Taking Stock

A domain renewal notice for Not So Common Thoughts landed in my inbox. It marked a year since I started posting here, so I took a moment to look at the numbers and reflect on the year behind them.

Over the year the blog drew 21,223 readers and 34,589 page views across forty-four posts. A few of those posts drew an outsized readership. An essay on AI and judgement caught the Hacker News front page and ran away with it for a weekend. The rest settle into a steady trickle, that essay still drawing a few a year later.

I started putting some thoughts on LinkedIn around the same time. Fifty-one posts there over the same window, 101,795 impressions in total. Same shape as the blog. A handful outran everything else (one on hiring designers, a couple on working with AI), then a long run of posts still pulling a thousand or two each before the tail thins out below that.

The blog sits on a domain I own; LinkedIn doesn’t, and a fair share of those impressions came from posts there pointing back to here. Keeping the center of gravity on my own domain is deliberate. It harks back to an earlier, more independent web, before writing funneled through a handful of platforms that own the audience and the terms. John Gruber, writing about Medium years ago, put it plainly: “There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.” I still subscribe to that.

The writing is a by-product. I get absorbed in something (a problem at work, an idea I can’t put down), and following it far enough usually leaves something worth writing down. The focus comes first; the post is what falls out of it.

What I genuinely enjoy is when one of these lands with someone. They read it, something connects, and they reach out. More than a few of these posts have turned into real conversations: new people, an exchange with a stranger circling the same idea. That back-and-forth is the part I’d miss if I stopped.