Deleted analytics from my site and shipped more in three months than the whole year before
Not a principled decision. I removed the script while debugging something, forgot to put it back, and noticed three weeks later that I had not thought about traffic once.
Before that I was checking daily. Post goes up, refresh, refresh, twelve people, feel bad, refresh. The number was always small because the site was small, and it was never going to be anything else at nine months old, but knowing that in the abstract does not help when the number is right there.
What actually changed is that I stopped optimising for the shape of the graph. I had been writing shorter posts on topics I thought would travel, and posting on Tuesdays, and none of it worked because none of it can work at that size. Without the graph I just wrote what I wanted to write, which is slower per post and I published four times as many of them.
I do still know roughly how it is doing, because people email.
@nine_posts_in · 2w ago · 2 replies
The bit that landed for me is writing what travels versus writing what you want. I have been doing the first thing for nine posts and I do not think a single one of them is good.
They are all "5 things" and comparisons because that is what I imagined would get picked up, and none of it got picked up, so I have nine mediocre posts and nothing to show anyone.
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@quit_twice · 2w ago
The cruel thing is that the strategy is not even wrong at scale. Those formats do travel. They just cannot travel from a site with no readers, because travelling requires somebody to see it first.
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