Interesting take you’ve found. To respond to it,
In a weird pursuit of digital minimalism, I find myself building and duct-taping additional components onto my site to replace whatever functions Yet Another Platform™ would provide me.
I’ve already cloned and implemented:
- Twitter/Bluesky
- Tumblr/DeviantArt
- Wordpress
- Status.Cafe (Yes! Not even SmallWeb services are exempt!)
- iMood
functionality into my site.
And I’m not done. Common Original Character platform ToyHouse is the next site whose functionality I wanna yoink and clone onto my personal site.
My reasons for doing so tend to be:
- Though I hypothetically get more “reach” on platforms, the quality of attention given is weak. People just wanna get their scroll on. They don’t wanna hear my thoughts or see my art unless it’s entertaining in an absolute vacuum of context, and those kinds of dopaminergic-without-any-context art/thoughts aren’t the kinds of art/thoughts I want to put into the world.
Scrollers definitely don’t want to give me any money either. (And I don’t blame 'em. Who wants to scroll to be sold to?) - Context Collapse: On my website, people get a full-context experience of myself as a netizen. On platforms, I’m For-You-Page’d or ReShared onto the feeds of people that do not have a contextual understanding of who I am, what I enjoy, or what I believe in. Unlike a visitor to my site, scrollers don’t want to see me, specifically. They just wanna see good content from whoever’s the best.
- Comparison Brainrot: I’unno. Too many people in one place with metricated engagement on the platform just leads to popularity-contest thought patterns for me. It also leads to me making art/thoughts that I believe will receive better metrics instead of what honestly excites and inspires me.
So while I traitorously agree with the article you found that normies and the greater culture won’t hop back onto personal site making anytime soon (normies hate friction and inconvenience, along with being new/inexperienced at things), I feel way better mentally on my website than on platforms, so I’m glad I dipped my toes back into WebWeaving to give it another shot.
Edit: I was shocked to see how many Medium claps the article got, but relieved to see the amount of "yeaaahhh, no"s it got in the Medium comments. Even for people who use platforms, it’s best to have a personal content archive that’s entirely in your control.