In my last post, I said I wasn't sure if the lack of analytics on HEY World was a good or bad thing. I thought I remembered Brent posting something about this a while back, so I looked it up. Here's what he had to say in 2018:
I don’t have any analytics on this blog. I don’t know how many visitors it gets, how many RSS subscribers it has, or which posts are more popular than other posts. I like not knowing.
And then,
I should write exactly what I want to, when I want to, with no care whatsoever for popularity. (I want to be read by smart people like you, but I don’t want to try to maximize the number of readers.)
I think I feel the same way. It's appealing to know that anything I write got ready by anyone, but I'm not sure that's the point. I know the chances of any blog of mine ever becoming very popular is fairly low. Feedpress tells me I've hovered in in the mid to high hundreds of subscribers since forever (used to be high, now it's mid).
Writing is a way of thinking out loud. It's a way of clarifying what you believe and why you believe it. I don't need anything to validate the success of that.
For now, I'm just going to keep writing whatever I feel like wherever I feel like and not worry about who's reading it. If someone does, that would be great, and I'd love to hear from them. I don't need to know if that's one of my dozen or ten thousand readers.