The case against worrying about your posts' analytics

I've had several conversations recently wherein my interlocutor has said that they tried writing online, got very few readers on their posts, and gave up (or, at least, feel discouraged about it). I think it's usually a mistake to worry about low readership on a post: As Patrick McKenzie has said repeatedly,1 much of the public, professional value of having written something is totally independent of its analytics. Simply being able to provably say you've thought about something before has a lot of value (e.g., in job applications). It's good to write, and most of the reasons for this (e.g., its forcing you to clarify your thoughts) are independent of the number of readers a piece has. (I would say more, but you've probably seen many arguments to this effect.) Even if your goal is influence, maximizing the number of readers is usually not the best way to get it. Saying something that is useful and intelligible in a niche is not just better but more influential than getting a lot of…