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The biggest problem with people making their own websites is: 1) It's more effort and time than most people are willing to deal with, when instead they can create an account on Bluesky in seconds, and immediately begin sharing their opinions. This means that the slant of opinions from people who make their own websites will inevitably skew more techy. 2) Most people don't view the content they are producing to need a website. It's great if you're writing short or long-form content or obsessed with a particular thing (like the three website examples listed in the article). But for the average Joe, a website feels unnecessary.

I feel like what's missing in this discussion is that as much as I hate Facebook and Twitter (X), they enabled people who otherwise would never have been able to participate in the global discussion to have immediate access to do so. There isn't a good way to parlay that ease of use and immediate connection into individual websites. If all of my friends made their own websites tomorrow, I wouldn't visit them all daily like I read their posts on Mastodon.

Maybe the solution is to accept that most people don't need to be posting their opinions out in the ether? Other than here, I rarely post online.

> 1) It's more effort and time than most people are willing to deal with, when instead they can create an account on Bluesky in seconds, and immediately begin sharing their opinions.

This is an interesting point because the apps and architecture behind Bluesky/Twitter/Reddit etc all have facilities for uploading, formatting and storing text, images, video - everything necessary for a website. So: why isn't there an equivalent mass-market "social website" platform that lets you create a website in seconds?

What stops that from happening - lack of demand? Are websites just not very useful for most people to have?

Communities. People want other people to talk about what you're talking about with you. You can add a comment section, but it requires mapping between commenters on your site and commenters on another guy's site in order to really have a comunity with repeated interactions between individuals. And of course if you're new it's hard to get traction on your own site without posting comments that say "here's my vaguely related article on my site". Now, you can imagine a meta-service that exposes websites by new users, ensures consistent usernames across all comment section on user websites, and surfaces interesting discussions in comment sections. And that's what social media is. I think tumblr matches that description most precisely
It's called Squarespace but the price is ridiculous
I think people are looking for attention. They want to be seen and heard. Posting on Facebook, Tiktok, X, etc does that (or at least they think so).
> “There isn't a good way to parlay that ease of use and immediate connection into individual websites.”

Seriously?

That’s what we’re mostly doing right here in HN. Having social discussion about links to long form (longer form) personal writing (ignoring the business marketing and Show links).

If you want to avoid toxic X/twitter, this is the way. Use social media to market your private work, and don’t participate in whatever the algorithm throws at you off topic. I’ve never really experienced toxicity on x/twitter this way.

Now ticktock is an evolution in a different direction. More like social YouTube.

There was an EDX course which really made this case. DALMOOC, Data, Analytics and Learning (University Arlington TX, 2014). The course was aimed at educators, and taught social media analysis and machine learning techniques for analyzing student participation and engagement when they followed the paradigm of using social media to link to their full project sites using blog platforms like Wordpress.

Hacker News (as much as I would like for it to be) is not and likely will never be the mainstream.

Even posting a link has friction, compared to the "share now" or retweet options.

I love the format and Hacker News in general, but you're kidding yourself if you think most people will pivot from X to HN and that it is a viable alternative for them.

?? I believe you're reacting to my reference of HN as the specific, and not example of what I'm referring to as the best use of social media--all social media.

> "Even posting a link has friction, compared to the 'share now'...".

Sheesh. I can only imagine what is your interest in personal expression--seems diabolical.

> Sheesh. I can only imagine what is your interest in personal expression--seems diabolical.

Think about the older people or not tech-heavy people in your life and try to imagine them building their own website from scratch or using a hosting platform, marketing it on various socials, doing what you're recommending. It's not impossible, but people go with the lowest friction option.

I personally go through times where I try to be active online, engage with people, and share my life experiences and knowledge, both on my website and on my few social accounts. I do this largely to build my personal "brand" so that when I move jobs, I can point to my website and all that it aggregates as a supplement to my resume.

However, I usually hit a point where I realize that most anonymous online communication ends up facilitating name calling and other negative behaviors, and I get tired of people accusing me and others of things, and then I drop off the Internet for a while.

I don't know what I stated about how the non-techy people in my life think ("share now" being easier than posting a link on HN) is diabolical.

Your recommendation of using social media as just a boost/plug for your website is great if the person has the wherewithal and interest to create a site in the first place. That's not how the non-techy and older people in my life think, and not how they ever will think without some substantial incentive and training.

> "...both on my website and on my few social accounts. I do this largely to build my personal "brand" so that when I move jobs, I can point to my website and all that it aggregates as a supplement to my resume."

Ok. I mistook your criticism as a strong belief about how people should/will/must use the internet in the future.

OP is describing the history of the internet before social networks. They focus on the people who were online, who made simple websites using HTML, and the sites are still visible today. You suggest "older people or not tech-heavy people" would not do this. I think the OP would disagree or simply say those who want to be on the web can do it, It's relatively easy, your ambitions can be simple and that simplicity is more authentic than just sharing links from your profile on a Social Network.

I wanted to add it's not an either/or proposition. Social Networks, pointed to your personal work, are very powerful way to be on the internet--and HN is an example of this.

It can become an either / or proposition with age.

At 80+, with 1-2h left to use outside self care, chores and naps independently, you go where you get social connections (if you can even sit in front of a computer without experiencing pain). Facebook lets you reconnect with extended relatives, friends from old blogging/web rings that shut down, kids and grand kids are on there... You can post a couple stories and/or share some photos in those 2 available hours, see comments on previous ones and see what happens in other people's lives, comment on their posts...

Compare that to hand coding (proudly still using front page), fixing inevitable bugs, figuring out over and over again how to use FileZilla and connect to your servers and publish the update ... Those 2h likely won't be enough to publish a single page, and you won't interact with anyone during that time. There's no time (nor interest) to learn a whole new system either that would make this easier in the long run, and why would you when there is an easier to use alternative that fulfills the need anyway?

And this is using examples from people i know that have an interest and some basic skills in web programming and overall comfortable with computers, which isn't that common i assume.

> I think the OP would disagree or simply say those who want to be on the web can do it, It's relatively easy, your ambitions can be simple and that simplicity is more authentic than just sharing links from your profile on a Social Network.

I think this may be the pivotal point here: Social media drove everyone online, even without those interests and that sense of authenticity. I kept getting hung up on the idea that those people who are there only because of the simplicity and ease of use would never pivot to the effort of making their own websites. But I see your point now.

It'll be interesting to see how the new wave of social media (Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky) fares over the next few years.

The idea that social Media is enabling constrained self expression is interesting - or that people who are illiterate in a literate world have limited self expression.
>After the election, users left the Elon Musk-owned platform in droves, unwilling to centralize the way they talk to people online around this one website.

>...

>Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends.

twitter emigre were fine with centralization of power, suppression of speech, and appeasement of advertisers just a few years ago, back when Ministry of Trust and Safety commissars were on-call 24x7 to suppress speech they didn't like and summarily unperson the offenders.