No Analytics
When I worked at Wikia, we had a lot of conversations about incentives. Mostly about user incentives but the same applies here to me. (I guess I’m the “user” here anyway. Maybe.) When you incentivize a behavior, people bend toward the incentive, not toward the intended behavior. So lots of unintended things pop up.*
I’m not sure what I’m trying to do here, but I do know that I don’t particularly care about most of the stuff Google Analytics is going to tell me, at least not now. On top of that, most of the data is going to be noise and I’m the type of person who will try to divine signal from that noise. I don’t want to “optimize” toward that. I just want to get my thoughts down somewhere. So, no analytics.
* The example of unintended consequences that we discussed at Wikia were edit counts on Wikipedia. Many hard-core Wikipedia editors would wear their edit counts as a badge of honor. (There’s even a scoreboard of sorts for this stuff.) That values quantity of quality and, when edit counts are used as a threshold for leadership (which happened on some smaller Wikia wikis), quality degrades, quickly, and the community can fall apart too.
Originally published on August 31, 2012