But where's the engagement?
Over a year ago I wrote the first version of the code for Popquizza. It’s a simple daily music quiz with ten multiple choice questions each day. It was my brother’s idea. He writes the questions and I used it as an excuse to learn Gleam for something useful.
Quite often, if I show it to someone involved in web development, they give me a small piece of advice. They tell me I should have a cookie warning. They remind me it’s a legal requirement. Except it isn’t. Because Popquizza doesn’t set any cookies. It does use local storage but purely for storing the results of your quiz. It doesn’t track you. We don’t do analytics other than occasionally checking the raw number of visitors. This is often followed by a question about how I track engagement. My answer, that I don’t, is met with visible confusion. Like, what’s the point then?
It reminds me of the Reddit page for Mastodon where people regularly come in complaining that they can’t get any traction with their posts. That they get so much more engagement on Instagram, X or even Bluesky. They argue Mastodon needs to add features to help people like them. Again, the idea you might not want to add those features seems to confuse people. I read a post on Mastodon yesterday which was trying to make the case that the Fediverse was actively hostile to people trying to make money from their work.
To be clear, I don’t think people selling things on Mastodon are doing anything wrong. I don’t mind artists promoting their work. I don’t mind people linking to shops, books, music, newsletters or whatever else. I don’t even particularly mind major brands having a presence, which is controversial in some quarters.
What unsettles me is not the disagreement. I disagree with people all the time. It’s the confusion.
What I object to is the idea that every space has to reshape itself around commercial expectations. That every site needs analytics. That every post needs reach. That every community needs growth tools. That every small thing on the web is somehow incomplete until it has been turned into a funnel.
Sometimes a quiz can just be a quiz. A post can just be a post. A website can just be a website.