I'm way more radical, I just look at what I'm making.

It's kinda like if someone were to survey their audience before a concert on what they should play, that wouldn't lead to better art. Have you ever seen a youtuber talk about how they would prefer to make videos about X, but the audience wants Y, so they're half-assing this other thing instead? Not only does this not lead to improvement, I think the major improvement would be to remove all things produced in such a extrinsicially motivated way, and replace them with nothing.

> Your stuff will start to puff up. Your paragraphs will start to get rotund with all the things you could say if you really wanted, but you can only hint. That's bad. It's bad intellectually and I think it's bad morally. It means that you become.. your contract is no longer with your readers. What I try and do, and the reason I write in longhand and write in isolation, is to say "The only person I have a deal with is the person who might read this. And I'll give them my best, and I don't care what the editor thinks, the advertising department thinks, friends and colleagues think." You try and live, as it were, as if none of these people counted. "What's the best account I can give for customers of this." Most of Washington punditry is nothing of the kind, it's... private letters written to other pundits and appearing in public space.

-- Christopher Hitchens, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsvq4PYdt40&t=35m46s

Say what you would say even if the whole world was against it. I don't live by that all the time either, but I'd rather fall short of that motto than live up to something easy and pointless.

Sure, when I see a page has a lot of hits, and I look at it and think I was being a bit lazy and people who search for that deserve better, I work on it some. If someone told me that the site doesn't work in a certain browser, I would try to fix it if easily possible, and so on. Just like an artist wouldn't say "I don't care, I only care about my music" when the venue they're playing at has no roads leading to it, and no electricity. But that goes without saying, for me that's like a painter making sure their canvas is okay.

This idea that I need to know much more, stuff like which path on the site most people are taking... no. I'm all for other people doing it, as long as privacy basics are respected, but the idea that everybody needs this to make something of quality, that I absolutely protest.

Show me one great thing that was produced that way, by someone or a group just following what people want (which is not the same as people working together as thinking individuals), just one? I can probably easily find you lots that were produced against the violent resistance of contemporaries, or even discovered as treasures of humanity posthumously.

Going just by what is the most popular, I would have ended up a Harry Potter fan rather than an Hannah Arendt fan. I would be watching SNL, instead of missing Bill Hicks. I would probably still care about movies and games instead of reading books and listening to music of the 20th century and realizing just how little value and depth what we currently accept as state of the art even has. I can't even imagine what a wasteland my mind would be if I had followed the masses rather than my instincts at every turn.

The biggest sites we know that currenly optimize for people staying long on pages prove my point so much, I had to avoid that to even get any opportunity to rant. Google search results that get worse, or Youtube and Facebook which are infamous for promoting low-quality or outright toxic and deceptive things that increase engagement. Or Amazon with fake reviews, and so on. It's not working. Just like the idea of ranking comments by clicking buttons to improve the quality of discussions doesn't really work and is much more useful for abuse than use.

Last but not least, I'd rather see a website where I hate every aspect of it, but that was made by a real person with real thoughts in their head, than anything else. Play from your heart, not from your analytics package and what you think the numbers mean.