Who are you people?

2025-05-03

According to neocities, this website gets like 250 visits a day. This can't possibly be right, so I'm assuming that must be mostly bots? The question of course is how many of these visitors are bots and crawlers, versus real people. Now I run into an issue with having chosen to host this site on neocities. I made that choice a long time ago, when I first made the site. It's limiting, in particular, I wish I could host mp3 files on site. The point being, if I were hosting the site myself, I'd set up anubis to try and stop these bots. I mean, I don't really care that much if my site is getting crawled by bots, not like I'm the one paying for bandwidth. My site is so lightweight even mass crawling is probably not a huge deal. I actually kind of dislike all the telemetry stuff that neocities has. The fact that people can like and follow me on neocities, I mean I guess it's kind of neat, if it helps people see my stuff then I can't exactly complain. But it does kind of feel a little "impure", in that it's introducing "social" media like interaction vectors to my space which is supposed to be how I get away from exactly that. It's not like I care about getting likes or followers on neocities, I don't really pay attention to it. Neocities only shows me site visits and hits from the past 7 days, so I can't gather detailed stats. Apparently my site has 279,831 views at time of writing. That seems suspiciously high. I assume when writing these posts that they will be read by about five people, and I'm going to continue assuming that the vast majority of these views are from bots, and that my site continues to be small and unpopular.

There is a part of me that is curious to see the truth, perhaps a "social" media hangup that actually hopes for views and growth and popularity and reach. I come here specifically to quiet that part of my brain. I'm aware that I'm not immune to propaganda. Intellectually, I believe that there are all sorts of problems with a growth mindset, and I believe that the internet is better as a place for direct social relations rather than as a quantitative popularity contest. At the same time, emotionally I still catch myself both hoping and dreading the idea of being popular. The idea of being looked up to or something like that. It also makes me embarrassed. Of course, I don't write things here that I don't believe, at least in the moment I wrote them, but I'm pretty far from a scholar, and I have to say I'm a little embarrassed by the idea that someone more informed than me might read them and think me an idiot. Well, that's not really a huge concern but whatever. The point I'm trying to make here, is that out of curiosity I'm tempted to include some call to action here, to say something like "if you're a real person, email me and let me know how you found this place, or like the post with your neocities account" or something along those lines. But actually thinking about it, while I'm curious, I think the less I know the better. I want this to be a message in a bottle. As much as it would be neat to know, I also can't see how discovering that this site is unexpectedly popular or unexpectedly unpopular would do me any good. So I think I'd rather remain in the dark.