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Comment by isehfb6372 | Hacker News Reader

The marketing machine around Matt, WP.com, and OSS is just incredible. Automattic has taken nearly a BILLION dollars in VC money (including 300m most recently from Salesforce) to essentially execute a hostile takeover of open of source WordPress. Automattic forced their rewrite of WordPress (a Squarespace clone written in React) on the community and it has been a disaster, leading to many resignations of long-time contributors and their replacement with paid Automattic employees: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/

Automattic/WordPress is like any other VC-backed venture looking for their exit, except this one is doing off the back of a once-vibrant OSS community. The open source connection is a fairy tale (and apparently powerful marketing tool). They will not save the Internet.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic

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The way I read it was that Matt saw that WP needed to evolve to compete with everything else that exists, and that the volunteer release lead model that they used before could never lead to anything like Gutenberg in such a short time.

All Matt has done and said makes me believe he loves OSS, freedom of the user and democratization of publishing. Why would he ruin his own creation by looking for an exit when WP is already hugely popular and more importantly why abandon what seems to be his principles around freedom/OS. I will eat my words in 5-10 years if it isn't true but I think everyone will see he will focus just as much on wp.org and freedom as he does Automattic (ie keeping as much as possible open, free alternatives (like jetpack), etc)

ALso Gutenberg is not nearly as bad as those reviews say. It is much better even only in the last few months, though a lot of UX development is needed it is a powerful editor.

I actually tried Gutenberg a few months back. It was nearly unusable as a document editor. Typing, undo, cursor movement, and moving between blocks was a glitchy mess, and so was importing pages from the classic editor (though that's a difficult problem). I reported several issues, and a few actually got fixed after weeks. Though I haven't tested again since I decommissioned my WordPress Pi image.

>I actually tried Gutenberg a few months back. It was nearly unusable as a document editor.

I've been using it for a couple of years in WP and had absolutely no issue with it as a document editor.

And I've have used everything from LaTeX to Markdown, and from Word to Mellel, including all kinds of web-based editors.

I'd be interested to see if there's any data out there showing that Gutenberg contributed to an increase in Wordpress adoption (both the open source version and selling WordPress.com as a service). My hunch is that people aren't coming to the platform because of the block editor, but the rest of the eco-system. Gutenberg still isn't as user friendly as Squarespace or Wix, and it's different enough from how OG Wordpress operates that most power users don't like it either. I think a more friendly editor was the obvious next step, so it's not misguided, but something about how it was implemented doesn't seem to click with a lot of users.

Anecdotal, but I loathe Gutenberg, and almost entirely shut down my blog because of it. I eventually decided to pay for hosting the open source version with their plugins so I could use the Classical Editor plugin, but Gutenberg was absolutely awful. The posts I was writing were quite long, as they were transcriptions of stories (the number of SEO red flags they give off is hilarious, honestly), and Gutenberg was just so laggy trying to go back and forth between my annotations of the stories at the bottom and the actual story at the top. I eventually just started typing it up in Pages and copy-pasting it over because it was such a pain to edit...None of those problems exist on Classical Editor, though I still transcribe them in Pages to keep them all in the same document for if I ever decide to publish.

In fairness to Matt and Automattic, Wordpress pre-Gutenberg was basically unusable by non-technical users. I’ve seen research that the successful completion rate for regular users with Wordpress on a bunch of core UX elements is close to zero.

It’s fine if Automattic wants to say that Wordpress is just for web developers and HN readers, but I think they really want to build the website platform for everyone, and that’s not happening with Wordpress without things like a real page builder.

(Full disclosure, I used to work at Squarespace and will freely say that the squarespace page builder at the time I was there was not great, but it was usable by regular people)

For a CMS that was 'unusable by non-technical users' the adoption rate was mighty impressive?

'Catering for everyone' is an ego-trip that's resulted in page bloat for everyone whether they wanted it or not.

It depends on the lens through which you want to view the addressable market for adoption. For sure, Wordpress has deservedly captured a huge part of the current market for CMS-powered websites. It's very powerful, it's performant, it's got an ecosystem of plugins and templates to expand its capabilities, and a huge network of developers and designers who are familiar with it.

But if you want to view the market as "getting everyone on the open web who needs a presence", it's hard to see how Wordpress the product is meeting that need. ~1/3 of US businesses have no owned/managed Internet presence at all (and the number is even lower outside of the US). Of the ones who do, something like 15% of them (iirc) are only on Facebook and/or Instagram, and that number is growing.

Let's take that small business owner who doesn't yet have an online presence and give them a default Wordpress install, and then let's give them a Facebook business page creator - which one do you think they'll be more successful at completing? Or if I need a simple blog/newsletter - let's try Wordpress vs. Substack or Wordpress vs. Medium - which is going to be easier?

If you say that's not the target market for Wordpress, that's fine, but every interview with Matt Mullenwig gives me the impression HE thinks that's the target market for Wordpress/Automattic - everyone who needs an online presence. By limiting Wordpress to only technical users and/or websites that are built by pros, it's basically ceding swaths of the user population to these purely commercial platforms that are open to varying degrees.

Fair argument although wasn't this the idea behind the .org/.com which was a kind of a best of both worlds solution that seemed to work OK up until now?

>In fairness to Matt and Automattic, Wordpress pre-Gutenberg was basically unusable by non-technical users.

While I'm pro-Gutenberg (see my answer above), the WP editor pre-Gutenberg was absolutely fine for "non-technical users" too. It's adoption, for regular users like plain blog authors and journalists and so on, had already been massive (in the "tens or even hundreds of millions userbase" level massive...

Yeah, in an attempt to be concise, some nuance was lost - I think Wordpress as a pure editor, as a real CMS, when set up properly and/or using an OOTB template is perfectly fine. The post editor is good, you have all the basic formatting elements, page types, etc.

But I think that limits you to two universes of setups - either built by a "pro" (for some definition of pro) who configures everything, installs plugins, installs and customizes the templates and basically gets everything perfect OR very basic cookie-cutter installs with lots of limitations.

Either of those scenarios is fine, and I think it's great to have an ecosystem of small designers whose customers are DIFM users. I agree for "blog authors" and writers it's also fine, subject to the above limitations.

The reality, though, is that market is tiny - "tens or hundreds of millions of users" - I do not think there are in the hundreds of millions of blog authors getting active traffic, though I maybe buy "10s of millions". Tumblr alone has 500+m active sites, even if we assume only 10% get actual consistent traffic (which would be roughly consistent with the data I remember), that alone is 50m active sites. If there are 10s of millions of bloggers, we would expect that the active # of sites are in the single-digit millions.

It's hasn't been just bloggers since forever. All kinds of sites, news, business, restaurants, community, ngo, all the way to the White House, use WordPress.

Unusable by non-technical users? Lol. Then explain how everybody from kids to grandmas started blogs and ecommerce sites built on top of WordPress pre-Gutenberg.

I missed this earlier - as always, it’s hard to convey nuance in a HN comment, so of course there are non-technical people who are successful at building Wordpress sites. I’m not a mechanic, but I can fix things on my car, because I’m reasonably handy and can read instructions and compare diagrams and I know when I’m over my head. I think the analogy holds up for Wordpress too - there are non-technical people who can figure it out, and that’s great. But I would argue they are a small population relative to the total addressable market of people who need websites.

Put another way - what data do we have that shows that “everybody from kids to grandmas” started sites on Wordpress? And to get more specific, how many of those users either had help getting it set up, or used a template and made zero changes to it, or had a hosting provider build a site for them using a builder atop Wordpress? Because the data I’ve seen suggests that users really struggle with any customization of a Wordpress site, and I think the adoption of Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s website central, etc. shows that there is a real gap there for Wordpress.

The data I have is who I've had as clients for other services throughout the past decade. Clearly a trend in the UK and USA, and almost all of them figure it out on their own from the extensive documentation and YouTube videos available.

Gutenberg, and the Full Site Editing features that are built in now, are unbelievably bad. With great examples of page editors like Elementor, Beaver, Divi and others, I just don't understand how something as badly engineered as Gutenberg came to be. There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing.

>Gutenberg, and the Full Site Editing features that are built in now, are unbelievably bad.

Not in my experience. I prefer them to the messy and hacky third party alternatives..

>There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing.

As a user, I had absolutely no problem with Gutenberg regarding intuitiveness...

Your experience and mine (plus thousands of others in the reviews) are vastly different. One thing that interests me is how much someone has to actually care about a problem before they are willing to take the time to go post a review. I think its an interesting metric to use when looking at stuff like this. Thousands of bad reviews is a pretty large number when you take into account just how many people won't go and post a review.

Bad reviews are pretty much expected for a project that are built in public like the Block Editor, and lots of them actually help to build a better product in the end. A final version was never meant to be released at once.

> and their replacement with paid Automattic employees

Automattic sponsors about 100 people to work on the WordPress open source project, and that's somehow a bad thing? Also, this isn't an Automattic exclusive thing, many other companies do the same: https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=con...

(I'm an Automattic employee, but I don't work directly on the WordPress project)

>to essentially execute a hostile takeover of open of source WordPress

The software he himself first created? Could have gone to worse hands. Not to mention it's still 100% FOSS and has been going from strength to strength.

Didn't know about that, but was a little surprised by:

> In every way that matters, Automattic is a reflection of Mullenweg (you could say he puts the “Matt” in Automattic). He started building web software because he wanted a place to store and share his photos; he’s a blogger to the core, and loves anything that aids in the free expression of ideas on the internet. He loves jazz, which is why WordPress releases are named for jazz musicians.

Sure name your company whatever you like, but why should releases of an opensource project be named based on one person's taste in music?

>but why should releases of an opensource project be named based on one person's taste in music?

Why not? As good as any other inspiration (like the naming themes admins use for hostnames in their LANs), and one man deciding helps stop the bikeshedding.

The same argument could be made for any decision, hence the issue with the pattern.

Obviously the same argument could NOT be made for any decision.

Only for those decisions that have the qualities I mentioned on my argument (which are hardly all): "as good as any other" and "stops the bikeshedding".

So, it should be decisions on things which don't affect much (the code-name of the release doesn't change anything, especially since people refer to it by version number, e.g. 5.8), and also trivial things prone to bikeshedding (similarly - nothing productive could ever come from a discussion about the naming scheme for releases).

Yes that's obvious, and I wasn't speaking to the pattern only being applied to bikeshedding cases but rather as a resolution mechanism in cases of uncertainty or disagreement in general. If it works to get things moving, what's to prevent it from being regularly used, especially if commonly used in other areas--could be a slippery slope if it's not already policy. It would be better not to have these concerns by not having one person's personal preferences dictate things that are small now, and leave room for doubt.

isn't that the story/dna of wordpress to evolve https://www.wpexplorer.com/history-wordpress/

Who do you think writes these pieces then? What's in it for them?

PR firms employed by corporations (e.g. Automattic) shop story ideas to media publications, including access to the subject (e.g. Matt). It is possible, but unlikely, that Protocol just randomly decided to write this piece.

What’s in it for them? Well, people do genuinely want to read these stories. It’s “win-win” for the writer (makes their job easier/they get access), the publication (eyeballs), and the corporation (positive story reaches the public).

Source: in my role at my company, I am occasionally asked to collaborate with hired PR firms to promote similar efforts.

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