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authorBradley Taunt <bt@btxx.org>2024-06-06 08:05:12 -0400
committerBradley Taunt <bt@btxx.org>2024-06-06 08:05:12 -0400
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+ <title>What Happened to Self-Hosted Blogs?</title>
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+<h1>What Happened to Self-Hosted Blogs?</h1>
+<p>2018-10-18</p>
+<p>I remember a time on the internet<sup>1</sup> when everyone and their grandmother was running a personal blog. And I mean <em>personal</em> - not hosted on some side platform or a tacked-on addition to the rest of their website.</p>
+<p>Nowadays companies and individuals alike use platforms like Medium to host and promote all of their articles, essays and case studies. I understand the draw, and can even list out the positives:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>A large community already exists under the Medium brand</li>
+<li>It's easy to promote your own work and follow others</li>
+<li>The platform is fairly easy to setup and implement</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Unfortunately this has had a pretty severe impact on the blogging community as a whole - no one controls their own blogs anymore. I remember when finding a new blog was an interesting and fun experience:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>how did they decide to layout the page design?</li>
+<li>what typefaces have they decided to use?</li>
+<li>what back-end are they using?</li>
+<li>how does it look and feel on mobile?</li>
+</ul>
+<p>These custom self-hosted blogs inspired other developers and designers to create their own blogs or tweak current ones. In a way it was a small factor in pushing what we could do on the web further and further, as designers engaged in friendly competition trying to one-up each others' creations.</p>
+<p>I also believe this inspired people to write better content instead of opting for clickbait garbage in order to get "featured" or boosted promotion on the main blogging platform. But I don't even think that's the worst to come of this mass-migration to a singular blogging platform.</p>
+<p><strong>All<sup>2</sup> blogs look identical now.</strong> I'm not sure if that was Medium's intention, but either way I personally think it's horrible. The individual personality of most design and development blogs has been completely stripped away.</p>
+<p>Maybe I'm just a salty designer with a narrow-minded, pessimistic view on where our blogging communities seem to be heading - or maybe I just have higher standards.</p>
+<h2>Refs</h2>
+<p><small><sup>1</sup> <i>the design world of the internet</i><br/></small>
+<small><sup>2</sup> <i>by "All" I mean the majority</i></small></p>
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