viewership analytics: the ultimate cognitohazard

Part of the reason I like the bumblebee site framework so much is because of how cut back it is. My European viewers (If I have any, more on that later.) might notice that this website doesn't have a cookies popup, and that's because I don't have to. I don't use cookies, I don't use any user-side scripts, I've got nothing except the nginx and Cloudflare logs. The good news is that this means my site remains totally in line with the principles I hold about online content and privacy, the downside is that I don't get reliable analytics.

Now, there's no real reason I need viewership analytics. I don't do any advertising where demographics are important or anything like that. The only reason I list my lack of analytics as "bad news" is because I just... kinda want them. Depending on your perspective, it's either the case that having info about who's reading your content can make it feel less like I'm shouting into the void, or I've got a bit of an ego on me and like the feeling that I'm influential and that people at large care what I think. The truth of the situation is likely a bit of both, but the presence of less healthy motivations for wanting analytics begs the question: should I include them at all?

Back when I streamed on Twitch, I remember the common advice was to never look at your live viewer numbers. Even anecdotally, I can tell you that I was both more comfortable and making better content when I wasn't focused on my viewership, and I'm sure this principle holds for blogging as well. Especially when your numbers are relatively low, you might see a decrease as a sign that you've done something wrong when it's highly likely that there's no correlation. It's very easy to get distracted by focusing on the wrong things, and for small hobby projects viewership is almost certainly the very definition of the wrong thing. I didn't make this blog to fuel my feeling of self-importance, I made it for self expression; self expression shouldn't change depend on the person viewing in.

This is normally the part of the blog post where I make the counterpoint, but honestly this time I don't think there is one. For a lot of people analytics make sense and should be prioritized, but there just isn't a good argument for why I need them. On top of that, I technically already do have those Cloudflare and nginx logs I was talking about. They are almost certainly rather unreliable, since I highly doubt I have huge Irish readership and almost nobody else¹, but they still tell me something. For now, I'll leave this website as-is. I anecdotally know of at least one person who's been on my blog, and part of why I made this blog is so that I could learn to be satisfied with that.

Fun fact I just learned while looking at my Cloudflare analytics: Ireland has a bunch of datacenters, so a ton of bot traffic comes from Ireland. This technically is because of their relatively loose Corporate Income Tax meaning a ton of companies use it as a tax haven, but this isn't a post about international law and economics.^