The Month My Website Stopped Belonging to Me

The rule was simple, which should have been my first warning

Every page on myxy554.com had a name. I gave it that name, sometimes years ago, usually at 1 a.m., usually while eating gas station snacks. For one month, any visitor could submit a replacement title for any page. Other visitors could upvote. Every Sunday at midnight, the top-voted title replaced mine. No vetoes, no appeals. I wrote the rule on the About page like a surrender document.

I expected maybe three submissions. I got 847.

Week one: the poets showed up early

The first renamings were almost embarrassingly beautiful. My "About" page — originally titled, with the creativity of a DMV form, "About Me" — became "The Guy Who Lives Here." My photo gallery of foggy parking lots became "Evidence of Weather." A half-finished essay I'd been sitting on for two years got retitled "The Draft He's Too Scared to Publish," which, honestly, stung more than the trolls ever did.

There's something about strangers that cuts through your own pretensions. I had named that essay something moody and literary. The internet looked at it and saw exactly what it was: a guy avoiding finishing a thing. Upvotes don't lie.

Week two: the trolls arrive, as promised

I want to be clear that the trolls were, for the most part, extremely polite. One visitor spent the entire month submitting variations of "Website of Lies" for every single page. Another was convinced my homepage should be called "This Man Owes Me $20," with no further explanation, ever. I have thought about that $20 more than I'd like to admit.

The voting system mostly handled them. A title needs momentum to win, and "Website of Lies, Part 6" never built a coalition. But a few slipped through. For six days, my contact page was legally titled "Do Not Email This Man," and my contact form submissions dropped to zero. Turns out people follow instructions.

The weird middle: a website by committee

By week three, the site had developed a voice that wasn't mine. It was mine-adjacent. It was like coming home to find someone had rearranged your furniture — nothing was wrong, exactly, but every room felt slightly haunted by someone else's taste.

My bookmarks page became "Things He Thinks Are Underrated." The archive became "The Basement." A page I'd titled "Links" for a decade was now "Exit Doors," and I'll be honest, I'm never changing it back. Whoever that anonymous voter was, they understood my website better than I did.

This is the thing nobody tells you about personal websites: you stop actually seeing them. The titles calcify. You wrote them once and then walked past them every day for years like wallpaper. Handing the keys to strangers was less a loss of ownership and more a forced eye exam.

What the renamings revealed

Reading through all 847 submissions at the end of the month felt like reading my own site's Yelp reviews. A few patterns:

• Strangers noticed the melancholy. Multiple titles referenced loneliness, quiet, waiting. I thought my site was playful. The audience read it as wistful. They might be right.
• Nobody used corporate language. Not one submission said "Content," "Solutions," or "Explore My Journey." The open web, when given the chance, rejects LinkedIn.
• The best titles were observations, not branding. "Evidence of Weather." "The Basement." "Exit Doors." They describe, they don't sell.

So whose website is it now?

Here's where I landed, standing in the wreckage of my own domain: a personal website on the open web was never really private property. It's more like a house with the door unlocked and a notebook on the kitchen table. People come in, they leave notes, some of the notes are about owing you $20.

I kept eleven of the renamings permanently. I reverted the rest, mostly out of stubbornness, partly because "Do Not Email This Man" was killing my correspondence. But the site reads differently to me now. It's a little less mine and a little more ours, and weirdly, that made me want to write on it more, not less.

Next month's experiment: strangers write the alt text. I'm either going to learn something profound or get sued by an image. Check back.