Own what’s yours

It’s 2025. Read.cv is shutting down. WordPress is on fire. Twitter has completely melted down. Companies are changing their content policies en masse. Social networks are becoming increasingly icy towards anything outside of their walled garden. Services are using the content you post to feed proprietary LLMs. Government websites appear to be purging data. It’s a wild time.

It’s hard to know where this bottoms out. And those who rely on these services are just along for the ride. Web 2.0 seemed like such a great idea in a more innocent time. We’re at a point where it’s only prudent to view third-parties as guilty until proven innocent. Not as some abstract, principled stance, but for our own direct benefit.

Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website. Ideally on your own server, but one step at a time.

The most common advice I give to junior designers is to write. I’m doubling down in the age of AI. Unique ideas and critical thinking are more valuable than ever. The craft of writing looks like it will go the way of cursive based on our current trajectory. People who can uniquely and independently articulate their own ideas have an advantage.

If I’m right, your unique and independent ideas will be increasingly valued. Don’t give that away. Control is ceded the minute it’s published on another service. How much control? Hard to say. It’s at the whims of their EULA, product direction, policy changes, and business health The most reliable way to publish ideas and have them remained published is on a site you control.

Yes, AI companies will almost assuredly scrape your site to feed their LLMs. Whether that will remain legal is questionable. But there’s no question when it’s willingly posted on their platform.

Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.

Plus, people over-think self-publishing. It doesn’t take much. Words–that’s all. An image of two if you’re feeling fancy. But things like search, and all the other fluff associated with modern websites–nah. Less features is a feature.

This isn’t the post to tell you what tools you should or should not use. It doesn’t matter as long as you own what comes from it. It can be something like Obsidian. It can be plain-ol’ HTML and CSS. It doesn’t matter–as much as folks want you to think it does.

And this isn’t just about blogs. This relates to portfolios, code snippets, photos. You name it. What’s made by you should be owned and controlled by you.

Web 2.0 failed. True online sharing died a long time ago. So start taking. Take your ideas, your words, your work–and go home.