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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

You've endorsed the article writer's lament as well. The decline of personal sites is worrisome and everyone getting silo'ed into megacorps is not a healthy alternative. Even if most social media users are okay with it, the same way that most humans are okay with increasing the use of fossil fuels or forest products. The average of humanity is unable to see beyond a short-range horizon, and in this case the tech community has failed to present attractive alternatives that might have helped slow the onslaught of corporate Internet takeover, even though stuff like Krita prove the community is capable, if only there was sufficient motivation and organisation. But somehow this area has languished.

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The web used to have parity between creation of content and consumption when desktop access was the way the world surfed the web. Since smartphones took over, the web has been about consumption of media, requiring most contribution to be through apps. What sadist would edit HTML on a phone?

I don't know if I agree... Ok, UI creation has gone down, but never the web had so much user created content. From tweets to videos and long texts it's easier to create content on mobile and in a much bigger volume than ever it was created.

"The medium is the message." The possible shapes of a river are determined by the underlying landscape.

And sometimes rivers over flow and change the landscape, what's your point? The medium and message interact together and have pros and cons to different methodologies. Is painting a bad art form because the canvas is too restrictive to convey a message?

Maybe of HTML but certainly not of content in general. People post Instagrams, TikToks, Tweets, Youtube videos, Unity Games, etc... I'd argue content creation is up, way up. It's possible just not content that personally interests you (or me)

>I'd argue content creation is up, way up

I think there's even an argument. During the heyday of the "Read/write Web"/Web 2.0 which was supposedly in part about the mainstreaming of content creation, the reality was that relatively few people had blogs etc. (and there were far fewer podcasts in the first wave than today).

Is there less long-form thoughtful writing and personal websites today? Possibly. Certainly it's a much smaller part of the overall mix. But there's more content (both quality and otherwise) than ever.

There are things like onuniverse, which has given interesting grid-like constraints to users to avoid html on phones

https://onuniverse.com/

Vines and later TikToks are examples of creative mediums which are almost exclusively made on phones

I think there's some rose colored glasses here about the "good ole days" where everyone had a personal site. In 1999 almost everyone's so called "personal site" was hosted by either Yahoo (Geocities) or Lycos (Angelfire/Tripod).

In fact most ISPs offered free web hosting and an email account, with optional domain naming, as part of their deal.

Geocities and Tripod were prominent but they were a long way from being the only option.

And the hosting usually allowed CGI and PHP and often included shopping carts and other ready-made services. So it was ridiculously easy and cheap to set up a small business if you wanted to - or just create some basic pages if you didn't.

Is there a decline in absolute numbers of personal sites? Or is there a relative increase in people posting stuff on non-personal sites? I suspect the latter as it’s easier than it’s ever been to have a personal site.

Easy for us. I can spin up a create react app, one of those minimalist CSS frameworks, netlify and I have a site in about 15 minutes.

But take the average joe that doesn't know about these tools, they don't know about netlify, CSS or HTML for that matter. For them it's a whole lot easier to create an account.

But it's still easier than it has ever been to create their own website. There are video tutorials with step by step instructions. People just don't want to. Which is okay, people are free to allocate their time to different interests.

You just repeated my point.

Look, if 25 years ago 100k people had personal website and today 3m people have personal website and also 3 billion have social media accounts, are we worse off than we were then? The personal website concept isn’t dying. It’s just that it’s no longer the only kind of web presence an individual can have and others are more popular.

Also, are you really looking out for the average Joe here? Really? You think that same average Joe that’s currently reposting a two year old meme on his Facebook suddenly will have something worthwhile to say if it’s hosted on his own domain? You think crazy aunt Sue will go from screaming about chem trails to engaging in polite discourse just because she got off Twitter and registered a domain? You think uncle Buddy will do anything but make the background, logo, and font of his site based on the confederate flag because he can host it on BuddyMerican.com instead of on Facebook?

I believe we should all have the ability to have a website of our own with as little control lost as possible. And I believe just like it’s a lot easier today than it was 25 years to have a personal website, that it will be even easier 25 years from now. But when people reminisce about the good old days what they like is essentially that it was hard to have a personal website so only the smart people could do it. That isn’t to say that only smart people had websites, but that websites were primarily run by smart people and that was because you couldn’t buy one, you had to build it yourself. And that meant that when you found a personal website that it was likely of high quality. Is that how you feel today when you discover a random abandoned mom blog about how hard it is to decide between different types of formula?

What Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, et al did was that they made it super easy for the average Joe to have a pseudo-personal website. It’s your moniker on their platform, you generate content, they host it and make money. And people wanted it by the billions. But at the end of the day do you really believe that all their content would be better if they simply moved from one kind of public platform to another?

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