I gave up on statistics
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At the dawn of the web we had a page. And that page had whatever we had put on it. However, like books, it was a one sided affair: there was no direct interaction between the audience and the creator. You had text, you had small images, and… well, links. The biggest initial innovation of the web over books.
One of the first popular things that broke this pattern was counters. You would embed an external image from a service elsewhere, and upon each download of the image the counter would go up. This was one of the first means of gaining Internet points, and it brought a simple social element into having a website. You could ask your friend to visit and you could tell if they visited if the counter went up. Because that is how low the traffic was back in the early days.
Later on we got more such social widgets to embed to your page: webpolls, guestbooks, comment forms. All of these had a promise of giving life and social aspect, a further motivation to interact with people. However, there was a certain limit to this which holds true to this day: it is an awful lot of work for a single person to keep on providing new stuff for an audience. So over time – on most of the sites – these services were more like a ghost town.
The rise of statistics
Most often servers are setup with access logs. At some point people started making tools to grab data from the logs and summarize daily, weekly, and monthly stats. This mechanism however was limited to webmasters of the time and rarely was available for hosted sites.
Then we got an evolution of the idea: combine it with one pixel image embedded on your site, just like a counter! Eventually a lot of people started making use of statistics services to see much more than they could before, such as where other people were coming from and visit back. The statistics also started to improve and evolved to track unique browsers (and later users) instead of just plain hits.
It was around this time we got Google Analytics. It eventually became de-facto analytics service everybody was using. It became a valuable skill to know how Analytics works. And one of the reasons for it’s popularity was, of course, the human desire for Internet points.
Capitalist web
Commercial social media brought some innovations. One of these innovations was to provide new mechanisms for people to collect Internet points: likes. One of the things that you no longer see on pages is an embedded like button to Facebook. This area was taken over by Twitter by getting people to embed tweets, which provided more than a single action like button. Facebook would have to innovate again to be different and beneficial so they ended up evolving likes into reactions. But they lost the embedded content game against Twitter.
There is a reason companies like embeds: they make it possible to track on people, and this is very beneficial for advertisements. Personalized, targetted ads with zero human interaction effort is the wet dream of a marketer. Essentially this is the game played by all the major internet companies.
Privacy concerns
This was one of the biggest shifts in recent web history, and a very important one: European Union ended the game of tracking people without their consent. A side effect of this was of course all the cookie consent dialogs on many sites. People often blame EU. But you could very well make a site with no need for tracking, and thus, without a separate cookie consent dialog. And really, you could separate the permissions and consents per feature instead of making a single point of loads of checkboxes, but they want to make you allow everything by making the dialogs annoying unless you press the big button that gives all the rights.
To me it is rather insane that people in United States have so little power over the capitalist powers that they keep on being sheeps with trackers in their necks. “But I have VPN! I pay for services to take me off lists to be safe from spam! Our system works!” is the naivety they live in. Of course the mechanism is familiar considering how the health care and school systems work in the US. Poorly.
GDPR and all the other privacy laws are guarding against the abuse of tracking people via embedded content. It is the better way. You should pay taxes to the government for basic services and protection, not an overpriced service tax to companies.
The downside of Internet points
If you have followed the web then nothing of this is new: the game played by the internet companies, and the privacy issues. To focus back on to the internet points and their addictive nature on the human mind, could they also be harmful in another way? Are there negative effects on me having analytics tracking on my site, even if I’m using a paid privacy first service?
And my conclusion on this thought was: yes. It did have an effect on me and how I thought about my sites. Over the years I have been giving more attention to the bigger sites instead of the smaller ones. However this was totally irrational: the happiness of creation often lies in the smaller sites where you have more creative freedom and less responsibilities. Putting too much effort on the bigger and more popular sites, continuously, eventually did wear me down. Especially as I finally successfully transitioned to work life as a front-end developer.
I have taken action: I no longer have analytics on my sites. I still have the tracking script included on some of them, but they will be eventually removed.
Instead of focusing on following user numbers or wasting my time on thinking about things like where I could get more people to come and visit the sites, I rather focus solely on content. Of course I’ll be doing minimal advertisement on stuff like this blog on Mastodon, but that I now consider more of helping out others to find valuable stuff instead of having traffic for traffic’s sake.
Doing that would of course be possible even with analytics, but I think this kind of concious choice gives more freedom to my brains. I will no longer need to waste any time thinking about analytics related stuff.
Instead of me seeing from statistics that you have visited my site, why not let me know elsewhere? I’m on Mastodon, maybe you should be too?
@MerriNet@mastodon.social