On April 21, 2005, I registered ckxpress.com and set up my personal website. It has now been 20 years, during which I’ve published 1,250 articles totaling 1.18 million words. Although the domain still has seven years until expiration, I just paid for an additional three years of registration fees to hold ckxpress.com for another 10 years. If it weren’t for the limit set by ICANN, I might have registered it for another 100 years.

Blogging Resume

If I were applying for a job as a blogger, my resume might look something like this:

Curriculum Vitae – chungkin Express

• Blogspot: 2003 – 2005

• ckxpress.com on WordPress: 2005 – present

• Medium: 2014 – 2020

• Matters: 2019 – present

• Substack: 2020 – present

• Paragraph: 2024 – present

If you were the employer, would you perhaps find me fickle for changing jobs so often and toss my resume aside after a glance? Hold on, please let this applicant explain.

In October 2003, I started contributing to the Telecom section of the Hong Kong Economic Journal (HKEJ). The column name, “Made in Hong Kong,” was so old-fashioned I don’t want to admit it. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg was still studying at Harvard, social networks hadn’t emerged yet, but Web 2.0, centered around UGC (user-generated content), was quietly unfolding. Blogspot (Blogger), founded in 1999, had gathered a group of users who enjoyed writing online over several years before Google acquired it. In the same year, I registered ckxpress.blogger.com, kicking off the chungkin Express blog, where I posted my column articles weekly. Considering this brief history, and even adding my personal website hosted by the Computer Science Dept during university (cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ckko), my blogging journey extends far beyond 20 years.

Also in 2003, meanwhile, WordPress was just established. After adding plugin and theme, it gradually gained popularity. As someone who always advocated for self-hosted websites and owning one’s domain, I set up ckxpress.com using WordPress in 2005. Although WordPress remains vibrant today with continuous updates and improvements, it is, after all, a product of over twenty years ago. The barrier to entry is relatively high, and both its underlying PHP language and basic product assumptions are somewhat outdated. However, it relatively remains the most free and extensible content management system. That’s why I’ve continued to use it to this day and will keep an eye on its development, especially regarding Web3 aspects.

The decade following 2003 was a golden era for the internet, emerging after the dot-com bubble burst in 1999 and several years of quiet building by entrepreneurs. Web 2.0 brought significant innovation, making UGC and social networks mainstream, but it hadn’t yet evolved into an oligopoly. Readers could receive my new articles (more often, just ramblings) from ckxpress.com via RSS. They could also read and comment on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, creating a balance between personal space and a public forum. In 2013, Google shut down Google Reader, single-handedly burying the open ecosystem, marking a watershed moment as the internet gradually transformed into walled gardens.

Web2 is Broken, Yet Web3 Isn’t Mature

In 2014, as problems caused by social media algorithms and closed systems became increasingly severe, I started paying attention to writing platforms and joined Medium, founded in 2012. Besides publishing my column articles on my personal website, I gradually began syncing them to Medium as well.

Medium’s founder, Ev Williams, was one of the original founders of Blogspot. After making money and exiting, he established another writing platform. He was someone who couldn’t stand the deteriorating quality of online content and tried various ways to maintain the quality of Medium articles. He used traditional manual curation, abandoned the advertising model he once used, and introduced a paywall and membership system starting in 2017. I paid to become a member right from the start when there were no benefits and joined its partnership program as soon as it began. At its “peak,” I earned HK$1,000 in a month. However, since I’ve always been unwilling to put my articles behind a paywall, I stopped locking articles after a short period and last updated on Medium in 2020.

For a while, around 2018-2019, many authors from Taiwan and Hong Kong joined Medium. However, Medium eventually discontinued its Chinese version and Chinese-language articles had virtually no chance of exposure, and income dwindled. Consequently, most authors migrated away although very few resisted the paywall like I did,. Hong Kong authors mostly moved to Patreon, while some Taiwanese authors shifted to vocus.cc. Speaking of Vocus, I used it for a period, but somehow I couldn’t log into my account anymore, nor could I Google my articles. I can no longer recall specifically when I started posting or when I stopped.

After Medium came my old friend, Matters. Matters was founded in late 2017, around the same time as LikeCoin. Naturally, I started using it from the beginning, syncing articles from ckxpress.com, totaling 276 articles to date. Matters’ most prominent feature is that all articles are stored on the “decentralized storage” IPFS, offering a degree of censorship resistance. Secondly, of course, is its integration with LikeCoin, attempting to generate income for authors based on individual articles without resorting to a paywall.

As social networks became increasingly difficult to navigate, I started using Substack (founded in 2017) in 2020, sending out monthly ramblings to friends. Then, in mid-2021, after Apple Daily was shut down, ending my columnist career, I took the plunge and started the DHK newsletter on Substack, which has now reached its #201 issue. In 2023, I even invested 5,000 USD to become a micro-shareholder. Substack has lived up to expectations, attracting more and more readers and authors in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Its features are comprehensive, and the interface is well-designed. I can hardly imagine what breakthroughs Substack could still achieve within the current system; I would describe it as the “Web 2.0 ceiling.”

Yet, foolishly perhaps, last year I moved my newsletter again, from Substack to Paragraph, a platform designed with Web3 principles at its core. Honestly, Paragraph is far less mature than Substack, especially with very few Chinese users. Since the move, my subscriber count has seen almost no growth. But I don’t regret it and will continue to stay with Paragraph to support its decentralized storage, content-unit-based creation, and open-content monetization mechanisms. Matters and LikeCoin strived for similar goals but didn’t fully succeed. Now, other entrepreneurs are continuing to explore this path, and I hope to participate as an author, helping to promote this model.

The Value Proposition of Web3

This blogger applicant may seem fickle on the surface, but from start to finish, I have been pursuing an autonomous, open, and sustainable environment for writing and reading. Besides, although I often “moonlight” elsewhere, my “main job,” ckxpress.com, has never been interrupted for 20 years. You could call me a loyal employee, right?

Dear employers, when someone uses a single platform long-term, it often signifies vendor lock-in that stifles innovation. The truly ideal ecosystem should be like portable phone numbers or email addresses – no matter how many times you switch service providers, your identity, data, and social graph can come with you. This portability, composability, and perpetual data storage are the core pursuits of Web3.

I’m not sure if I’ll still be using Apple, Google, or OpenAI in 10 or 20 years, or if I’ll still be struggling with compromising with Meta’s algorithms. But I can assert that unless the internet or I disappear, the ckxpress.com website will continue to operate. No, even if I disappear, ckxpress.com will remain unaffected. I plan to upload myself to the cloud before I die and find a way for an AI ckxpress to operate decentrally after my death.

p.s. Due to space limitations, saying ckxpress.com has been built on WordPress for 20 years skips many technical details. In reality, it involved multiple evolutions: from initially renting a virtual machine and installing Linux, Apache, etc., myself, to later opting for the convenience of hosting on WordPress.com. Then, as cloud services became popular, I thriftily rented a low-end EC2 instance on AWS. Later still, tired of management, I switched to a cloud service providing a complete WordPress environment. Most of the time, I’d rather pay a bit more for simplicity, but sometimes the opposite happens – I get the itch to handle the underlying infrastructure myself, even obsessively avoiding server restarts to solve problems. My longest EC2 uptime was 1051 days. However, regardless of how many times the backend has moved, for readers, it remains ckxpress.com. The URLs for all articles have remained unchanged, and SEO hasn’t been affected. This is the beauty of portability, and why I so strongly advocate for owning your domain. Only what you can take with you can truly be called ownership. Unfortunately, this kind of autonomous internet user is becoming increasingly rare.