Intuitively, I'm mostly optimizing for having readers come back to the blog. With that said, I'm making no money off it (just today I paid $80 to remove ads from Putanumonit) and I'm trying to keep readers by being interesting and educational and not by being clickbaity or controversial.

Regarding pictures, there this piece of advice by Scott (number 2) to break walls of text with pictures although one does notice that Scott doesn't follow that advice himself. I think I'll stick with that, I don't think the pictures are that distracting.

Some people like links and some people hate them, I think that people who are familiar with my blog just learn to ignore most of them. I can see how many links are clicked per view of my posts, it's not a lot. With that said, probably at least 20% of my links are useless and distracting. I'll do my best to rein the excessive linking in :)