A year of building for the small web

Twelve months ago I did something that felt, at the time, faintly ridiculous: I deleted the analytics. All of it. The dashboards, the funnels, the little real-time counter I'd check the way other people check the weather. I wanted to know what would happen to my writing if I couldn't measure whether anyone was reading it.

The short answer is that everything got quieter. The longer answer is what this post is about — because quieter turned out to mean weirder, more honest, and, against every instinct I'd built over a decade of internet, more alive.

First, everything went silent

For about three weeks I felt the phantom-limb version of a habit — reaching for a number that was no longer there. I'd finish a post and feel the pull to go check how it 'did.' There was no how-it-did anymore. There was only whether I liked it, which is a much harder and much better question.

Writing for a number is a slow way to forget what you sound like. It took a year of silence to hear it again.

What replaced the numbers was mail. Actual replies, from actual people, arriving days or weeks after I'd forgotten a post existed. A retired teacher in Ohio. A teenager learning to code in Manila. Slower, rarer, and worth a hundred vanity charts.

What I'd tell you to try

• Turn off one number this week. Just one. Notice what you start writing instead.
• Put a real reply-to address at the bottom of things. Let people write back.
• Publish the draft that scares you a little. That's usually the one.

The whole experiment convinced me of a thing I now believe stubbornly: the small web is not nostalgia. It's a working way to make things you're not ashamed of. If you keep a site — even a neglected one — that's already the movement. You're in it.

If you want to argue with any of this, please do — the whole reply-to thing still stands. I read every one.