When I wrote that post, the site had no analytics. This article prompted someone to reach out and recommend goatcounter to me. It's lovely! And it avoids the bad points that I mention in the post. I highly recommend writing blog posts as a way of finding solutions!
For the simple reports it's generating I'm surprised this deployment of GoatCounter requires javascript in the client instead of just consuming the Location/ip/user-agent string from the server logs.
> Other information such as the URL or Referer do not relate to an identified person.
This doesn't sound like it holds weight: Referer is a user-specified string, this could easily be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional information
The URL of this comment is [0]. I clicked the link above, if Referer is being tracked, it's almost guaranteed that you've collected my PII
Interesting blog post. I personally believe analytics are bad. Optimizing for analytics means:
(a) Taking the path of least resistance instead of trying to gauge engagement in other ways. Yes, you can still use other ways but most people don't.
(b) Optimizing for analytics means optimizing for an immedaite return rather than following your gut on what you like. The ultimate reason for analytics is so that you optimize for ad views for Google, rather than increasing quality. Google would never do anything unless it is in its own self-interest. They have zero social responsibility.
(c) I have disabled analytics on my blogs and now I find I write just what I want and what I find interesting and I don't bother with which posts get the most views.
What do you want? Views from interesting poeple or an interesting number of views?
> Optimizing for analytics means optimizing for an immedaite return rather than following your gut on what you like.
You don't "optimize for analytics", you optimize for an objective that you are measuring through analytics. If you are simply following your gut then you simply don't have a quantitative objective.
Note that Im not saying that not having a strategy is not a valid strategy per se, I'm just pointing out that analytics is a means to an end.
The point though is that the tail wags the dog: I don't believe for a second that most objectives aren't, in fact, being selected for being measurable via the available analytics (or even merely the appearance of being measurable via those metrics).
I want to know which pages and posts people find the most interesting and which remain popular over time. Just because I’m curious, that’s all.
It leads to interesting surprises, for example I wrote a pretty small post on my blog weighing the pros and cons of merging vs squashing first and for some reason it’s one of the top Google results and I get consistent views for something I felt was only minor.
My thesis is that at one point, people knew this about their creations through direct interaction. Analytics are a poor substitute, especially since they do not show the subtle aspects of engagement.
Our natural instinct for curiosity as you put it is precisely the tool used by big-tech to subvert our natural human instincts into becoming replaceable cogs of their technological kingdom.
Hard to make a blanket statement about analytics being 'good' or 'bad'. They are there as one of many tools to provide a compass and let you know whether you're headed in the right direction.
I think there's a bit of nuance here between an artist's approach versus that of a product designer, for instance. Artists seek to express an idea, feeling, or concept. Analytics, which (in the case of Youtube) optimise for a certain outcome, can easily befuddle. Designers seek to solve a problem. Analytics can help shed light on whether the problem has been solved.
Hi I wrote this post! You're right - that's what I was getting at in the post :)
I've seen lots of people say analytics are "bad" recently, and that's what inspired this post (as well as starting to write an analytics-free blog).
I think it's especially twisted when analytics companies (like google) try to manipulate me into changing from an "artist analytics user" into a "engagement engineer analytics user". That's bad.
Analytics flattens user engagement to more narrowly defined single dimensional metrics. And, critically, it ignores the bidirectional nature of a creator's relationship with their audience.
It's like when politicians cite opinion polls to justify their platform but ignore the fact that they often play a huge roll in the formation of those opinions in the first place. IMO, having a platform means not only that you respond to and are shaped by your audience but also that you play an active role in cultivating it
Article writer here! Yeah it's really creepy. In the "Research" tab, youtube tells me what my viewers have been searching for - especially the searches that don't produce many results. Sometimes the search terms are very general (eg: javascript), and sometimes they're more specific (eg: how to [personally identifying task]).
It also shows me what my viewers favourite videos are. Again, the 'highest rated' ones are general. But as you look down the numbers, you can see more specific things.
Well. I was in the "analytics is mostly bad" camp anyways. But the things that you just told me are more of the "analytics are far worse than you think" kind. Like "how the hell aren't those people in jail right now"?
>Like "how the hell aren't those people in jail right now"?
Were you under the impression that things you typed in the search bar of YouTube (or Google or Facebook or...) were not tracked? What about this situation makes you believe someone should go to jail?
The reasonable assumption is that it’s tracked by YouTube and mostly relegated to server logs and automated analysis, not that the search queries will be displayed verbatim to the channel owners.
They don't filter out low-volume queries?? In AdWords search term report they would blank out any queries not searched by multiple different users which was enough to not leak anything personally identifiable..
Analytics should just be one point to weigh across others when making a decision. I don't fully think it's a binary decision to use it or not.
Consider analytics. Consider user feedback. Consider your gut. Consider stakeholder requests. Consider historicals. Consider your team. Consider your debt. etc etc
I like the concept of 'walkouts.' And I'd add they don't necessarily reflect badly on those being walked out on - sometimes they're just the result of a disconnect between what a person thought they were getting into and what it turned out they actually getting. As the author mentioned, walkouts occur more when there's no incremental cost in walking out, so I've seen them a lot at sessions for conferences that have a fixed registration fee - e.g., a presentation may be great but just over one's head. Imagine walkouts must really be prevalent in free MOOCs (how many college courses would you have dropped had there been no consequences?).
Hey author here. Yes I agree about the 'vagueness' of a walkout. For any given walkout, it could be for any reason. But when you put the numbers together, you can see clear patterns.
One person walking out means nothing. But ten walkouts at the same time tells you something. It feels like analytics. And those people wouldn't feel as free to do this if there wasn't an element of vagueness.
After being an extremely data-driven dev/pm/founder I'm currently making a mostly offline app with close to no analytics (apple gives install numbers but that's about it). It's fun not to know how many people click on my button. It's like a whole world of concerns melt away and I'm forced to just have (good?) taste. No days spent constructing funnels and hunting drop-off.
Would not recommend for a business that's trying hard to optimize, but for a hobby project flying without instruments is pretty fun.
Analytics are good and useful in a broader context.
They often are a valuable signal which combined with a broader environment (news cycle, activity by marketing dept, socio economic factors, etc) can yield meaningful insights.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
How do I know? Our customers use Wide Angle Analytics and are doing just that. Their feedback indicates that yes, analytics are good.
More like "Privacy destruction and flagrant disrespect for users in the name of slurping up as much personally identifiable data as possible that you have no right to have or see is bad."
view-source:https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/social-media/analytic...
> GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform¯\_(ツ)_/¯