By TxNx
Originally published on 14/09/2024
Nowadays, more and more people are leaving social media (or, at least, talking about it); many are the causes: content control (which sometimes appears as plain censorship) from the platform’s owners, intrusive action of behavioral algorithms, fed with data gathered though observation of the user’s activity, lack of personalization and perceived shift from an active position to that of a spectator to influencers. So, what’s the future? Is this the end of the internet?
While most people would now associate the internet mainly with the apps they use, it hasn’t always been this way in the past: before the phone era, time was mostly spent on different sites.
In the last years, there has been a rise of personal blogs and sites, a practice that had a large diffusion between the 90s and the 2000s, but then quickly evaporated with the coming of modern social media (Facebook, often considered the pioneer in the field, was launched in 2004). But what does the personal web offer? First, complete control on the content: you, the site owner, choose what the visitors will see and what will be suggested to them, without external interference aiming to maximize the time they will spend looking at the screen. Furthermore, there’s no limit to the media type that can be used, being it images, sounds or videos and all of this can work in an interactive structure, id est following the user’s input. You can also finally be free from ads.
In conclusion, I think that the personal web will be a rising phenomenon in the next years, particularly among creative people that find the social media experience limiting. Are you gonna be part of it?