You don't care

Quite a few of us maintain our own websites and publish our thoughts. We play in hard mode:

• We need to build our website before even publishing our first post.
• We don’t benefit from the network effect of bigger platforms to get eyeballs on our writing.
• LLMs aggressively scrape the web and can serve our thoughts or expertise to their users without them visiting our websites.

And on top of that, you don’t care.

And I don’t expect you to care. Like the rest of us, you are flooded with information constantly. You’re fed so many words that you read the equivalent of whole books every day. How entitled would I be to expect you to care about my words when you have to filter through every story you’re bombarded with.

So why do we keep the small web alive?

I can’t speak for others, but I know why I maintain my website and why I publish my thoughts there. By increasing order of importance:

1. I keep my web development skills reasonably up to date.
2. I can shape my website to adapt to my content, and not the other way around.
3. I have freedom of tone and vocabulary. I don’t have to censor words like “suicide” or “sex”.
4. I write long form posts that help me shape my thoughts, develop ideas, and receive feedback from my peers and readers.

If you can afford to, I can only encourage you to write and publish your thoughts on your own platform, as long as you don’t expect others to care in return.