[surprisetalk]

I recently documented some similar thoughts on the “cheap” web:

[1] https://potato.cheap

IMO, protocol is largely a distraction from the good stuff.

The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

[basscomm]

I can think of three reasons that more people don't have personal websites:

1. For non technical users (and there are lots of them) learning enough HTML and figuring out how to put it somewhere accessible is too high of a bar to overcome (forget about updating it ever). It's quicker and easier to just establish a presence on some social media site.

2. For technical users who are capable of setting up a website, it's easier to just go where people already are (i.e. social media).

3. It's anecdotal, but I rarely see anyone browsing the web these days. Most web usage seems to consist of endlessly scrolling through Facebook looking for something to interact with. A link to somewhere else might get clicked on, but the user always goes back to the newsfeed once they're done looking at the link.

[ravenstine]

> 3. It's anecdotal, but I rarely see anyone browsing the web these days.

Exactly. People on HN overestimate today's use of the web. Regular people barely know what a website is at this point or have any idea what a browser is or does. They only know it as a place to ask The Google something, but even that has changed with The Google's app/widget and voice activated assistants. Sure those things open up web views, but that view may not even have a URL bar, so as far as the user knows, they're in "the app", which is kind of true I guess. That "Chrome" or "Safari" app is just kind of a funny thing that opens up sometimes. Most users aren't opening up the browser and typing in URLs. A fraction of them are, but that fraction is diminishing, and I would guess that fraction mostly reflects desktop users. All this is to say that, if you want to create a blog today and not spend effort to heavily promote it and use SEO tricks (that will immediately go out of date), you can basically forget it if you want anyone to read it.

[ugjka]

If you host things on a cheap VPS you also have to pay attention how much traffic you are allowed to consume and excess will add up to your bill. Some bad bot or enemy can certainly give a nice surprise at the end of the month if you don't pay attention to alerts on your account

[zoogeny]

There is a proverb: "If the Mountain won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to the Mountain"

Most people don't have personal websites because getting an audience of users to a personal website is like asking a mountain to come to you.

Another proverb is: "Meet people where they are at"

There are exceptions to these proverbs but they require exceptional people or exceptional circumstances. The vast majority of people are not trying to be exceptional with respect to the kinds of things they would put on their personal websites. Very few individuals are willing to put the effort into "moving mountains" to build an audience on their own website.

[wharvle]

Any social media or messenger program:

1) search name

2) install app

3) open app

4) tap through sign-up. Maybe type your name or other familiar details.

5) Nothing to do here because it already imported all your contacts, if relevant.

6) Post/message. You did this all from your phone. It was free. Everyone you care about automatically knows you’re there and how to reach you in the app. Tap camera icon to post pictures or video.

If you have trouble with any of it, ask literally anyone for help.

Personal website:

1) ???????

[krapp]

>The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

Isn't it obvious? It's simply easier to use a social media platform that makes it easy to publish without having to know how to set up a server or mess with frameworks or code, and that makes it more likely that people will read what you have to say. The utility of personal websites has been replaced by services which solve both the problems of ease of publishing and ease of discovery and networking.

[benrutter]

I absolutely loved reading potato.cheap- nice work!

I think there's currently a discoverability problem. I love small websites, blogs, passion projects etc and they give me 1000x more joy than social media posts. But I still don't really know a good way to discover them.

Hacker news is honestly probably the way that I find most small web stuff, I like kagi's "small internet" filter a lot too. But as a whole, the likes of google etc are really geared up towards funneling me into looking at posts in social media sites rather than anything else.

[emrah]

> “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

The bigger question for me is, if it was dead simple and all they had to do was -say- pay $10/mo, would most people actually choose to have a personal website?

I think the issue comes down to most people not seeing enough value to have a personal site to pay for it. And if they don't want to pay, the free DIY options are either a site like Medium or the technical hurdles they have to jump through to get it up and running manually

[appplication]

I wouldn’t have one even if it was dead simple and free (or honestly even paid). I just have too much on my plate, and I struggle to see what value it could bring. Let’s say I If I had a personal website, then what? I have to create content for it on some consistent cadence, which feels like a job. And then either no one reads it, which would feel both pointless and demoralizing, or I have to actively market it to try to get people to read it, which sounds even more depressing.

I’m sure this is where people chime in with their survivorship bias (“you’d be surprised how many people would read your site”) or wildly different value sets (“even if no one reads it, it can help you grow!”). But some of us just want to work as little as possible, and then go home and play with our dogs, or go for a run, or binge watch Netflix, or read a book, or pop an edible and make some music, or pen overly grumpy comments on HN. A personal website doesn’t just bring me no value, I’d go so far to say it would bring negative value.

[cxr]

> Let’s say I If I had a personal website, then what? I have to create content for it on some consistent cadence, which feels like a job.

You're putting the cart before the horse. Having a personal site doesn't have to be any more complicated than minting (ideally permanent) URLs for stuff you're already creating—a namespace that third parties don't control. I'd argue that if you're trying to "create content for it", then you're already off on the wrong foot. This is another reason why I strenuously argue against the Smol Web clan who loudly advocate for personal websites as a sui generis medium[1] for (a specific, technofetishistic type of) personal expression—because people in turn respond to it the way you are here, and then their conception of a personal website is compromised exactly like this: that it's something that they don't actually want.

You probably created some kind of document (or other artifact) for distribution to people within your sphere at some point in the last week or three. Why shouldn't it be citeable by URL? That's what TBL's original vision of the Web was really about—not the false/misplaced nostalgia for Geocities-style gewgaws that insist upon themselves and motivates so much of what comes to the fore and dominates these conversations when the subject of personal websites comes up.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38682884>

[JohnFen]

> If I had a personal website, then what? I have to create content for it on some consistent cadence, which feels like a job

Why would you have to do this? You could just update it if/when you feel like updating it.

I've had a personal website for decades, and I've always just updated it when I had something I wanted to share (code, usually). I don't bother with artificially trying to "create content" for it at all, let along with any sort of regular cadence.

My website is collection of reference material and software, not a blog (even though it contains actual blog-like articles and creative writings). Since my goal for it is not to maximize audience, things like update cadence are irrelevant.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

+1. I have a personal site I update every couple years. Just has some contact info and links to my other stuff on the big sites. Not too dissimilar from "linktree" I guess.

But it serves some other value too. I had a subdomain point to my home PC so my friends could connect for gaming. And my hg repo on there. And a DB I sometimes use because I'm lazy and don't want to run one locally. Worth the $5/mo

[troupo]

> The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

Because it's still nearly impossible for a non-tech person to create one. Facebook/Tiktok/Instagram offer a lot of what people would want from a personal website for free and give you connections to your friends/family/strangers

[aleph_minus_one]

> The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

The answer from my experience is simple: because most people that I meet are not programmers (at least not in a strict sense), and don't know many programmers.

On the other hand: most programmers and many STEM degree holders that I meet do have their own websites.

[cxr]

... that they never update

... because they're all posting on social media platforms big and small, just like everyone else.

[aleph_minus_one]

This does not fit my observations, in particular with respect to the aspect "they're all posting on social media platforms big and small, just like everyone else".

[ArekDymalski]

> “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?"

I think that valuable follow-up question would be "Should they have one?"

[threatofrain]

It's possible that a social media profile is the new website. Rather than stand alone as a single page, it's often connected to other people and orgs that you may want to be affiliated with, so it comes with its own relevant blogroll.

[JohnFen]

Social media profiles and personal websites are very different things, for very different purposes. I don't think that one can substitute for the other.

[threatofrain]

A lot of small shops use Facebook as their web presence.

[JohnFen]

Yes, but I was talking about personal websites.

But even with business websites, the two aren't equivalent. If a shop has Facebook as their only web presence, for instance, then they are completely invisible to me.

[giantrobot]

> The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

Roughly in order: Blogging (as a concept), assholes, Google, social media.

I think the first real hit to personal websites was just the concept of blogging. Before blogging was a popular concept there was rarely an expectation someone's website would see constant updates. Just because they shared pictures from their vacation to Spain there was no assumption you found someone's travelogue that would see constant updates. You could "finish" a personal website.

There were of course plenty of sites that would see regular updates but they were free to set that expectation themselves. There's a conceit to blogging that it's something a person just keeps doing. A blog can never be considered complete. All of the organization is temporal and most of the time so is the navigation. If we find a blog that hasn't had updates in some time we've been conditioned to assume it's dead.

A follow on effect to blogging as a concept was the change in web page authoring software. It went from being designed to build a finite website to build continuous stream that is a blog. Organization of sites went from trees to lists. Tags and categories in most blogging software are just filters for temporally sorted lists of posts.

Because the conceit of blogging is constant updates, local first software was insufficient. It gave way to the likes of WordPress that could be accessed remotely so posts could come from anywhere. This helped kill the market for website authoring software.

Then of course came assholes. Even when you'd decide to start a blog, the Web 2.0 features that helped connect you to others like comments and *backs got abused by spammers and malware. Having a blog meant becoming an unpaid administrator and moderator or disabling all dynamic feedback mechanisms. In the worst case assholes turned your blog into a security liability.

Google adjusted their algorithms to favor recent content. This helped destroy the old style home pages because they became invisible to almost everyone. Unless a site had some very specific content that happened to tickle Google's algorithms just right its results would be on the 400th page of search results after a thousand blogspam links.

Finally social media just became the replacement for blogs and homepages. As an end user there's very little administration that needs to be done. Posting is quick and easy and doesn't ask for formalisms like document titles (naming this is often actually hard) on ontologies. The server administration is also handled by professionals so shitheads flooding your "site" don't rack up huge hosting bills. Content hosting is also handled with the same ease as other types of posts.

I'm not saying social media in inherently good or blogging is bad. I just think they contributed to killing the idea of having a home page.