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Let's make the web personal again

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Re: Let's make the web personal again

#81

Post by abeppu »

nunez wrote: post #5

If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace. My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this. Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or dir…

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

But personal sites don't need to be about web culture per se. The best ones were often about some other interest or perspective that happened to be combined in a person who was also tech-capable enough to share it online. And 15 years ago, if you had some passion, whether that was french cooking or birding or carpentry or something else, a personal website or blog was a pretty good way to share it. But now, you'd get a better audience through sharing that same perspective on social media.

I think the thing that's hard to get on a personal site is the immediate feedback that social media provides. The issue as I see it isn't so much that people only want to consume (that was always the case) but that people creating content are in a numbers-driven competition for eyeballs. Creating and publishing stuff online has been mashed together with status/follower-seeking behaviors, and your own personal site likely doesn't provide the same dopamine hit. Even if you're posting about your latest sewing project, putting it on social media can get you some likes and comments, but putting it on your personal site can feel like talking to an empty room.

And aside from the minor technical challenges of creating your own site, I think people rarely talk about the legal or administrative burdens of creating your own whitelabel place to host your content. Do you want to track how people use your site with some analytics tool? What TOS and cookie opt-outs do you need to provide in that case? Oh, you'd like to have a comments section under your posts? What are the GDPR implications of that? You're publishing online so it's not for "purely personal or household purposes" after-all. What if after your personal project gains an audience, you decide to sell some merch -- then because you're 'a business', what has to change for you to meet CCPA obligations? Whereas if you have just a bunch of social media profiles, you don't control and are not responsible for handling that user data.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#83

Post by nickthegreek »

treesknees wrote: post #56
nickthegreek wrote: post #15

Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.

I've had excellent results with pointing people to Google Sites. The editor and available features work really well for just a static site for someone non-technical. You can set it up on a free Google account and point a custom domain name to it [1] very easily. [1] https://support.google.com/sites/answer/9068867?hl=en

> https://support.google.com/sites/answer/9068867?hl=en

I maintain several google sites for my job, dont know why I didn't think of this route!

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#84

Post by 2b3a51 »

nickthegreek wrote: post #15

Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.

Over here in the UK companies like mythic-beasts would provide what you are asking about.

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting

You would add your CMS of choice (Wordpress running on the shared server or rsync up a local set of static files)

I'm assuming companies like this must be ten a penny in USA.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#85

Post by deltarholamda »

dfxm12 wrote: post #64
btbuildem wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People only care about consuming" -- it might seem that way to a lazy beholder. The entire digital landscape is engineered for consumption -- of ads, and the products they advertise. Yet individuals continue to CREATE content on which these parasites piggy-back. We are creatives by nature. The consumption is just one facet; had we built "the internet" out of tools and spaces more suitable for creativity, perhaps thi…

Interesting that you left off the qualifier "many", changing the context of OP's statement. I'll say, talking about "many" in the pool of all Internet users is pretty much meaningless (you can count "many" among any sub-population from a starting population so large), but OP is clearly implying that there are a great deal more consumers than creators out there . Stats support this, like 97% of tweets coming from only…

Exactly this. The sort of person who kept a personal Web site in the 90s and 00s is the sort of person who keeps a personal journal. Back then it was a fairly significant outlay of cash (domain name, hosting, etc.) Right around the time these things got significantly cheaper, it also ran up against the competition from siloed services (Twitter, Facebook).

It takes a certain type of person to keep up a personal site that is largely disconnected from a wider audience. The people posting memes, quips and barbs on social media aren't "creative" per se. They're engaging in the dopamine drip machine of social media.

Technical people are more used to this kind of thing, as they are almost forced to delegate their cognitive load onto some sort of medium that they can access so they don't have to remember how to set up load balancing in Docker or whatever.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#86

Post by ripsawridge »

I've had my site (https://www.mountainwerks.org) going since 1998, and for sure, I am myself the primary user. But over time, my gosh, there is a lot of content. It started as a log of trips to the mountains. I found religion through trying to pay homage to nature by remembering each "piece" of it. Because an attitude of thankfulness gradually became nature (thanks to going out so danged much).

I wouldn't know any other way to live. Old ideas are often gold.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#87

Post by amendegree »

nirimda wrote: post #35
nunez wrote: post #5

If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace. My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this. Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or dir…

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to get an audience - because you know there's other people there. If you have your own personal website, you have no natural audience. If you're lucky, Google mig…

Back when there was a lot of push back against a certain CEO redditors didn't like, that CEO noted that the ratio of commenters:viewers was like 1:1000. I personally know many people who created reddit accounts only because they were forced to by the app, but still have never posted a comment or even upvoted something (intentionally).

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#88

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Eupraxias wrote: post #65
superkuh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 For now. It won't be too many years before the mega-corp browsers not only drop early HTTP support but they drop HTTP/1.1 too. They'll do this in the name of "security". And then all that Chrome based browsers will support will be their very own invented and open-washed QUIC in the form of HTTP/3 and hosting a personal website visitable by a random person will not be pos…

Why is this getting downvoted? Can someone who is downvoting, or anyone, provide a reason? Is the comment patently incorrect?

Is a proof-less conspiracy statement supposed to be enjoyed and loved? It's more conspiratorial emotion than fact. These "I miss the old internet" posts come up every week or so on HN and are largely all the same conspiracies with slightly different wording and no more proof than before.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#89

Post by indymike »

nunez wrote: post #5

If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace. My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this. Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or dir…

> SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace.

What is remarkable is that despite trying to wall the garden, the personal website is still a thing.

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

Maybe the era of shifting print, TV and radio to the internet is reaching saturation. You can view the internet as a content distribution system, but that ignores the key difference between internet and broadcast media: it is a two-way communication media.

> My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice.

There were plenty of choices. The big innovation was the social network that allowed people to connect with friends, family, and people with common interests. Now you could write something, take a picture, make a video, whatever, and share it with people who would start communicating with you and form communities around those interests.

> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

Most people now communicate via the internet about those non-computer-y interests.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#90

Post by lakomen »

nunez wrote: post #7
Affric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is. 99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.

thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their w…

Did AI write this?
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