Dear reader,
I started my blog because I enjoy writing, and the thought of having my own space to share my thoughts felt exciting. I also saw blogging as an alternative to social media platforms, where the hostile discussion culture, combined with other negative attributes, had left me wanting to find a space where I could still interact with people, but on my own terms. At the beginning of my blogging journey, I could mainly focus on writing. Mataroa, my blog provider at the time has made it their thing to help you with that by limiting analytics and customization options. This year, I moved to Pagecord since I wanted more comprehensive analytics and the ability to customize my blog. Overall, the experience has been great.
However, all the included social features began affecting me. And not in a good way. I was evaluating my posts based on the upvote count, and the number of daily readers told me how meaningful my writing is. When Pagecord introduced an option to hide analytics and other metrics, I jumped on board straight away. This is a post where I will discuss all of this and answer the question if removing all social features removed my anxiety regarding blogging.
About those analytics
As cool as it is to see how many people visit my blog and where in the world they are located, I became too occupied with these stats, and they had a negative effect on the way I view my blog. If there weren’t many visitors during a day, I would feel disappointed and start questioning if my writing is even that good.
Hiding the analytics has allowed me to just focus on my writing and enjoy it more instead of worrying about how many readers I have. After all, the number of readers that my small and niche blog gets shouldn’t matter much since I’m not making any money out of it. The direct feedback that I have received from people should be the only feedback that matters. After experimenting with this for the last few weeks, I’m quite certain I want things to remain this way.
Peter Bryant has also written about this topic, and the following part really resonated with me:
We’re hobbyist bloggers, not professional publishers. I like having a blog because I enjoy writing, and I want to escape the incentive structures behind social media platforms. I should actively avoid knowing how many people are reading my posts!
No more upvotes
The like button has been another thing I have removed, since it also affected the way I see my posts. It also reminded me of social media, where people can get obsessed with the number of likes their posts are getting and start evaluating their posts by this meter. This happened to me when I had these turned on. Spending a lot of time writing a post and getting zero upvotes felt discouraging and made me think that maybe there was something wrong with the post since I usually got at least a few likes.
It’s important to understand that the upvote button can’t never give an accurate estimation of how many people have liked a post. All it can ever tell is that a number of people have pressed a button. That’s it. Even the motivation for doing this isn’t clear. For example, one Bear blogger recently argued how we should view post likes as merely other people saying hi.
Forget the argument that it's about collecting likes. Nonsense. That was for social media 'influencers' desperate for attention and validation. On a web page it's a friendly gesture to say Hello
I would love to agree, but then why does Bear Blog make the like count public by default? Sounds a lot like social media to me. As much as I admire what Bear is doing, this is a feature I cannot stand.
I have also read many great blog posts, but without pressing the like button. Maybe there was a small part I disagreed with the author, or perhaps I wanted to protest against the whole button, as ridiculous as that sounds.
Many people are also reading through RSS, and even if they have liked my post, I will never know unless they tell me. But this kind of direct feedback wins post upvotes each time. Even if you want to challenge me, my inbox is always open.
The upvote count doesn’t always even tell if a post is good. Recently, a weird AI post rose to the top of the Bear Blog’s discovery page with hundreds of upvotes, seemingly because it was also posted on Hacker News. I also remember reading a highly voted post (again on Bear Blog), where the first paragraph had me already rolling my eyes since the person was making poor arguments about a topic I know a lot about. While the rest of the post was pretty good, it was yet another demonstration that you can’t trust upvotes even on a blogging platform like Bear that seems to be filled with great people. On blogging platforms, where upvotes are publicly visible by default, they play an even more important role, and can make people trust the content too much just because of the number of likes.
Blogrolls and discovery
I have my blog listed on many blogrolls that display all the new blog posts that the included blogs publish. No algorithm, no public upvotes. Just a steady stream of new posts that could pique someone’s interest. Blogrolls are great since they allow me to make my blog more discoverable without pushing my content in anyone’s face, and people who browse these sites are looking for new blogs or interesting posts to read, so it’s a win-win situation.
Recently, a new blogroll called Bubbles has gained traction in the blogging space, and most people have eagerly welcomed it and even highlighted their Bubbles upvote count on their personal sites. But for me, the platform felt like another thing to get obsessed with, and exposing my posts to public voting and discussion reminded me of social media. After it became a habit for me to check how well, or let’s be honest, how poorly my posts were doing there, I asked to have my blog removed from the site.
It’s still a great place to discover new blogs, but it just wasn’t the right place for me, at least for now. A lot of what Luke Martell has written here regarding Bear’s discovery list also applies to how I view Bubbles.
Closing thoughts
There are many ways to view this topic, and people’s experiences will differ. That’s why it’s important that we all respect each other’s decisions, even if you may not agree or think that it’s dumb to care so much about analytics. What matters is that we all find the approach that works for us. Taking these steps has allowed me to find a more calming blogging experience that I want to maintain from now on. I will write posts, and some people will read them. Some may even want to contact me. Shouldn’t this be all that matters?
Of course, it would be great if I could just ignore the negatives in analytics and post upvotes, and have enough trust in my writing, so I didn’t need to worry if people are showing up or not. But I’m not there yet, and maybe I never will. But stopping writing because of analytics anxiety would just be stupid, and I think you would agree. 🌔