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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google is, obviously, very well aware of this target market, and tries to feed back into this loop as well. It's not without reason you get weekly summaries and more into your inbox by default. The reality, of course, is that it's serving them while hooking you, much like social media notifications driving engagement etc.

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Analytics can absolutely be useful for your personal blog / website. Imagine you're an academic on the postdoctoral fellow / tenure track job market and you want to both numbers and see locations of where your hits are coming from, google analytics can help. For universities the ISP entry is often "X university" which makes things even clear than the broad Geo category of which city the hit comes from. This can be very informative in terms of what leads are likely to come up.

What is the created value from that data extraction, though? That you know that the uni you applied to looked at your website? That's nice, but again, simply a way to reinforce your ego as far as I see — you get insurance that you're important enough to get through the first filter. But what actionable data does this interaction give you?

The academic job market can be unforgiving, and for those who also have industry leads/offers it can be helpful to know whether there may be future offers from academic institutions when deciding whether to commit elsewhere. Even without industry offers, it isn't like all academic job offers come in at the same time and you may be second pick at your preferred institution so it could take some time for a possible offer to come through. If you're still getting website hits from a place it's a fair bet you're still under consideration and you maybe don't want to commit elsewhere.

It's not really about an ego boost, and in any case, egos can take a pretty major bruising during the very anxious weeks.

> For universities the ISP entry is often "X university"

Actually Google killed that report earlier this year. It's kind of a big deal, a lot of companies were using ISP dimension to distinguish external vs employee traffic.

Yes, but there are hacks to get that back: I have been using https://ipmeta.io/ with success.

With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish. You could look at your server logs, of course, but analytics is easier to set up and gives you higher quality data than something like AWStats. Since Google lets you opt out of sharing your data with them I don't see much argument against using it.

How does embedded script provide better data? You mean if the page is delivered from network cache you still get analytics or something else?

By filtering out bots and giving you the number of visits rather than just pageviews, and also giving you data on things like screen resolution and time on page that can only be retrieved in javascript.

Or you can have comments or some social platform for interacting with users, which is more rewarding, direct, and useful for future direction or content suggestions.

But also requires things like moderation, especially if your topic of choice is remotely controversial. It also gives you individual data points rather than an overall picture, skewing towards people with strong opinions.

> With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish.

No, and trying to make your content more appealing based on analytics is often a great way to tend towards SEO optimized blogspam.

Yeah, I removed GA from my websites years ago, when I realized that I didn't look at GA output pretty much at all for many years prior. I also started being more careful about whom I give control over my domain/websites.

0 value for my personal websites. All the value for Google.

Let's be honest, many things in life (especially quantitatively measured) are done to feed the ego. There's no need single out website views.

For personal projects, what about basic usage data from something server-side like nginx logs?

No JS, no tracking, just basic analytics. Even if it's only a personal blog, knowing what people care about is helpful

If anyone has recommendations for something self-hosted like this, I'm in the market :)

Do you mean GoAccess?

oh! This looks great, thank you!

> "The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period."

Analytics are for optimizing your business and presentation, for finding out how big your audience is, how it responds to new content or features, etc. And for users it's not a loss of privacy if the data is anonymized.

Even for your personal blog, if you treat it as a tool for reaching an audience, then analytics are useful for growing that audience. When you put effort into writing articles, you want to see some results, after all it's an investment. And even if it's a hobby, seeing the size of your audience can serve as motivation. Even if it's a hobby, as long as you publish it online, you want others to read it, so it isn't a hobby that you can do in isolation without feedback.

In fact analytics can be a legitimate interest under GDPR. Usage of Google Analytics might be in a gray area due to it being a third-party and it's debatable if they are GDPR compliant, but usage of analytics in general is perfectly legit without explicit consent, as long as the data is anonymized.

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