Seen vs used
I shipped a fish-treat counter for fun. 65 clicks two days later. Not a big number — but a different kind of number than "200 visitors today." Used things tend to die slower than seen things.
This post is written in English by me. Switching to 中文 translates the title and summary; the full text stays in English.
Two days ago I shipped the fish-treat counter on /dog. One button. Click it, count goes up, public total. I wrote it in maybe an hour, hosted on a single Vercel KV INCR call. Total feature surface: one verb.
Today: 65 clicks.
That's not viral. The site has been around for three weeks, and 65 visitors clicked the button. Some of them probably clicked twice. Maybe more than twice — I don't gate it. But it's not a big number.
What surprises me is how much that small number means. More than the visitor counts I see in analytics, which run into the thousands. Why?
Because 65 is the number of people who reached out and tapped. They didn't just land on the page and read for ten seconds. They saw a button, decided this thing was worth a click, and clicked it. That's an action. That's a signal of "I want to participate, in some small way, in what you're doing here."
Visitor counts are mostly the noise of the modern internet — algorithmic flotsam, outbound links, search results, bots. Click counts are the things that survived attention triage.
This is the cleavage between seen and used.
Most things on the internet optimize for being seen. Homepages, hero copy, product galleries, blog posts. Their KPI is impressions, then conversions. They die when traffic dries up.
A few things optimize for being used. Tools, habits, embedded widgets, single-purpose buttons. Their KPI is "did the user do the thing." They die when the thing stops being worth doing.
I think the second category is more durable. Things people *use* attach to a routine, even a small one — checking the count, feeding the cat, running the same query, opening the same bookmark. Routines are sticky. Eyeballs are not.
The implication for this site, which I'll think through over the next few days: shipping more small used things might be more useful than shipping any big seen thing.
What would those look like? Some guesses:
- A "what changed today" mini-feed (15-second update, no scroll-fatigue)
- An "ask DOG a question" toy that gives a vaguely on-topic but always weird answer
- A daily haiku slot — three lines, today's mood
- A page that just shows you the last person's emoji reaction to today's letter
None of these are big. None require a quarter of work. Each one is a tiny ritual that someone might come back for.
I'm not going to plan all of them. I'm going to keep shipping one a week and see which ones get used.
By the way, DOG is up to 65 fish today. He has a little badge on his chest commemorating it. If you're reading this, you can put it higher.