Many of these kinds of retrospectives contain graphs of views over time or the most popular posts; but I’m not showing it to you because I can’t—I don’t keep any statistics whatsoever.

I don’t really care—and I don’t want to care—about how many readers I have or what posts are and aren’t popular. I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I were chasing views I would certainly not have continued to blog for as long as I have, and I’d have missed out on the many benefits I’ve gotten from the blog.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

I do thoroughly enjoy when people reach out and tell me they read the blog, but I don’t share things here for the social clout.

I share things on here because the act of curating thoughts through the writing process brings me so much joy and clarity.

I’ve been meaning to write something longer form on here for a while, but all my good long thoughts have been sent to Monkey Wrench.

But this post made me reflect on my own blogging journey. I started blogging in a LiveJournal at some point in the early 2000s. I bought my own domain and moved my thoughts over there in 2004. I blogged from a pseudonym starting in 2006 up through college. I bought this domain while sitting in a TV production class my senior year of college and started a fresh blog.

It’s been a while since I burned the stack to the ground and started fresh, but ever since I started building websites for a living, it stopped being fun to do it in my free time.

Like many people I’ve been dealing with the collapses of the various systems I relied on for information over the previous decades. After 17 of using Twitter daily and 24 years of using Google daily neither really works anymore. And particular with the collapse of the social spaces many of us grew up with, I feel called back to earlier forms of the Internet, like blogs, and in particular, starting a link blog.

One of us! One of us!

This isn’t a lengthy post, but I damn near quoted the whole thing because Kellan makes great points about the state of information sharing, the collapse of the Web 2.0 social infrastructure we all used for twenty years, and lamenting the fact he doesn’t really consume media from a wide variety of sources (me too, friend).

If you’re reading my link blog here, consider starting one of your own. Make it low effort for yourself, but just start one and stick to it for a month.

I think you’ll find your media consumption habits begin to trend toward higher quality sources of information/entertainment.

But I will share the Google Analytics graph below that I pulled tonight — mostly because it makes me happy and maybe it will inspire some of you to stick with it. Remember, the flatline you see early on in 2006 is basically what things looked like from 2004 until that point.

Inspiring post from MG Siegler. Be sure to check that graph out.

Wait, you guys don't think I'm lame, do you?