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Comment by nannal | Hacker News Reader

> And not just the bad ones, like Google Analytics. Even Fathom and Plausible analytics struggle with logging activity on adblocked browsers.

I believe that's as they're trying to live in what amounts to a toxic wasteland. Users like us are done with the whole concept and as such I assume if CSS analytics becomes popular, then attempts will be made to bypass that too.

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Why?

I manually unblocked Piwik/Matomo, Plausible and and Fathom from ublock. I don't see any harm in what and how these track. And they do give the people behind the site valuable information "to improve the service".

e.g. Plausible collects less information on me than the common nginx or Apache logs do. For me, as blogger, it's important to see when a post gets on HN, is linked from somewhere and what kinds of content are valued and which are ignored. So that I can blog about stuff you actually want to read and spread it through channels so that you are actually aware of it.

To your point, server logs have the info.

If every web client stopped the tracking, you, as blogger, could go back to just getting analytics on server logs (real analytics, using maths).

Arguably state of the art in that approach to user/session/visits tracking 20 years ago beats today's semi-adblocked disaster. By good use of path aliases aka routes, and canonical URLs, you can even do campaign measurement without messing up SEO (see Amazon.com URLs).

You're just saying a smaller-scale version of "as a publisher it's important for me to collect data on my audience to optimize my advertising revenue." The adtech companies take the shit for being the visible 10% but publishers are consistently the ones pressuring for more collection.

I'm a website 'publisher' for a non-profit that has zero advertising on our site. Our entire purpose for collecting analytics is to make the site work better for our users. Really. Folks like us may not be in the majority but it's worth keeping in mind that "analytics = ad revenue optimization" is over-generalizing.

I'm sure your stated 13 years of data is absolutely critical to optimize your page load times.

Of course analytics from 13 years ago doesn't help us optimize page load times. But it is extremely useful to notice that content that has gotten deep use steadily for a decade suddenly doesn't. Then you know to take a closer look at the specific content. Perhaps you see that the external resource that it depended on went offline and so you can fix it. Or perhaps you realize that you need to reprioritize navigation features on the site so that folks can better find the stuff they are digging for which should no longer include that resource. We have users that engage over decades and content use patterns that play out over years (not months). And understanding those things informs changes we make to our site that make it better for users. Perhaps this is outside your world of experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. And we also gather data to help optimize page load times.....

Can you give some examples of changes that you made specifically to make the site work better for users, and how those were guided by analytics? I usually just do user interviews because building analytics feels like summoning a compliance nightmare for little actual impact.

We generally combine what we learn from interviews/usability testing with what we can learn from analytics. Analytics often highlights use patterns that are of a 'we can definitely see that users are doing 'x' but we don't understand why' genre. Then we can craft testing/interviews that help us understand the why. So that's analytics helping us target our interviews/user testing. It also works the other way. User testing indicates users will more often get to where they need to be with design a versus design b. But user testing is always contrived: users are in an "I'm being tested mode" not a "I'm actually using the internet for my own purposes" mode. So it's hard to be sure they'll act the same way in vivo. With analytics you can look for users making the specific move your testing indicated they would. If they do great. But if not you know your user testing missed something or was otherwise off base.

I've decided to either stop working or keep working on some things based on the fact that I did or didn't get any traffic for it. I've become aware some pages were linked on Hacker News, Lobsters, or other sites, and reading the discussion I've been able to improve some things in the article.

And also just knowing some people read what you write is nice. There is nothing wrong with having some validation (as long as you don't obsess over it) and it's a basic human need.

This is just for a blog; for a product knowing "how many people actually use this?" is useful. I suspect that for some things the number is literally 0, but it can be hard to know for sure.

User interviews are great, but it's time-consuming to do well and especially for small teams this is not always doable. It's also hard to catch things that are useful for just a small fraction of your users. i.e. "it's useful for 5%" means you need to do a lot of user interviews (and hope they don't forget to mention it!)

How horrifying that someone who does writing potentially as their income would seek to protect that revenue stream.

Services like Plausible give you the bare minimum to understand what is viewed most. If you have a website that you want people to visit then it’s a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in.

When you start “personalising” the experience based on some tracking that’s when it becomes a problem.

> a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in.

not really

it should be what you are competent and proficient at

people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't)

there are many proxies to know what they like if you want to plan what to publish and when and for how long, website visits are one of the less interesting.

a lot of websites such as this one get a lot of visits that drive no revenue at all.

OTOH there are websites who receive a small amount of visits, but make revenues based on the amount of people subscribing to the content (the textbook example is OF, people there can get from a handful of subscriber what others earn from hundreds of thousands of views on YT or the like)

so basically monitoring your revenues works better than constantly optimizing for views, in the latter case you are optimizing for the wrong thing

I know a lot of people who sell online that do not use analytics at all, except for coarse grained ones like number of subscriptions/number of items sold/how many email they receive about something they published or messages from social platforms etc.

that's been true in my experience through almost 30 years of interacting and helping publishing creative content online and offline (books, records, etc)

> people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't)

This isn’t true for all channels. The current state of search requires you to adapt your content to what people are looking for. Social channels are as you’ve said.

It doesn’t matter how you want to slice it. Understanding how many people are coming to your website, from where and what they’re looking at is valuable.

I agree the “end metric” is whatever actually drives the revenue. But number of people coming to a website can help tune that.

emails revived or messages on social media are just another analytic and filling that same need as knowing pages hits. and somehow these people are vega analytics junkies instead of mainlining page hits. your unconvincing in the argument for "analytics are not needed"

they are not collected without user consent or knowledge though.

you chose to send an email or to buy a product or a subscription, which is different from being tracked.

it's still a metric, but has an higher value.

it's people genuinely interested in what you offer.

Nothing's gonna block your webserver's access.log fed into an analytics service.

If anything, you're gonna get numbers that are inflated because it's a bit impossible to dismiss all of the bot traffic just by looking at user agents.

The bit of the web that feels to me like a toxic wasteland is all the adverts; the tracking is a much more subtle issue, where the damage is the long-term potential of having a digital twin that can be experimented on to find how best to manipulate me.

I'm not sure how many people actually fear that. Might get responses from "yes, and it's creepy" to "don't be daft that's just SciFi".

Makes me reminiscent of uMatrix which could block the loading of CSS too.

    ||somesite.example^$css

would work in ublock

I didn't know this. But with uMatrix you could default to all websites and then whitelist those you wanted it for. At least that's the way I used it and uBlock advanced user features.

Is uMatrix not in vogue any more? It's still my go to tool!

It's not actively developed anymore so I've been using ublocks advanced options which are good but not as good as uMatrix was.

This approach is no harder to block than the JavaScript approaches: you’re just blocking requests to certain URL patterns.

That approach would work until analytics gets mixed in with actual styles and then you're trying to use a website without CSS.

You’re blocking the image, not the CSS. Here’s a rule to catch it at present:

  ||bearblog.dev/hit/

This is the shortest it can be written with certainty of no false positives, but you can do things like making the URL pattern more specific (e.g. /hit/*/) or adding the image option (append $image) or just removing the ||bearblog.dev domain filter if it spread to other domains as well (there probably aren’t enough false positives to worry about).

I find it also worth noting that all of these techniques are pretty easily circumventable by technical means, by blending content and tracking/ads/whatever. In case of all-out war, content blockers will lose. It’s just that no one has seen fit to escalate that far (and in some cases there are legal limitations, potentially on both sides of the fight).

> In case of all-out war, content blockers will lose. It’s just that no one has seen fit to escalate that far (and in some cases there are legal limitations, potentially on both sides of the fight).

The Chrome Manifest v3 and Web Environment Integrity proposals are arguably some of the clearest steps in that direction, a long term strategy being slow-played to limit pushback.

Plausible still works if you reverse-proxy the script and the event url through your own /randompath.

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