Putting the "Person" in "Personal Website" | Hacker News Reader

Putting the "Person" in "Personal Website"

blog.jim-nielsen.com

62 pointsTomte13 comments

Just yesterday, I walked by a soccer field with some young kids playing a game. They were using a mini-goal, parents were standing around, their gear didn't fit very well, etc. But they were having a blast.

And it occurred to me that this is what real sports looks like. Just playing a game, having fun.

In that moment, all the hyper-athleticism, hyper-competition, money, etc. of modern sports just seemed so ... absurd? Perverse?

Anyway, it just felt a bit parallel to this article. It seems like there's a lot of human experience that is better when it's not some ultra-refined extreme version of itself.

Exactly!

And why do we celebrate the fact that 3 human beings that are running 100m at full speed and coming perhaps 0.1s of each other at the end line should be hierarchized in gold / silver / bronze? This is stupid and anti-sports

Human beings capable of such feat are just equally as good as each other, there is no hierarchy

Why the arbitrary 0.1s? Why not 1s? Or 10s? Because that way I would run as fast as the the world record holder.

In its core, competitive sport is defined by the ability to differentiate the best from the next to best. It's obvious that as a species we value those who can perform with the highest marks, it's neither stupid nor anti-sports.

When we arrive at some values that are so low than just looking at which track they started from, which brand of shoes they wear, what was the weather condition, would completely change the result, then yes, it is stupid to maker a hierarchy which has no real meaning

I play in a pool league, and by far, the teams I look forward to playing are the ones that are getting mediocre results but really using the sport as a pretense to have a fun mates night out. You get the teams putting lots of effort into technique and matchplay as though it's the most important thing. Do you want to be the best arbitrary group of six players in the local town, or do you want to connect to other people in your community with a backdrop of light competition?

Love this. Maybe everything we do and enjoy doesn’t have to also become a skill and identity.

Absolutely agreed on this. We should all “embrace our mediocrity” and create things as we like — music, essays, art, etc.

It’s an innate human quality to be creative, so we should focus on that rather than external validation from like/upvote counts.

> The medium shapes the message.

Publishing content on a global public network that is regularly indexed and archived seems like quite an intimidating space to share anything too personal. Maybe the pattern of presenting ourselves through pseudonymous and artificial identities is one way in which the medium has shaped the message.

I've felt one massive problem with most social media is that they are single-threaded and globally public by default, so every interaction turns into a public performance. Compare that with a small web forum, where there was a small barrier to entry, but a larger barrier to virality. People recognise the regulars, and the mods are in conversation with the community, and you tended to get more human interactions between people.

This is a great point and a huge feature provided by major social media platforms. They have built-in access control that is consistent across profiles.

I haven't seen a compelling offering for providing this on a personal website, especially if you want to express different things to different people.

As the famous blogging platforms are getting older, I've seen a couple posts here about people celebrating their 15-year or 20-year blogging activity. In a sense, for those who have been comfortable with blogging platforms, this piece makes a lot of sense and also relates to these texts I've seen. Thanks for sharing!

> A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else

In this sense, would MySpace with its extensive customisation count more as a personal website than a social website?

I wonder if this is why SpaceHey is doing so well. A month ago enumer8 wrote here on HN:

> "It was partially the customisation aspect that drew me in at the beginning, having that much control over my profile... reminded me of what I loved about being online

> "Having a little corner where I can just go and blog/post bulletins about things I'm thinking about... feels really nice."

* https://spacehey.com

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41423275

Don't forget to put ads on that personal website. Monetize! -- written with sarcasm

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