I don’t care about traffic numbers on my website

In the early days of this website I had a Google Analytics script embedded and I also sometimes analyzed the server logs to look at visitor counts and where they came from.

While that was interesting, I have completely stopped. There’s no analytics script anymore and I don’t have access to server logs at all.

I do care about human readers and I also do care whether people are appreciative of what I’m doing. There’s no way to programmatically measure that, though, so I’m not even going to try.

These days, the primary audience of my writing is myself, since writing helps formulate thoughts – when turning over ideas in your head it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that you have a clear story and a coherent argument. Trying to write it down is really hard if it’s complete bullshit. Writing still isn’t the ultimate test of an idea of course, otherwise we’d have solved philosophy a long time ago.

I fear that caring about traffic numbers would make me care about the wrong thing: I would start writing about what people (or bots) want to read or what brings traffic instead of the things I actually want to think about. I want to write about the ideas I’m trying to get a clearer understanding of. Writing is thinking.

I like the calm internet of the blogging days. Those days might come back when people have had enough of algorithmic social media outrage.