The staff of QuantumBones has been oppressed in more ways than one. The latest “improvement” to our working conditions was the Hit Counter, a newfangled internet widget-piglet that counts how many times people have clicked an individual article. Read on to find out how oppressed we were because of it – and how we got rid of it!
When I came to work one monday a couple of weeks ago (we do have an office unlike some piss-poor companies) I was surprised to see sneering faces all around me. People asked me how my articles had done lately, and I said I naturally had no idea since we have no feedback form on the site.
I went to my desk, fired up the computer, and to my horror found a text atop one of my articles: “0 Hits”. I swallowed a couple of times and decided to investigate further.
I looked up another of my articles. Zero hits again. I went through the lot of them – around ten articles in all – and realized not one of them had any hits. This meant people had not been reading anything I had written. A bit later, I was infuriated at seeing that one of the editorials had scored more than twenty hits, and that some other articles had scored more than five, too — while I stood at zero. I only had one course left.
I logged out and started clicking on my own articles. The next morning, the hit counter was gone. No more oppression!
Is there anything to be learned from this? I don’t know, but I’m against hit counters.