I came across this article about personal websites vs. social media. I didn’t stumble across it coincidentally. I was actually searching the question “do people prefer social media to personal web sites”.
Back in the day (after the internet became a household commodity), prior to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, (and I MUST mention MySpace for historical reasons), etc., many people who got in the worldwide web and wanted an ‘online presence’ created personal web sites on Geocities, Fortunecity, Tripod, Angelfire, Lycos, Homestead, and many others. They presented their pages of themselves and their lives as welcoming and inviting, get to know them style.
Then social media platforms came and the traffic went there. Much easier to create a profile and voila, instant “web presence”. No need to actually learn a whole lot about building web pages, presenting content, and learning any online etiquette (something I can talk about for hours about how people come out of the jungle and login and act like they’re still in the jungle). Point and click photo post, comment, on a timeline that represents them, however it actually comes off sounding or feeling.
When said people who grew up only on social media do go to web sites and blogs, the complain about getting lost navigating the sites, not understanding how to login or change pages, etc.. They give up and crawl back to their simplistic comfort of their social media platform. I laugh. Yet, it’s sad.
Many advice givers and opinionists will tell all about how personal/business web sites are much better than social media to promote whatever it is one wants to promote. With me, the biggest advantages and my reason for preferring my blog are security, control, and management of content. Security of having much more control of posted/presented content and where it’s stored on the web server. Controlling who can see it on the front end. Not worrying about social media staff, on the back end, monitoring and policing what you share and throwing you in “facebook jail” for going against THEIR decided rules. Being able to manage the size and scope of people who see what you share without having to live by someone else’s filters. I don’t have to live with their cookie cutter tools. No need to create “family” profile for politically correct appearance and a separate “rogue” profile to really say and share what’s on my mind in the way I want to say it. One site, one persona, just restrict content to those whom you want to see it.
The vast majority of those living in the cloud these days just don’t get it. Actually, I do. What they don’t know they don’t know.