Stats Are Not My Friend
Part of the motivation for me to start writing posts here under my own space is down to two things:
- I can have more control over what I post and how it looks
- I don’t have any analytics
Sure, it’s more complicated and time consuming to create, edit and publish new words here, and Medium.com gives me a really nice user experience to write in, but point #2 is the most pertinent.
I am addicted to stats.
For the same reason that I took myself off of Facebook, MySpace, Soundcloud, Last.fm and all the other reasonably “social” networks, I cannot help myself but check how many people have read/listened/visited since I last looked 15 minutes ago.
I will publish something somewhere and almost immediately log back in to see if anyone’s visited. And that takes up an awful amount of time during the day, not just the physically checking but the space in my brain thinking about how something I’ve done is performing out in the wilds.
I think this is a common problem with social media platforms in general - the idea that what you do is graded - if it doesn’t have xx amount of visits or yy number of likes then you failed. There are notorious issues with people who frequent social media sites suffering from the need to constantly up the stakes with each subsequent post, because anything that has a lower number of stats than the last was considered a failure. And nobody wants to be viewed as a failure.
So I’ve taken the decision with Medium.com that I’ve taken with all other services. It’s got to go.
And I’m already feeling better for it.
I’ll add things to this site when I think I have something valuable to say or demonstrate and there it ends! It’s the same whether one person, ten people or zero people read. The motivation has moved from me doing something for other people’s acceptance, to me doing something I enjoy.
Soon I’ll move over an article on the Coordinator pattern and how it took me to the brink of an existential crisis, but that’s for another day.