Why I write here

Every few years someone declares the personal website dead. The audience moved to a platform, the argument goes, so the writing should follow. I have never found this convincing, and after a decade of watching platforms rise and fold I am less convinced than ever.

What a platform gives you

Distribution, mostly. That is not nothing — it is, in fact, the hardest part of publishing. A platform hands you an audience that already exists and a text box that already works. In exchange it takes the URL, the design, the archive, and the right to change any of them without asking.

The trade is reasonable when the writing is disposable. It is a poor trade when you intend to keep the work.

A piece of writing you cannot move is a piece of writing you do not own.

What a site of your own gives you

Permanence, and a lack of arguments. Nobody negotiates with me about line length here. There is no engagement metric shaping what gets written, no recommendation engine deciding which paragraph is the hook. The constraint is the reader and nothing else.

That turns out to change what I write. When there is no feed to feed, the incentive to publish frequently disappears, and what is left is the incentive to publish something worth the trouble of building the page.

The cost

Real, but smaller than it looks. This site is a folder of markdown files, a build step, and a static host. It has no database, no comments to moderate, no dependency that will demand a migration next year. The whole thing fits in my head, which is the property I care about most.

The rest of what appears here will be about technology, software, AI, and economics — the four subjects I cannot stop reading about. Some of it will age badly. That is fine. It will age badly at a URL I control.