In recent years, a popular phrase has emerged on the Chinese internet: building a personal IP. The phrase itself is imprecise. IP originally means intellectual property; using it to describe a person’s public image, recognisability, and influence is a specifically Chinese internet adaptation. Yet beneath this rather loose term lies an impulse worth taking seriously. More people no longer want to exist merely as an account on a platform. They want to retain a place from which they can speak in their own name.

Most claims to a “personal IP” are still weak, of course. What many people actually seek is steadier traffic, a clearer persona, or better commercial conversion. They may never have seriously considered intellectual independence, the right to expression, or the boundary of a private spiritual space. But the dissatisfaction itself matters. It suggests that people are beginning to sense that a platform is not simply a neutral publishing tool.

The purpose of a platform is quite straightforward. It must retain attention, increase engagement, and turn vast quantities of content into things that can be rapidly distributed, recognised, ranked, and consumed. There is nothing morally surprising about this; that is what platforms are built to do. But when someone expresses themselves within that environment for a long time, their ideas, language, and choice of subject are gradually filtered by it. Which headline attracts clicks, which position provokes argument, which emotion travels best, and which idea can be made to feel complete in a few seconds or a few hundred words may begin as practical questions. In time, however, they reshape the person doing the speaking.

The deeper concern is not simply what a platform removes. It is that, before it removes anything, it teaches people to avoid whatever does not travel well. One begins to write fewer complicated judgments, to leave less room for hesitation and revision, to avoid views that cannot be immediately placed on one side of a conflict, and to abandon arguments that require patience to unfold. Eventually the platform need not force anyone. It only has to keep rewarding one kind of expression, while other kinds slowly wither. That is the most effective form of platform discipline.

By expression sovereignty, then, I do not mean that writers must withdraw from platforms, still less that a personal website is some pure space untouched by the world. Platforms remain useful. They can introduce one’s work to strangers, circulate a finished piece, and lead readers who might never otherwise encounter a website back to its source. The question is simply one of order. A platform may be an outlet, a signpost, or a temporary stage. It should not become the headquarters of one’s thought.

A personal website should remain the home base. There, the length, sequence, title, categories, revisions, and duration of an article are determined first by its author rather than by a changing recommendation system. A site allows scattered pieces to be returned to a longer structure. It allows a question that interests no one for the moment to remain alive. It need not manufacture activity every day. It is closer to a study than a store: an archive and workbench for thought, not a vending machine required to satisfy passing customers.

This matters especially to me because much of what I write cannot be reduced to a view that produces an immediate effect. Whether I am thinking about artificial intelligence, philosophy, psychology, music, or ordinary life, the valuable part is often not a sentence that can be shared on its own. It is the relationship slowly formed between one piece and earlier articles, concepts, and experiences. If such work exists only as platform posts, it is soon covered by the next topic of the day, leaving behind little more than the emotion and metrics of that moment. On a personal site, it can become a line of thought that can be revisited, corrected, extended, and allowed to grow.

That is why I still persist with the seemingly old-fashioned practice of maintaining a personal website. It resembles the new old-style songs I enjoy: at first hearing they sound like old songs, yet they are genuinely new compositions. A personal website is not an attempt to return to a pre-platform past. In an age excessively dependent on platforms, it preserves certain old-fashioned but not outdated things: an author’s continuing responsibility for their work, the full timeline of a developing thought, and the freedom to write without constantly adapting to an external rhythm.

I do sometimes share articles from my site elsewhere. But that is only a way of putting out one or two links, so that interested people can find the source. Where a piece truly belongs should not be decided by its likes, reposts, or momentary visibility. It belongs where its author can take responsibility for it, preserve it, and continue to revise it.

A personal website cannot guarantee independence. Someone may repeat fashionable opinions under their own domain just as easily as anywhere else, or turn an independent site into another vehicle for self-marketing. But it preserves a necessary condition: expression does not have to pass through platform selection first, and thought does not have to be compressed into the form most easily understood by an algorithm before it can appear.

For me, that condition is already important enough. A personal website is neither a retreat into the old internet nor a refusal to connect with the world. It simply affirms something straightforward: a platform may help my writing be seen, but it should not decide why I write, what I write, or where I finally place my thought.