> I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook Pages or

> I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook Pages or cookie-cutter Squarespace designs, if they have their own website at all. Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site. The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS into Geocities? For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say, 1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page. Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and so on. Everything's just there. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.