I don’t know if you’ll engage more and I don’t care either way. I post repair instructions for a 16 year old car and recipes for my own reference. You are on a personal website.
I'm not demanding you take it off, I'm just making a conversation. I'm curious about the difference between "being hooked" and "time killing" from your perspective.
Right now, it seems that the difference is "whether or not the creator cares about the amount of user interaction". Which is fine, makes sense (since most toxic of forms of "engagement tools" are driven by metrics user interaction) but kinda hand-wavy - anyone can pretend to "not care" and keep doing it.
It just means that it doesn’t support a metric. It’s just there because I wanted to build something fun. I agree that it’s a bad experience, but I wasn’t exposed to it in so long that I forgot it was there.
Whatever thing we're talking about, be it online media or TV shows or an activity or whatever, there's a thin line between "fun" and "addictive" - in order for anything to be "addictive" it must also be "fun", or otherwise nobody would get addicted to it. Even more - the more "fun" a thing is, the more "addictive" it gets.
In online media, engagement tricks have got a bad reputation (at least with HN-visiting crowd) because of the companies who pour huge budgets into "engagement research", A/B testing, dark patterns, and all the other stuff we hate.
However, discarding all fun things because they might be addictive would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So it is important to draw some kind of line between "fun" and "addictive".
Right now, the absence of user engagement data collection seems to be a good rule of thumb. So in conclusion, your widget is okay.
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I apologize if my question has offended. I did not mean to imply your personal work is "bad" in any way.
No need to apologise. It was delightfully ironic to have achievements there, regardless of intention.
In the end, you have to ask yourself who it benefits, and at whose expense. Intent matters a lot. In this case, there's no case for growth hacking. It would be different if I hosted this post on a professional website.
I run a content website, and I constantly need to remind my business partners that I answer to my readers, not to them. If you perceive the internet as a giant conversion funnel, users become a lot more like cattle: a commodity whose well-being is only considered in support of profit. The incentives are all geared towards squeezing users.
