The grifter web

@ohhelloana@mastodon.social recently wondered about personal websites. What is it that people like about personal websites?

I think when I search online for a topic, I'd love to find pages by people enthusiastic about the topic and not two dozen sites full of ads that give me the impression of being people farms or bot farms. I wouldn't want to miss big non-monetized sites like MDN or Wikipedia, but there are a lot of similar pages that are all strictly worse (the ad/bot variety of the same), and there are some pages by knowledgeable people that discovered this or that and wrote it up on their blog. The same is true for non-technical subjects like gardening.

I want the big non-monetized documentation sites and the personal sites, and I don't care for the monetized sites because I feel they're just leeching off the sites I like: copying the text and pictures directly, or copying them, training their bots on them and regurgitating a mix, inserting themselves as middlemen, trying to profit from that large value gap, slicing it up and taking a share, diminishing the value for the rest of us.

> grifter (n): a person who swindles you by means of deception or fraud

​#Web