🔗 You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company – This day’s portion:

I ditched analytics quite early in this blog’s history when I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world. For example, when Smashing Magazine linked to a WordPress theme I’d published I got thousands of visitors over a couple of days. The only practical outcome was that a couple of people approached me to redesign their websites. This would have happened regardless of whether I knew that I’d been linked to, and how many clicks this link had generated.

The other reason you might put analytics on your site is to know when someone links to your writing. Again, if the linker doesn’t intend to tell you, then you’re surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned.

I have not had any kind of analytics or tracking on any of my blogs for five or six years now, and I agree 100% with Leon here.

There was no benefit to knowing what kind of traffic I was getting or where it was coming from. Worse, I found that having the data to look at was making me think about what I was writing in ways I didn’t like. So I ditched it and never looked back. YMMV.

When I was still on Micro.blog, one of the perpetual debates was whether there should be likes and boosts and whatnot. Again, while I understand why people think they need this kind of stuff, I feel like we would all be better off if, when you like something some that someone has posted, you write a reply telling them so.