Winnie Lim

Over the decades I’ve migrated my blogging to other hosted platforms like livejournal, vox, posterous, wordpress.com, medium, etc but in 2015 I decided I want to stop experimenting with other platforms in order to have a forever home with my writing. I started to feel the importance of permalinks – how disruptive and saddening it is when cherished posts by other people go 404.

#b3f51e Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

Back then I was pro-technology and didn’t fully understand my privilege in many ways. I was always advocating for personal websites without realising how much work it is for the average person.

#4169ec Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

It was then peaceful for a while. But running wordpress on its own is also stressful, people are always seeking to exploit its vulnerabilities.

#c2340a Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

This site is over 10 years old and this is the first time attacks are happening consecutively. Why? AI, obviously. I feel dirty even typing the word out. It is being used to find vulnerabilities at a speed and depth that didn’t occur before.

So I patched the site again, and the next thing I know is that bots are clogging up matomo, which I use to view referral traffic etc. I’ve used robots.txt and .htaccess to block them but most of them are masquerading as humans. I look at the site’s access logs and it is just bots, bots, bots everywhere.

#695095 Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

I’m spiritually exhausted with these bots. If I’m having so much frustration as a former technically-inclined person, I can’t imagine the average person trying to run a self-hosted personal website. Sadly platforms are the way to go for the average person.

#d93cd5 Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

I’ve personally argued that we are probably living in the dark times but dark times are only obvious when viewed with the lens of history.

#c5fae4 Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience.

#54173d Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido

Why should I take the time and effort – the deep meditative state I need to reach to translate my inner experiences into coherent words – when AI bots just scrape everything? And someone out there is probably typing a prompt and getting responses in 0.001 seconds without giving a single thought about the human energy that is powering that response.

#8229fb Winnie Lim: Manter um site pessoal não é mais divertido