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+---
+layout: post
+title: "What Happened to Self-Hosted Blogs?"
+date: 2018-10-18
+---
+
+
+I remember a time on the internet<sup>1</sup> when everyone and their grandmother was running a personal blog. And I mean *personal* - not hosted on some side platform or a tacked-on addition to the rest of their website.
+
+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:
+
+1. A large community already exists under the Medium brand
+2. It's easy to promote your own work and follow others
+3. The platform is fairly easy to setup and implement
+
+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:
+
+- how did they decide to layout the page design?
+- what typefaces have they decided to use?
+- what back-end are they using?
+- how does it look and feel on mobile?
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+**All<sup>2</sup> blogs look identical now.** 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.
+
+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.
+
+<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>