analytics are risky business
For me, I mean.
I've written "professionally" "for the Web" for nearly 20 years now. In some circles, that means I get to talk a lot of crap about being an "experienced SEO specialist" or whatever. (All it really did was ruin my writing.)
As part of that, I kept a "professional" blog on Wordpress - sometimes .com, sometimes .org. I stared at a lot of analytics, too. I stared at my own blog's numbers. I stared at my clients' numbers. I pegged my personal and professional self-worth to those numbers.
When I decided to break free of all that, I first landed at Bear Blog. I've been asked at least three times since why I'm on Bear, and each time I've said that I appreciate the "lack of comments and analytics."
It's true there is no comments section. Some people widget one in, but I like that Bear defaults to email when people want to talk to each other (and that people can just...not share an email address). I find everything is more thought out over email.
There is a "toast" function, which is basically an "upvote" or a "like." There's no corresponding "downvote" ("untoast"?), nor is there a way to differentiate "likes" from anything else. This function is used to calculate how long things stay on the "trending" list and how they're ranked.
The "toast" function has been quite bad enough, frankly, to irritate my still-active addiction to "engagement." But today, I discovered Bear also has analytics. The link is right next to "settings."
Without paying for an account, one only gets access to "unique reads" and "unique visitors" over the prior week or so. But that's enough. Too much, actually. I really do not need to see that. It feels unhealthy.
Web content/analytics/SEO is still how I make ends meet - being a librarian, while arguably The Coolest Job in the World, does not pay enough for us libertines who enjoy "eating" and "sleeping under a roof" together in the same day. So I can't divorce myself from it entirely. But my goal, in eliminating my social media/corporate Web presence, was to prevent the drive to make Number Go Up out of my personal life online. I may be being paid to make clients' Number Go Up, but I don't have to conduct myself like that as a person.
There are things I like about Bear, and I may continue posting there. Seeing the analytics, however, has convinced me further that I'll be long-run happier in Geminispace.
For one thing, my first reaction to those numbers wasn't "oh, here we go again" or "I should click away from this and never return." It was "statistically, those are much higher read numbers than my professional blog ever got, I must be doing great!"
...Only after that did my brain go "wait, no, that's precisely the kind of 'great' I'm trying to avoid. Forever. Yikes."
And then I signed up for a smol.pub account, because I already love status.cafe and midnight.pub and the Neon Kiosk, so why ever not?
EDIT: I saved this, viewed it, and immediately thought "I could repost this to Bear," and immediately-again thought "no, I don't want to deal with people telling me to stop mildly criticizing Bear," and immediately-again-again thought "wow, once again I am doing the thing where I edit myself online for platform and audience."
Not that self-editing is inherently bad. I left social media because I was tired of self-editing for audience and platform, though. At least here I can self-edit for "getting my point across" instead of for "preemptively fending off potentially negative comments."
/gemlog/