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by basscomm
903 days ago
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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. |
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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you want to create a blog today and not spend effort to heavily promote it and use SEO tricks (that will immediately go out of date), you can basically forget it if you want anyone to read it.