If you’ve ever been forcibly redirected to a URL you didn’t intend to access after clicking on a link to a personal website on Google, Reddit, Facebook, Hacker News, etc. it is because the operator did not consent to having their personal website linked from a corporate-owned internet platform.
The law does not forbid such links, or oblige corporations to compensate personal website operators for unexpected traffic spikes or unexpected and often hostile attention from complete strangers. Nevertheless, the operators of personal websites reserve the right to refuse service to anybody for any reason, and are under no legal or moral obligation to welcome visitors from the corporate web.
If you find this objectionable, reconsider your life choices and think about the burden you are helping to place on personal website operators by supporting a tech industry that sees the personal web as nothing but an untapped resource to be mined for training data for advertising, large language models, etc.
Nobody runs a personal website to make the likes of Google, OpenAI, or Reddit more profitable. The personal web is for personal expression, and personal website operators often do this as a hobby, at their own expense, which can be considerable depending on their income from their day jobs.
But if you came from Google or a popular social network, you don’t concern yourself with such niceties. You probably think that the entire internet is there for you, and that the people running personal websites need or are grateful for your attention, which you have oh-so-graciously deigned to bestow.
Here’s a reality check for you:
- We are not things.
- We do not exist for your sake.
- We create our websites for ourselves.
- We were fine without your attention.
- If you are only here to scrape data to feed into your LLM we are not grateful for your presence in our spaces.
The personal website is for personal, non-commercial use. Denizens of the corporate internet are not welcome here.
Webmaster Resources
Resources for Corporate Web People
If you work in tech, you need to listen to Harlan Ellison and take what he said to heart. Assuming you even have one, let alone a soul.
Pay the writers, pay the artists, pay the webmasters, and pay every other motherfucker whose work makes your search engine, platform, or LLM valuable. With the money you assholes are getting from assholes like Marc Andreesen, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel you can damned well afford to do so.