No Analytics

It was nice to see Rach talk about stripping out analytics. I stripped out my analytics years ago and while I thought I wrote about it, I can’t find where I did so. My apologies if I’m repeating myself. (I’m getting old.)

When I was deciding to strip them out, I was in the middle of looking at the performance of my sites and one of the things I realized was that much of the JavaScript I had running on my site, I no longer needed. I didn’t have a comment form or other web site widgets that required those scripts to be running.

Marketing

Were I still working to build an audience and promote myself, knowing what of my writing was resonating could be useful. Of course, what does resonate mean, exactly? Is it merely a level of engagement, good or bad? (There’s the ol’ saying that even bad publicity is good publicity.)

Even with analytics, nothing ever really tells you what worked, exactly.

Vanity

While I no longer felt a need to see whether an article was getting the traffic that indicated it was “good” or “bad”, it’s still a dopamine hit to see those numbers go up. If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody still blog? Is it worth blogging if nobody reads it?

I got over that vanity and really write for myself now. As such, it really doesn’t matter whether I have a consistent audience or not. I have an expression of my creativity and of myself and that is enough.

Community

One thing I miss is seeing who has linked back to me. If somebody writes a retort, it’d be useful to be able to see that. Then, I can possibly retort their retort. Or just bask in the glory and/or dumpster fire of a response.

This is one area where I miss having the analytics. I used to be able to do Google searches that would list sites that linked to mine but they removed that feature years ago.

Social media site searches are mediocre and now spread across multiple platforms making it difficult to search across those platforms.

Server-side

Which leads me to the server. There are server side tools that use logs to build analytics. This means that users aren’t burdened with another chunk of useless code that doesn’t help them. It also means that I’m not handing over a plethora of your data to a third party.

You win

In the end, laziness won out and I have no analytics on my site. I am very much okay with this. As they say, ignorance is bliss.