Andy Baio via Ben Brooks
Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.
While I may cross-post some content to Apple News, Medium, and other services as they spring up — I won’t cross post everything and I certainly don’t trust those sites to ever be more than a passing fad. Having my own site gives me complete control to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. I don’t understand why people ever want it any other way.
This is right on the money: I haven’t been on the Internet as a browser or producer for even a fraction of its total life, and I’ve still seen the rise and fall of many websites. MySpace, Digg, Friendster … there is no reason to believe that the trendy publishing platforms of today will be around tomorrow, in fact quite the contrary. While I take this to be an argument against using these services and have no desire to change, I do suspect that this is a somewhat selfish and hermetic Internet existence, where many people would argue Internet introverts have a lot more to gain from centralized platforms than they’re giving up. Specifically, because it’s centralized, the audience is centralized, discovery is easier, and the value of the interactions that happen while the site is live far outweigh the risks of losing that data or ability once the service invariable tanks, either by shutting down or with some insipid monetization scheme.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
If a user wants to reach an audience to “gain awareness”, he or she will use whatever medium at their disposal. It shouldn’t matter what the name of the service is. Due to many factors, including the nature of our short existence, most people care about what has happened recently, what is happening now and what might happen in the not too distant future. A post about AJAX written in 2009 on Tumblr can be considered irrelevant, whereas a post on React on Reddit, Medium or Hacker News will get a lot of attention. If there is something relevant and important to communicate or something thats needs proselytizing and you have a need to reach the widest audience, you would be doing yourself a favor by shifting or crossposting your content to wherever that audience may be. It seems like the original author is trying to express some egocentric understanding that public sentiment shifts create new establishments in publishing and marketing all the time; that it’s preferable to have a “base of operations” within his control so that he’s unaffected by the ever changing field. I might be stretching his words in this case, but it seems like he also wants us to sympathize with people who invest entirely in one platform. His conservatism raises a red flag for me.