Personal Websites Are Dead (Or Are They?)

Earlier in my career, every single person on my team had a personal website. At lunch, we’d talk about how we built them, diving into servers, Fail2Ban setups, zip bombs, and the weird little quirks we each added. It was fun, it was ours, and it felt like building a tiny home on the web.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is completely different. One coworker has a website perpetually “under construction,” and the others shrug and say they have nothing to say online. When I mention a blog post I wrote years ago that’s relevant to the conversation, I feel like a charlatan trying to sell snake oil.

So what happened to personal websites? A few things.

The Death of RSS and Discovery

Personal websites are independent by design. That’s the magic of them. But to keep up with updates, you’re left with two options: you either check the site manually or subscribe to an RSS feed.

RSS was once the perfect tool for this. You could follow a list of personal blogs, aggregated in a reader, and never miss an update. But RSS faded into obscurity. Popular readers like Google Reader were shut down, and most people didn’t bother finding alternatives. Outside of niche technical blogs, RSS is effectively dead.

So without RSS, how do people find personal websites? They don’t.

Google Giveth, Google Taketh Away

Google used to be the lifeblood of personal websites. Back in the 2010s, searching for almost anything would land you on some random person’s blog, offering the exact insight you needed. It was beautiful.

But as with all good things, spammers saw an opportunity. SEO specialists gamed the system with content farms and low-quality clickbait. Google responded by updating its algorithms to fight the noise. Unfortunately, in their quest to clean up search results, they buried a lot of personal websites alongside the spam.

Now, searching on Google rarely leads you to an individual’s blog.

To make matters worse, Google’s “enriched snippets” and AI-generated answers extract information directly from personal websites. You get the answer you were looking for right in the search results, so why click through? The original author never gets the credit or the traffic, and personal websites grow quieter.

The Web of People Feels “Untrustworthy”

Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that a site without corporate branding must be unreliable. A personal blog with no recognizable logo feels... sketchy. Why trust some guy’s blog when you can trust big-name websites?

But here’s the irony: the internet is built on some guy’s blog. LLMs like ChatGPT? They’re trained on data from random people who volunteered their time, thoughts, and expertise. Much of the web’s collective knowledge—tutorials, reviews, ideas—originated as someone’s passion project.

Yet, a generation of internet users has grown up thinking that content begins and ends on social media. The messy, independent web feels foreign and uninviting.

Social Media Ate the Internet

We don’t need to dwell on the addictive nature of social media. It’s designed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. But beyond the algorithms, social media gives people something personal websites never could: an audience.

Your friends are already on social media. The likes, shares, and comments give you instant validation. Why spend time building a personal website when you can post to Instagram or Twitter and get immediate feedback? It’s easier, faster, and far more rewarding—at least in the short term.

Why Personal Websites Still Matter

Despite all of this, I still believe in the power of personal websites. There’s something special about carving out your own corner of the web. It’s a small act of defiance, a flex that says, I own this space.

Unlike social media accounts, a personal website is under your control. You can write what you want, design it how you want, and share it with anyone on the planet. You’re not at the mercy of shifting algorithms or platform rules. It’s yours.

Having a personal website may feel pointless in an age dominated by social media, but it’s a power you’ll only realize when it’s gone. The open web is a privilege—one worth remembering and reclaiming.

So go ahead. Build that site. Share your ideas. Be some guy with a blog. Because that’s how the internet was always meant to be.

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