I’ve been following Kening Zhu‘s website for a couple months now. His writing about creativity culture is warm and disarmingly honest. Today he linked to a blog post by Tara McMullin about how platforms are pushing the idea that the internet is dying. There are a couple things that I loved about it all:

First, in Kening’s post sharing the link, he articulates clearly the kind of thing I’m hoping to do here:

To deliberately accept the feeling/fate of “languishing in obscurity” — and to STILL create — because, as an artist, the process of creation itself (regardless if I made money or not from it) nourished me.

Embracing a highly self-selecting, “niche” audience … to slowly magnetize a tiny, highly self-selecting group of people. This means that my website has to feel “sticky” for the right people. — and have enough friction (my uncompromising authenticity) to keep out the “wrong” people.

See what I mean? His writing is extremely succinct and honest, and the concept he’s talking about is something that I think the platforms trained out of us over the years.

Here’s McMullin in the original post:

The Platform Pill illusion is that “nobody visits websites anymore.” But correlation isn’t causation. Platforms present themselves as website killers—they’re more efficient, more fun, more visually pleasing, and far easier to build an audience on. The platform is better than a website, so you don’t need to make one, visit one, or really ever leave the platform again.

Did people stop visiting websites because platforms are actually better? Or because platforms incentivized us to abandon the websites we used to love? Did people stop making good websites because platforms are better for business? Or did platforms make us choose between the potential for internet fame on their terms or the near certainty of languishing in obscurity on our own websites?

It’s in the platform’s best interest for us to believe that websites are dead—that no one reads blogs anymore, that all the good stuff is on the platform, that distribution only happens at the whims of the algorithms.

Build a website. Start a newsletter. Think and write and make things on a place that doesn’t require a membership to view. Learn to use RSS. It’s either that or more AI generated spam.