why I created my own website in a social media world

the shrinking internet

The Internet continues shrinking more and more every year as a handful of Big Tech controlled websites and social media platforms have been endlessly devouring the Internet like a hungry, merciless black hole. Ten years ago, I was able to find the answer just about any question my mind could think of on the rainbow of information that was Google. A few keystrokes and one button click away, and a whole cornucopia of personal blogs and obscure forum posts would appear. Not only could I find answers, but be endlessly entertained for hours at a time. In the current year, when Googling, I have to scroll through pages of irrelevant news articles and AI slop-filled fake blogs, and if I’m lucky if I’ll find a halfway relevant 10-year-old Reddit post that kind of answers my question.

In an era where only a handful of websites and social media platforms monopolize our attention online, why would even anyone consider creating their own personal website? Creating a website is not only more difficult and costly compared to posting on a website like Twitter or Instagram, but also almost guarantees that your content will have comparatively limited traffic in the current Internet landscape.

social media algorithms control us

Even though posting on social media will get you more views compared to a website, you become a slave to social media algorithms. These algorithms silently yet pervasively control our online experience as both content consumers and online creators. If you want to have any sort of visibility on these platforms, you have to cater to stupid trends you, and probably your viewers, don’t enjoy or care about, and you have to become a human content machine, pumping out posts daily, if not multiple times a day depending on the platform, only hoping you get picked up by the algorithm gods and shared by others.

Social media algos promote slop and low effort content such as AI generated content, plagiarism and copying, and controversial rage bait because it gets them engagement and profit, rewarding lazy and dumb people and penalizing creative and hard-working people that actually put effort into their work. This is very frustrating for people who actually put effort into their posts, either getting burnt out and quitting or posting more frequently but lower quality content. Social media success is exclusively based in number of views a user gets, and underperformers get their posts buried under a whole ocean of content.

my website is my space that I control

I’m tired of robots controlling my online experience, as both a viewer and creator. I keep on getting served up the same old tired and irrelevant crap over and over again on YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit. Google hardly functions as a search engine anymore. Every year the Internet is increasingly becoming more and more corporate, with authentic creators being promoted less, and more corporations and fake influencers being promoted instead. The Internet used to be a green, fertile ground of creativity and freedom, but in the past several years, those fertile grounds have shriveled into a toxic wasteland of inauthenticity and trash content that wastes your time and actively makes you stupider.

Instead of choosing to be slave to such algorithms and posting garbage in hopes for attention like I regrettably have in the past, I would rather post work that I care about and that I can take pride in. I can’t win at someone else’s game when the rules are rigged against me, so I would rather play my own game. I started my own website so I can post whatever I like without having to adhere to arbitrary and toxic algorithms. Having my own space online is not only something I take pride in, but also great because I get to express myself without boundaries while retaining unlimited control and ownership, which can’t be said of social media. I can post my artwork and blog posts without fear of being pushed down and drowned out by ruthless algorithms.

I put off creating my website for a few years because I thought it would be really difficult and expensive to create a website from scratch. I don’t know how to use WordPress or how to code. I tried to “learn to code” in the past (basic HTML/CSS), but I found it difficult and have since forgot most of what I learned. I think many people put off creating their own personal webpage because, like me, because they lack tech skills and don’t have a lot of money to spend on hobbies. However, I discovered that I don’t really need coding skills to build a competent and basic personal website, Hostinger’s website builder has suited my needs just fine, and is decently affordable as well. In the future, when I learn more tech skills, I might decide to upgrade to more a flexible solution, but what I have is working for me for now.

To me, few dollars a month in hosting for an exclusive personal online space is worth it, but some people on tighter budgets may not be able to afford it. Fortunately, some website builders like Wix, offer free plans with limited features. While not as flexible as a paid service, these can also be excellent options for users with a limited budget and tech knowledge.

personal websites are making a comeback?

Personal websites aren’t very fashionable in the current year, with most casual online users preferring to post on social media. I’m not very proud to admit it, but I waste most of my online time on sites like YouTube and Reddit. I can count on my hands how many small and mid-sized sites that I have recently visited. However, I believe that personal sites and blogs are coming back into fashion after years of being basically dead. Neocities, a free, retro-style, HTML-based webbuilidng platform, modeled after Geocities, is gaining popularity online as a personal website platform for hobbyists and enthusiasts. I also am getting recommended videos on YouTube of other people who have decided to start personal websites for reasons similar to what I described earlier in this blog post. I predict that personal sites will make a big comeback in the next 10 years as social media continues to become more of the toxic wasteland of slop and users seek out more interesting content.

As for now, I’m just hanging in here with the current dead state of the Internet.