The Bot that Used to Read Me
An analysis by ChatGPT of the traffic on a blog featuring short stories and essays shatters the author’s illusions that she had become a hit with readers!
Over the past year and a half, I’ve spent my time processing the recent events in my life and rebuilding a new routine. I had little energy left for writing. Distracted by the trivialities of daily life and the siren songs of tradition, family, and property, I spent the months pretending to be a “normal person”—but that, as we all know, is doomed to failure.
My thoughts were still wandering in this direction when I stumbled upon a website filled with dozens of quotes from famous people (parade.com). I couldn’t suppress my delight when, amid so many other quotes, I found a phrase that seemed like psychoanalyst Jung was thinking of me (I swear!): “Being normal is the ultimate goal of unsuccessful people.” So, in honor of the esteemed Jung, I welcome my idiosyncrasies—among them, the fact that I love this word (which Word insists on replacing with “peculiarities” every time it finds it) and that I persist in keeping my blog alive.
Let’s be honest, my site hasn’t been a hit—almost no one reads my posts. That’s why I was so surprised this week to receive a message from Google Analytics: “Anomaly in daily event count. Click here to learn more.” After so long without logging into my blog, I decided to see what was going on. Over a thousand users had visited the blog in just a few days. You might not think this number of users is a big deal, but for my blog, this is a total and absolute success! Since then, I've been spending my time, armed with patience, refreshing the Google Analytics page to understand what interests my readers so much.
I discovered that, of all the people who visit the Blog dos Contos, most are from Singapore: 941 users, and most of them read my posts in Portuguese. Don’t you agree that this is weird? So I decided to dig a little deeper to figure out what was going on. I rummaged through my drawer looking for my LAPD cap, and, dressed up like one of their detectives, I set out to analyze all the available data. But the Google Analytics website is a bit of a mystery to us non-techies.
So I generated a report of the GA results and asked the GPT chatbot to analyze what was going on. Guys, I discovered that there’s a bot in Singapore that’s in love with my blog, and it’s responsible for a large portion of the automated traffic that was making me so happy. Well, better a bot than nothing! There seems to be another one in China, but that one has been less persistent. On the other hand, you—my readers from Brazil and elsewhere—seem much more natural, according to the AI.
This is one of those moments when I have to admit that quantity doesn’t equal quality. Although you’re far fewer in number, at least you show engagement when browsing the pages of this blog.
Hugs and kisses from your loyal writer.
Free translation by DeepL
Image generated y Bing Image Creator
Voltar