After her WordPress site was consecutively hacked and scraped by bots, Winnie Lim writes about how running a personal website is not fun anymore:
It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience. Why should I take the time and effort — the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words — when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.
I get it.
What a beautiful way to describe the act of creating something for other people. Making something for others requires a belief in our shared humanity. I love that.
I don’t know if I agree that running a personal website isn’t fun anymore. I’d simply say: never bet against the blog.
To me, having your own website and blogging feels more vital than ever. A good personal website — one that doesn’t look and read like slop — is a differentiator now. In that sense alone, having a little website for yourself feels important.
But the real strong feeling I have probably stems from a youth spent playing in a metal band and hanging out in the hardcore and punk scenes a lot: screw the man, man. I don’t lose a lot of sleep over bots scraping my site. You can’t fight what’s coming (RIP Cormac McCarthy). Yet I look around and I see a lot of old-timers leaving the scene. Just the other day I saw a thread of developers on Mastodon talking about how they were changing careers entirely; some were becoming nurses, some were getting into the trades, and some were making plans to get out while the going is good.
Similarly, a lot of people have stopped blogging. My RSS feed is drier than ever. (I guess I’m implying that my RSS feed was wet at one point? Sounds gross. But you know what I mean).
I don’t think humans want to see less cool stuff than before. This is a generational sea change.
I grew up in a mob-run town (it was very safe for that reason; don’t poop where you eat and all that).
One of the things I learned about the mob is that they have a purge every decade or two to get rid of the bad blood. It’s The Godfather, basically. Assassinations, hits, all that stuff.
I learned the general pattern for recognizing mob warfare, so when my wife and I later lived in Toronto and there was a shooting at the same restaurant down the street from our condo twice in one week, I could say with 100% certainty that this was a good old-fashioned mafia purge.
It feels like the same thing is happening on the internet with a generation of designers and developers. They’re all really smart people, but they either feel too young, too old, or too risk-averse to deal with the industry changing anymore.
I’m not trying to imply that’s who Winnie is and what she’s thinking. I don’t know her. But I have seen this sentiment expressed many times in the past twelve months.
My point is this: if your peers all leave a scene, you can view that as a warning, or you can recognize that you have the entire market to yourself.
So it goes with blogging: if you have the stomach to scream into the void, this is a vital time to share your thoughts freely on the internet.
I think a lot of it has to do with motivation. If you write for other people, and it feels like those people have disappeared, why bother continuing?
But I write for me. I write to figure things out. I write to practice critical thinking and I share because I’m a nerd. I’m under no illusions of my own importance. Publishing is the exercise that takes this from a vanity journal to a creative practice — something that involves showing up and putting in the time to make something, even when it’s hard, even when nobody is listening, even when bots are the core audience. Because who cares? Bots won’t always be the core audience, nobody is listening until one day when a lot of people are listening, and it gets easier the more often you do it.
All that to say pull your pirate flag out of storage, be a rebel, screw the man, and blog like your life depended on it. I think it’s more vital than ever.