Poor Man's Web

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

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.

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.

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.