I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn't measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic - the one that lives at pluralistic.net - has *no* metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don't know who visits the site. I don't know how many people visit the site. I don't know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I *can't* know any of that.

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I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn't measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic - the one that lives at pluralistic.net - has *no* metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don't know who visits the site. I don't know how many people visit the site. I don't know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I *can't* know any of that.

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The other versions of Pluralistic are less ascetic, but only because there's no way for me to turn off *some* metrics on those channels. The Mailman service that delivers the (tracker-free) email version of Pluralistic necessarily has a system for telling me how many subscribers I have, but I have *never* looked at that number, and have no intention of doing so. I have turned off notifications when someone signs up for the list, or resigns from it.

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The commercial, surveillance-heavy channels for Pluralistic - Tumblr, Twitter - have a lot of metrics, but again, I don't consult them. Medium and Mastodon have some metrics, and again, I just pretend they don't exist.

What *do* I pay attention to? The qualitative impacts of my writing. Comments. Replies. Emails. Other bloggers who discuss it, or discussions on Metafilter, Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News.

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That stuff matters to me a *lot* because I write for two reasons, which are, in order: to work out my own thinking, and; to influence other peoples' thinking.

Writing is a cognitive prosthesis for me. Working things out on the page helps me work things out in my life. And, of course, working things out on the page helps me work *more* things out on the page. Writing begets writing:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the…

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Honestly, that is sufficient. Not in the sense that writing, without being read, would make me happy or fulfilled. Being read and being part of a community and a conversation matters *a lot* to me. But the *very act* of writing is so important to me that even if no one read me, I would still write.

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This is a thing that writers aren't supposed to admit. As I wrote on this blog's fourth anniversary, the most laughably false statement about writing ever uttered is Samuel Johnson's notorious "No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money":

pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/for…

Making art is not an "economically rational" activity. Neither is attempting to persuade other people to your point of view.

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These activities are not merely *intrinsically satisfying*, they are also *necessary*, at least for many of us. The long, stupid fight about copyright that started in the Napster era has rarely acknowledged this, nor has it grappled with the implications of it. On the one hand, you have copyright maximalists who say totally absurd things like, "If you don't pay for art, no one will make art, and art will disappear."

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This is one of those radioactively false statements whose falsity is so glaring that it can be seen from orbit.

But on the other hand, you know who knows this fact *very* well? The corporations that pay creative workers. Movie studios, record labels, publishers, games studios: they all know that they are in possession of a workforce that *has* to make art, and will continue to do so, paycheck or not, until someone pokes their eyes out or breaks their fingers.

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People make art because it *matters* to them, and this trait makes workers terribly exploitable. As Fobazi Ettarh writes in her seminal paper on "vocational awe," workers who care about their jobs are at a huge disadvantage in labor markets. Teachers, librarians, nurses, and yes, *artists*, are all motivated by a sense of mission that often trumps their own self-interest and well-being and their bosses know it:

inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.or…

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