Building Up A Personal Site

中文版见下文 See below for the Chinese version

In recent years, the trend toward a platform economy among social media and tech companies has been troubling in many ways. Most social media apps that I use, especially WeChat and Facebook, have become more insular because of the tendency. In contrast to what was envisioned in the early days of the Internet, these social media apps and websites, which were expected to generate meaningful relationships between people, often isolate rather than connect. They use algorithmic designs to mark up boundaries and try to make users stay within their territory. For example, content published on these social media platforms is often inaccessible through external search engines: WeChat disables a large number of hyperlinks to other sites to prevent users from leaving the WeChat bubble so that they stay longer and longer. Many of the social media sites and apps I use also tightly manage user content. In some more extreme cases, platforms may disable users’ accounts, with the result that those users can no longer even access the content they’ve produced. What is even more disturbing is that media companies are constantly using the data generated by user activity for profit. What has also been extracted to the benefit of the platform is our attention and time.

For these reasons, I decided to turn to a relatively “old” form of media and set up my personal website/blog–a media form that popularized in China in the early 2000s–in anticipation of minimalizing my presence on social media platforms while still maintaining a presence on the internet, in a somewhat different form.

If you have similar concerns and are interested in building a personal site, you may want to consider WordPress, which is a very handy tool to set up a website. Squarespace and Wix are also popular choices that only require very low maintenance, but are relatively more expensive.

This website is based on Jekyll, with the help of the Minimal Mistakes template. It is hosted on GitHub for free. I highly recommend this option as well!

近年来，社交媒体和相关的互联网公司之间所存在的平台经济的趋势一直令人感觉到困扰。我使用的大多数社交媒体应用程序，尤其是微信和Facebook，都因为这样的趋势不断地变得更加孤立和隔绝。与互联网发展早期的设想迥异，这些原本被期待产生人与人之间的有意义的联结的技术产物，却不断生产着漂浮在虚无的海洋之上的孤岛。它们尝试各种算法和设计来划定疆域，并试图使用户在他们的领地内更长久地停留。比如说，这些社交媒体平台的内容通常无法通过外部搜索引擎进行访问，微信禁止了大量可以通向其他网站的超链接以阻止用户离开微信所筑造的生态圈——总是，久一点，然后，再久一点。在此之外，我使用的许多社交媒体网站和应用程序也会严格地管理用户内容，在比较极端的情况下，平台可能禁用用户的帐户，结果就是这些用户甚至无法再访问他们曾经花了大量精力所制作​​的内容。而更加令人不安的事情在于，媒体公司不断地利用用户活动产生的数据来盈利。同样被转换成平台的利益的，是我们的注意力和时间。

出于这些原因，我决定转向一种相对比较“旧”的媒体形式，并建立我的个人网站/博客（这大概是在2000年初期在中国比较流行的媒体形态），以期待减弱我在社交媒体平台上的存在感，同时也在网络上以另一种形式保留一种存在形态。

如果你们也有类似的烦恼，并且有兴趣建立个人网站，我觉得可以考虑的选项包括 WordPress，这是一个比较方便的建立个人网站的工具。quarespace 和 Wix 也比较受欢迎但也贵一些。

这个网站是基于 jekyll建立的 ，以及是在 Minimal Mistakes 这个模板上进行的修修补补，至于在GitHub上进行托管是免费的，所以我对于这个选项也是十分地推荐的。