Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

10,000 Page Views Yesterday!

What explains yesterday's traffic surge? 

My average is 1200-1300 page views per diem. Recent posts are nothing to get excited about. It is not as if their quality is superior to what I regularly crank out.  Have I 'triggered' some woke 'influencer'? Pissed off a powerful pol? Is the NSA rifling through* my vast archives preliminary to my incarceration?  But surely I am way too obscure for it to be cost-effective to send me to the gulag.   

Is some AI monster grabbing my  content to regurgitate or repackage?

I solicit your hypotheses.  

___________

*'Riffling through' in British English.

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Bill Vallicella

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9 responses to “10,000 Page Views Yesterday!”

  1. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Bill,
    In your blog stats (I’m not sure how Typepad works) there may be something called “referrers” or “referring sites”, which might help you figure out what’s happening.

    Reply
  2. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    “Security through obscurity.”
    We may all be thankful.

    Reply
  3. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    Yes, it is called Recent Referrers. But while philosophy is long, time is short, too short for this old man to scroll through a thousand lines. As I like to say, “The clock is running and the time control is sudden death.”
    But being old and obscure, my hope is that I will escape incarceration. I’m no Boethius. But there is such a thing as civil courage.
    Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:
    “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”
    Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

    Reply
  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    That’s a good line, Joe. Will appropriate.
    The pursuit of fame is folly when you consider the sorts of people who confer it.
    It can also get you killed by a fool for no good reason as John Lennon could attest.

    Reply
  5. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    Fame? It is a pathetic thing !
    Here is Merton, writing in “Seven Storey Mountain.” After describing the obscurity of theTrappist monks, he says:
    “The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men ! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real !
    (page 330, 1948 edition)
    What a great book.
    — Catacomb Joe

    Reply
  6. Richard Avatar
    Richard

    Did anyone think that maybe Bill has a vast readership (if that’s a word) who enjoy this site on a daily basis.
    And perhaps too intimidated by Bill’s command of philosophical thought , grammar, syntax , to post their own thoughts. Yet truly enjoy the musings .
    Did it occur to anyone that maybe this cohort was interested in Bill’s take on the SOTU?
    I know I checked.
    Not everyone has the capacity to post , but we quietly enjoy the content.

    Reply
  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    Thank you for your kind words, Richard. But it was the spike that puzzled me. And just now at 9:55 AM local time, Sunday, I have for the day so 40,311 page views!
    So something I wrote ‘triggered’ somebody. I suspect it was something having to do with Ukraine and Russia either here or at Substack.

    Reply
  8. Miloš M. Avatar
    Miloš M.

    I haven’t read blog for a while (I follow Substack posts regularly). Peak of readership could be explained probably by current political themes.And there are a lot of them in United States these days.

    Reply
  9. BV Avatar
    BV

    You’re right, Milos. People generally do not get hot and bothered over abstruse questions in ontology and epistemology.

    Reply

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