I always viewed comments as the true decider, for me personally. A view could be anything, but someone taking the time to leave a comment or reply to somebody else is a great motivator for further writing.

But I'm of the "a blog without comments is not a blog" folks.

It's 2023, just federate your blog and pull in comments from across the ActivityPub spectrum. If you're into low effort, just webmention.io it, else there are premade solutions for WordPress, 11ty, Jekyll, and many others.

Comments are so 2003 pre-Trackback/Pingback.

I don't have comment fields on my blog. Comments often feel low effort and noisy. Also no analytics.

Figure if someone wants to reach me there is email, and if someone wants a discussion, they can post the article here or on reddit or whatever...

Depends a lot on the niche. A lot of people are just readers in tech blogs, and only comment if you made a mistake. But if you have a personal blog, the most random opinion can get dozen of comments even with a fraction of the readers.

Different strokes for different folkes I guess.

I've been blogging for a decade and I never bothered with analytics of any kind.

Sure, it is a good feeling if you reach the frontpage of HN, but that's not why I blog. I do it for me, regardless if nobody reads it.

> Knowing that people read the stuff I write is the only motivation I have for writing at all. If all my posts are seen only by bots, then the hours I spend making them are pointless.

For me, it varies. If my aim is to make an impact around me, then the more traffic there is, the better. However, sometimes just clarifying my own thoughts is a good enough reason for writing. Anything beyond that is a positive side effect.

Interesting, I write just to have those ideas in the wild, not necessarily that anyone would actually read them. I will say that I have a private "blog" or journal as well as my public one. My private one is usually for day to day musings while if I find an interesting enough idea, I polish it up and "promote" it to the public blog on my website.

Same but i use self hosted umami

You can just use the logs of your webserver for that...

where you can't tell if they're all bots

Some (most?) of them announce they're bots with their user agent.

Could you describe how you set this up?

Not the above commenter but I used Coolify on Hetzner to self host Plausible and other services, works great.

https://Coolify.io

I think the point was you don't need client side analytics (i.e. the "putting analytics on a page" type). Your server logs are more than enough to get all the information you're talking about.

The first thing they say is "I parse the access log". So they are also checking how many people are visiting.

Bit of a clickbait title. Should be changed to "You don't need an off the shelf client-side analytics script".

I find goaccess the best solution for this if you host your website or web app on a vps.

No client side analytics, tracking, or cookies at all!

goaccess generates same/similar dashboards as plausible without having to host/manage any additional self hosted services