Why Keep a Personal Website in the 2020s?

There was a time when setting up a website was considered a standard, if slightly nerdy, rite of passage for anyone on the internet. You bought a domain, wrote some rudimentary HTML in Notepad, picked a background color that was probably too bright, and uploaded it via FTP.

Then came the era of platform consolidation. We were promised convenience: why bother maintaining your own server or styling your own headers when you could post on Twitter, Medium, Substack, or LinkedIn? For a decade, the independent personal website felt like a nostalgic relic.

Yet over the past few years, a quiet counter-revolution has taken place. People are returning to their own websites. Why?

1. Ownership and Permanence

Platforms are rented land. When you publish exclusively on social platforms, your work exists at the mercy of shifting terms of service, changing recommendation algorithms, and company pivots. Content that you poured hours into crafting gets buried under an endless river of ephemeral updates in less than forty-eight hours.

A personal website provides a permanent home for your thoughts. URLs are persistent, searchable, and archivable. It is an intellectual portfolio that compounds in value over time.

2. Freedom from Algorithmic Optimization

Writing on modern platforms invisibly shapes what and how you write. To get distribution on algorithmic feeds, you are nudged to write provocative hooks, split paragraphs into single punchy lines, and choose topics that trigger immediate emotional reactions.

When you own the medium, you are free to write for the curious individual rather than the engagement metric.

On your own website, there are no like counters, no retweet metrics, and no algorithmic incentives. You can publish a 4,000-word deep dive on an obscure topic or a 50-word note with a photograph. The medium bends to your intent, not vice versa.

3. The Joy of the Open Web

Personal websites allow the internet to feel human again. When you browse sites like Rohan Selva-Radov's or Lieu Zheng Hong's, you immediately get a sense of the person behind the screen—their quirks, their reading habits, their aesthetic tastes.

Hyperlinks connect independent nodes across the web. Reading someone's blogroll, discovering new writers through a webring, and sending an email in response to an essay creates genuine human serendipity.

Conclusion

Building and maintaining a personal website isn't about vanity; it’s about digital autonomy. It is a commitment to slow, deliberate thinking in an environment built for speed and noise.