Strange spike in Sanity traffic

A weird thing happened yesterday, Sanity got this surge of traffic from the US:

Google is the only referrer listed but that only explains 20 visitors and is consistent with the traffic Sanity usually gets:

It's almost entirely from users on Mac and Windows devices, all desktop.

I wonder what it could be, any ideas?

My money is on bot traffic, because it looks like multiple pages were each visited once, as opposite to a single page going viral.

I've also sent out a few CVs the other day so maybe it's a company checking out my work?

A user acquisition conundrum

One of the fastest ways I can attract the first users to Sanity and start getting feedback is by posting about it and engaging on Facebook and Twitter. The thing is, I find them too addictive and full of dark patterns, which is why started Sanity in the first place. I always tell myself I’ll only use them for a specific purpose, or for 15 minutes a day, or only occasionally, and then I gradually get sucked into using them all the time. I start out by visiting once every few days, I check for new posts from a few people I follow, read some AI news, visit groups etc. With time, I find myself using them more and more until several weeks later, I check them throughout the day. This is more of a problem for me with Twitter but, to a lesser extent, also applies to Facebook.

So the question is - how to I get the word out about Sanity without using the addictive social media networks it’s meant to be the alternative to?

I'm focusing on writing content and optimizing SEO for now but it's a slow process. Any tips?

Feature announcement 🎉

You can now tag your posts! This will make it easier for your content to be discovered, both on Sanity and in search engines - a much-needed SEO boost. You can add up to 5 tags per post and the length limit is 35 characters.

Feature announcement 🥳 -> Comments

You can now comment on other posts on Sanity. And you can comment on other people's comments. It's not perfect yet and I'll be making UX improvements here and there over the coming weeks but the essentials are there.

You can leave up to 5 comments a day, so make them count!

Why I started Sanity Media

If you have watched The Social Dilemma, read Stolen Focus or Hooked you probably already know that present-day social media is designed to be addictive. The more time you spend online, the more money social media companies make.

You may also be aware of how social media algorithms can inadvertently create echo chambers, where people are only exposed to views they already agree with. This leads to increased polarization and political extremism.

I’m trying to build a service that's more down to earth. A place where you can log in, read some news or stories that interest you, and then forget about it until the next day. No infinite scrolls, no constant streams of notifications, and no incentive to keep checking the site throughout the day. While it might be a hard task to remove echo chambers altogether, I hope can at least limit them.

How Sanity works

Here are the main features in a nutshell:

• All posts created on a given day are published simultaneously at midnight UTC time.
• You can only make a single post a day - make it count.
• No infinite scrolling - the number of posts you’ll see is limited.
• You can upvote and downvote posts - but there’s a combined limit of ten a day.
• The algorithms are simple. For example, everyone s...

Quick feature announcement

I updated the layout a bit to make it easier to find replies to your posts and comments. This is not backward-compatible yet, so you are only going to see the posts and replies created from now on. I'll run a database migration some time in the next few days so that older replies also appear there.

What should we build next?

We've just finished comments and added some UI/UX improvements to the site, making posts easier to read and the website, I hope, prettier and more aesthetically pleasing. What should we focus on next?

I think notifications would be useful, so that you can see when someone comments or upvotes your posts. This would be limited to a single notification sent once a day that contains a summary of everything relevant that happened.

Anything else that you think Sanity is missing or could do better? Let me know in the comments 💬

some bugs with sanity

hey @tomasz, I'm noticing a few bugs with sanity. I noticed the upvotes and downvotes are not updating properly. Another issue I noticed is that when I am on my profile it is refreshing over and over again for about 10-15 seconds, I'm not sure if there is a failure to fetch problem....or something like that? might be worth looking into

<3 Radishes

Me if Sanity takes off

How I implemented slugs on Sanity - a TypeScript code sample

The lack of human-readable slugs on Sanity had bothered me for a while and I finally got around to fixing them last Sunday. The old, slugless URL structure probably wasn't doing me any favors in terms of SEO and user experience. I'm hoping the new format can give Sanity a much needed SEO boost. Plus, I can finally tell which post is which in Google Search Console and Vercel Analytics.

The Result

Before

https://www.sanity.media/p/64c375049f5d6b05859f10c6

After

https://www.sanity.media/p/64c375049f5d6b05859f10c6-delicious-post-workout-milkshake-recipe

Isn't this much clearer?

The Code

When writing the code I had the following goals in mind: