analytics and user-level data? Honestly 99.99% of blogs don't even generate a sufficient volume of traffic to analyze. I just don't see the utility.
Put another way, how would my behavior change in response to analytics data? It wouldn't. It certainly shouldn't.
Bender · 6h ago
There is a middle ground. Maybe one need not add third party privacy invading analytics but there are simple self hosted solutions that have been around for ages and probably covers most of what people are looking for such as AWStats [1]. Logs can be merged into a centralized tiny web server on ones private network and that node can be running AWStats. Demo [2]. Main site [3].
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 interacting with the digital world. Without it you are flying blind.
diggan · 6h ago
> The beauty of sharing things is the feedback you get from others
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!
akoboldfrying · 5h ago
I think there's an easy litmus test for everyone who claims not to care at all how many people read what they wrote:
Would you be as happy just saving that file to your hard drive, instead of publishing it online?
diggan · 5h ago
I feel like that's missing that "putting it out there" or making some thoughts public is different than not doing so, regardless if you care about what happens afterwards or not.
elric · 6h ago
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 people who usually write about tech and suddenly write about baking, it makes life in my RSS reader that much more fun. If they optimized their "reach" they probably wouldn't include those gems.
skeltoac · 4h ago
> I'm totally fine with people who usually write about tech and suddenly write about baking, it makes life in my RSS reader that much more fun.
:) 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.
tyleo · 6h ago
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.
DrewADesign · 6h ago
People that want fun harmless things out of analytics usually use free add-ins that are free because they’re made by megacorps connecting services and building shadow profiles of people.
cornholio · 6h ago
That's the point I think, you can have some local page counters, broad region geolocation, referal stats etc. without selling your visitors privacy to some corporation, for some data that is not even that useful for you.
jotaen · 6h ago
I think there is some nuance to this: to me, it makes a difference whether you are counting page views in a coarse-grained, anonymous fashion, or whether you are going through all the hoops to find out as much as technically possible about all visitors.
I have some basic analytics on my blog as well. I’m just curious “what’s going on” on my website, in the same way as e.g. a shop owner in real life is aware of what’s going in their store. Publishing things on the internet can feel quite anonymous for the most part anyways, so at least I find it nice to have some rough insight into basic traffic patterns.
bubblebeard · 5h ago
I’m strictly against collecting data from users unless absolutely necessary, and never without their consent.
As for technology stripping us of our humanity, I could not agree less. I think it’s helped us connect better with each other across different countries and cultures, broadening what was for many a fairly narrow view of the world. Technologies like computers and the Internet are also amazing tools for aiding humanity in our creativity and exploration of everything.
And as for the constraints they may place upon you it’s no different then government, economy or religion. They are all constructs designed to control you. Best you can do is realize that and live with it as best you can. That or go hermit I suppose, it’s a valid choice.
jilles · 5h ago
I enjoy looking at my blogs analytics. It does make my day better knowing that people find my writing useful and read my posts. Do I need it? Probably not. But I don’t “need” a blog either. I just like it.
8organicbits · 5h ago
> I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world.
I'm in the process of trying to monetize a concept I discussed in one of my blog posts. I wouldn't have realized the idea was valuable, or that other people didn't find it obvious, if not for analytics.
I will agree with the general sentiment of the post: that there is a moral duty not to surveil readers of your blog. Personally, I find https://www.goatcounter.com/ strikes the right balance.
loloquwowndueo · 6h ago
I get by with Apache log analysis with webalizer or goaccess.
I used to have Google analytics on the site but then I decided what for - so I removed that.
mathiaspoint · 6h ago
This. The access log has everything you need. Start shoving in megabytes of tag managers etc and people will just bounce or avoid your site for alternatives like AI overviews or sites they're familiar with.
kmfrk · 6h ago
They're not important, but we're also simple creatures who find it amusing when some numbers go up. And KPI's can also be fun for things like A/B testing etc. You could even rig something for some positive reinforcement to send a notification when a post is overperforming.
But I haven't found any analytics tools that strike the right balance; they either are too unwieldy, or they're absurdly simplistic.
These days, going viral is very much a double-edged sword, and getting a heads up is useful in more ways than one.
+1 for GoatCounter. I’ve been using it as well for a few years now, and I find it to be a good middle-ground between useful level of insight and respect for privacy. It’s very straightforward to self-host too.
Brajeshwar · 6h ago
Once upon a time, my personal website, used to be well trafficked. Heck, I got a girlfriend because the analytics counter[1] on my website didn’t stay still but keep increasing. I had to had coffee and show the stats to prove to her that it is not an auto-script, that people actually do visit my website. That that is how I got that girlfriend.
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.
As long as you're not funneling this data to the Big Tech/Big Cloud/Big Ads, possibly self hosting and partially anonymizing data, and using it for personal purposes, I feel like it's fine. Web is lonely, so watching numbers go up and seeing that, for example, your writing is being read around the world can be a huge motivator to continue creating.
oliwarner · 4h ago
Vanity is a powerful force. When I was younger and actually blogging, the numbers (views, links, comments) were the exciting bit. They really kept me going. I was blogging for simple popularity, not altruism.
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.
echoangle · 5h ago
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 intend to tell you, then you’re surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned.
Assuming this is done with the referrer header, I also don’t see how this is bad. That’s the whole point of the thing, if you don’t want that as a user, disable it in your browser.
elric · 5h ago
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.
echoangle · 5h ago
Then the problem is the browser makers enabling referrer by default, not my Webserver looking at it. Is looking at the user agent string immoral surveillance too, because most people probably don’t know that exists either?
GavinAnderegg · 6h ago
I ditched Google Analytics on my blog because it more than doubled the size of any page load (the “Universal” version loaded a lot of additional JS). This was fine for a while, as I wasn’t posting much. Later, I wanted to write more. This might be shallow, but I found having numbers associated with my writing helped me keep at it. I also found it fun and useful to see what got traction. I tried Plausible for a while, but it was overkill for my needs, and I grew out of the first tier quickly. I then moved to Tinylytics [0], and have been enjoying that.
Knowing who links to you can be valuable, especially in a niche field, because it tells you who else has a blog or social media account or web page on the same topic or a similar one. Then you link to them and make them feel included in a community.
m-hodges · 5h ago
I dropped GA and all other trackers off my blog after I realized I would just sit there staring at the live dashboard for hours after pressing post, begging the number to go up.
roscas · 6h ago
The only way is to make that illegal, and many other tracking done by Google and Facebook.
littlestymaar · 6h ago
Or just ban ads. There will be no surveillance capitalism if the data wasn't monetized through targeted ads.
lukan · 6h ago
Current direction seems to be rather banning ad blockers.
I am still amazed how anyone can stand surfing the web without.
greyman · 5h ago
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).
roscas · 2h ago
I see youtube being behind a subscription model. I would pay.
If a service is good, I see no wrong on paying for that.
lukan · 1h ago
"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.
littlestymaar · 23m ago
And that why every subscription service end up having ads after a while (with the ad-free version being promoted to a more expensive tier, or disappearing altogether).
hoppp · 6h ago
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.
noAnswer · 5h ago
I have a homapage (just static manual html). I host config examples, for when I'm out and about and I need a reminder. And I write "blog posts" about unique problems I solved. Unique in the senses that a search engine was unable to help me at the time. It is not about reach at all. I write for my self and for the one or two people that are in a similar situation.
I know I have helped people, because ~0.7 times a year I get a thank you mail from someone. If I analyse with goaccess all I see is bot noise.
Is it just out of curiosity, or is there a reason you want the information?
KingOfCoders · 6h ago
1. Yes
2. I use SimpleAnalytics
3. I think Search Console is useful
4. But then, really?
PS: Over the last year, my impression in search more than doubled, my clicks fell 75% #AgeOfAI
righthand · 5h ago
How do you find Search Console useful and how is that relative to collecting analytics? Just curious, I've only used Search Console in the manner of validating how pages are returned when searching and validating page metadata is correct.
I realize that Google may require you to drain data into Search Console to use it or something, but I'm not sure how the data may be useful for the Search Console functionality.
Danborg · 4h ago
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Danborg · 4h ago
Ignorance is bliss.
joshcsimmons · 2h ago
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 out to get me" chain of thought.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> 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
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.
palata · 5h ago
I feel like nowadays, whatever you write for your blog will end up in an LLM and people will get the information from there.
So if you have a blog in the hope of getting a lot of traffic, well good luck.
The only reason I see to keep writing a blog in 2025 is to build your portfolio, which may be beneficial when looking for a job.
bloqs · 5h ago
an old man shouting at The Cloud(s)
zzzeek · 5h ago
I was intrigued at this post's emphasis on militarization as the source of pretty much all the digital technology we use today (not technically incorrect for the internet, not so sure about computers in general), combined with a really neat dropshadow /caption effect on the central image of a prison. Certainly that we started with "military command and control" and ended up with "cool dropshadow effect on captioned images", im not sure we stayed on track creating strictly a weapon of war.
colesantiago · 5h ago
He is right.
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.
yesbut · 6h ago
you don't need analytics for most of the stuff you do.
Havoc · 6h ago
Bit of a strange argument frankly.
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.
righthand · 6h ago
> The computer. The Internet. Artificial intelligence. These are military technologies, first and foremost... [0]
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.
> 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, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc.
They still have valid points against the intrusion of data gathering, but it's simply inaccurate to claim there's no benefit to the data.
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 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 to write more.
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.
It’s hard to engage in good-faith discussions because individuals may not have thought about the “why” yet, and it would be an embarrassing moment to be caught mid-discussion.
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 tracking, but I do look at logs now and again.
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.. :) )
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 data (visited page counts etc).
The problem here is probably that logs are not always accessible (managed services like GitHub/GitLab pages).
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.
Lots of precedent on this and it's clear cut.
To be clear, my ego would love to know that people are flocking to read my brilliant prose! Alas, though, I don't even have what we used to call analytics: a number of visitors counter.
So my blog is, as someone on HN pointed out to me, "useless".
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 who are passionate about their topic and really take the time to become an expert (if they aren't already). They don't need to know anything about me to write about their topic.
Both of those are extreme positions.
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 with people in the comments.
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.
Friend, there are many other ways to care about your audience without being a whimsical stalker from high up.
That's not what you described. You described a blog writtten by someone who wants to increase their reach.
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.
Uh, because you find the content interesting?
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. see visitor stats) to continue to work on (2).
An example of this I came across was a analyst who was really knowledgeable about tele-communications, cell towers, datacenters, etc. He wrote some blogs and created videos about how the industry players work. It was really good analytical work. Unfortunately, he didn't gain a big audience following from it and quit after just 10 months.
He's still in the industry and I'm sure he's still "passionate" about the topic of next gen cell towers, etc. Just no longer passionate about blogging into an empty void.
One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.
In my case, there’s a social proof element, but it’s also nice to know if I’m basically talking to myself or if there’s somebody out there listening. If it’s the former I feel kind of silly, like someone sitting in an empty room muttering to themselves might, plus writing takes time and energy that I could be putting towards something else. You know how there’s some meals that feel worth cooking if there’s even one other person who’ll be eating, but not if it’s just yourself? It’s like that.
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.
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.
Do you "need" to have any of the analytics crap to have the same effect? No.
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.
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.
The reason is: a) I do these things first and foremost for myself and I share them because maybe they are useful for other people (but I dont mind if they are not). And b) I always intend to publish my "products" without needing a cookie banner.
And it also gives me a lot of peace of mind.
It's nice to know whether people use your stuff or not. Particularly so you don't turn off something that actually do care about.
Put another way, how would my behavior change in response to analytics data? It wouldn't. It certainly shouldn't.
[1] - https://github.com/eldy/AWStats
[2] - https://www.nltechno.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=destaille...
[3] - https://www.awstats.org/
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 interacting with the digital world. Without it you are flying blind.
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!
Would you be as happy just saving that file to your hard drive, instead of publishing it online?
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 people who usually write about tech and suddenly write about baking, it makes life in my RSS reader that much more fun. If they optimized their "reach" they probably wouldn't include those gems.
:) 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.
I have some basic analytics on my blog as well. I’m just curious “what’s going on” on my website, in the same way as e.g. a shop owner in real life is aware of what’s going in their store. Publishing things on the internet can feel quite anonymous for the most part anyways, so at least I find it nice to have some rough insight into basic traffic patterns.
As for technology stripping us of our humanity, I could not agree less. I think it’s helped us connect better with each other across different countries and cultures, broadening what was for many a fairly narrow view of the world. Technologies like computers and the Internet are also amazing tools for aiding humanity in our creativity and exploration of everything.
And as for the constraints they may place upon you it’s no different then government, economy or religion. They are all constructs designed to control you. Best you can do is realize that and live with it as best you can. That or go hermit I suppose, it’s a valid choice.
I'm in the process of trying to monetize a concept I discussed in one of my blog posts. I wouldn't have realized the idea was valuable, or that other people didn't find it obvious, if not for analytics.
I will agree with the general sentiment of the post: that there is a moral duty not to surveil readers of your blog. Personally, I find https://www.goatcounter.com/ strikes the right balance.
I used to have Google analytics on the site but then I decided what for - so I removed that.
But I haven't found any analytics tools that strike the right balance; they either are too unwieldy, or they're absurdly simplistic.
These days, going viral is very much a double-edged sword, and getting a heads up is useful in more ways than one.
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)
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.
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 intend to tell you, then you’re surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned.
Assuming this is done with the referrer header, I also don’t see how this is bad. That’s the whole point of the thing, if you don’t want that as a user, disable it in your browser.
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.
[0] - https://tinylytics.app/
I am still amazed how anyone can stand surfing the web without.
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.
BTW: This video pushed me over the edge to finally start a homepage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDzAAjzbV5g
2. I use SimpleAnalytics
3. I think Search Console is useful
4. But then, really?
PS: Over the last year, my impression in search more than doubled, my clicks fell 75% #AgeOfAI
I realize that Google may require you to drain data into Search Console to use it or something, but I'm not sure how the data may be useful for the Search Console functionality.
Seems to just be one more link in the kooky "everyone is out to get me" chain of thought.
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.
So if you have a blog in the hope of getting a lot of traffic, well good luck.
The only reason I see to keep writing a blog in 2025 is to build your portfolio, which may be beneficial when looking for a job.
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.
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.
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)