What are you doing, WordPress.com?
rootprivileges.net
rootprivileges.net
VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com.
You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me.
Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a couple of phases of changes.
Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another.
Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post:
- No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing.
- As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will get this updated ASAP.
- Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying.
- Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't going anywhere.
- The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo.
- We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and choose which additional functionality they want, without needing to upgrade to the Pro plan.
Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns.
That really needs to be transparent. Right after Vimeo's mess with this is a bad time to introduce vague language around this, and people will assume you mean "force upgrade to thousands-of-dollars enterprise plan".
That is not as reassuring as people seem to think it is.
Plus, if the pricing changes per-location as stated, that's significantly more complicated, and not something that can be done in a few hours over the weekend. I'm inclined to cut them some slack, I felt the response posted upthread was OK. Has noone else worked with legacy systems? The large number of pricing plans being rolled out haphazardly over years is very believable to me, my current company had a pricing option buried deep in the site that nobody even remembered existed anymore, customer service actually brought that to my attention after a unrelated change broke billing for those customers.
That being said, if the changes proposed aren't updated on the pricing page by Tuesday, then it's safe to assume this is all meaningless PR fluff.
We did however publish an update on our support forums, which you can find here: https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/pricing-feedback/
I will circle back to this thread with additional updates as they are shared publicly.
Here's the last discussion I read, there's a link from dang to another, related thread.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Vimeo user, so I'm not in a position to know if the whole thing was overblown or not.)
This is leadership.
Also, a good example of the sort of attitude we've come to expect from WP folks, and from which the sudden Pro-plan changes departed.
Caplan is the author of The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and he blogged regularly at Econlog for many years. His remarks are consistent with my own recent experiences; I've written on Wordpress since 2007: https://jakeseliger.com/ and, although I don't have the reach of Caplan, or have the need for some of the features Caplan does, I also find recent changes to be chalelnging. Two may not constitute a trend, but, if I were starting today, I'd use Substack or Ghost.
Wordpress options at this point are just stressful. Do I really need to keep track of page views? It’s like the same absurdity when it comes to font licensing. Every time I want to buy a font, myfonts wants to inject a tracking script to track how many people visit the site. And then the same people complain there isn’t money in selling fonts. Simplify and give less stress to customers. Explain that in the marketing copy. For SaaS where the marginal cost is diddly squat, increase in sales will most likely offset whatever last penny you want to squeeze from customers.
Marketing people just don’t get it. I’ve seen this happen in my own company, seen it first hand how it damages sales. Marketing that works with AWS doesn’t work with Wordpress. Totally different customer needs.
Ghost blog guys do it better but it can still be simplified.
Edit: I just checked https://wordpress.com/pricing/ – That looks very simple. Two choices, sorry for the rant, I was just going by the article.
Edit: There's its avatar Posthaven but the Posthaven blog hasn't been updated since 2017.
I see script injection as something similar to giving a spare set of keys out to your house.
They want me to give them a spare set for the privilege of paying for the paint I used for the walls?
License requires that you do not modify the font package they let you download which includes @import tracking.
I have an old site on their $13/yr custom domain plan that I'm probably going to let die this year because I don't wish to keep paying for it and it's not worth that hassle to restore to its original state on my own server.
Free tiers do not make any money. So they have, what, 6 GiB of quota (however you want to imagine "quota" implemented) for thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, for 18 years. That adds up! It's getting more and more expensive to run datacenters (I can only assume they are using their own datacenters, and not renting space, as they've been live for about 18 years) via fuel costs, etc.
This is the inevitable culmination of literally everyone in techbro culture telling non-techincally-minded people "If you would like a blog, you should use Wordpress. They have a high usage limit and are free".
It turns out when everyone is using the free tier, the company has to tighten it's belt a bit? Who would have thought, under capitalism, that a company could lose money. Unimaginable. Woah.
Sorry, what do you mean by "forever" in this instance?
10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years?
200 years?
500 years?
What if you start out being able to afford it but suddenly lose most of your funding overnight as result of bad press, and then have a court case on top of that?
What if millions more people are using the internet and blogging than ever before? What if file sizes suddenly inflate to the point that what was tens of thousands of images, is now only a hundred images?
The difference between 2002 and 2022, technology-wise, is extremely vast. 20 years is a very long time for a company providing a web service to have lasted.
This really doesn't hold up on any level, the more questions you ask about the conditions of "forever", and the more you bring reality into the whole thing, huh.
BtrFS can do it, and I bet that zfs can too.
If it comes to it, I’ll have to look for alternatives that are better and provide a GUI based editor. Subscription by email is something that visitors to the blogs seem to use. Transitioning that may be painful or impossible, but these aren’t sites that have a personal connection with the subscribers. A post about the move should suffice for those who are really interested in getting notified (as opposed to the majority who follow a blog in the hopes of their blog being followed in return).
So I cancelled the subscription, and hit the delete-everything button. Which refuses to work. Because I still have a subscription, see, so why would I want to delete things? So I could just wait until the subscription period ran out, at which point the button would presumably work, but at that point all my password-protected posts and pictures would also lose their password-protection, becoming free for all the world to see. So, no thank you. I'm being cagey with details here, but it's just vacation pictures of my kids, nothing special.
What to do instead? Click on each post, hit delete. Manually. No big deal, it's only a few dozen. But then, REPEAT THIS FOR EVERY PICTURE, because every picture has its own "post" in WordPress's database. Good thing I only uploaded TWO THOUSAND images. Seriously, clicking every single image manually was actually the fastest way to do it. Click all 2000 images (thank goodness there is that one view that at least allows multi-select), then click the delete button (and wait).
This was painful. Had I known this beforehand, I would not have started a Wordpress.com blog.
Also fun: at some point, WordPress.com had silently switched out all of my printable, high-resolution JPEGs for crappy, compressed WebPs. So I couldn't "just" import the Wordpress export into the next blog engine, I additionally had to finagle all of the pictures to point to the originals instead of the replacements. Of course this silent change had not in fact changed my storage quota. It still used three times the JPEGs' storage, which is why I wanted to migrate originally.
Or that Wordpress.com uses a custom gallery that does not, in fact, export correctly, so I had to redo all the galleries when I imported the old posts in the new engine.
Or that one time where they silently switched my theme, so all the galleries broke. And let's just not talk about the broken image upload if you're on anything but a rock-solid connection. (Hint: Gallery View, drag-and-drop, Edge, is the least unreliable process. The file picker, or directly inserting into posts, or Firefox or Chrome, just immediately quit as soon as the connection so much as drops a single packet).
The blog is now generated by Publii, which is delightful, but a very different animal.
TL;DR: Migrating away from Wordpress.com is even worse than using it.
Measure how much time it would take to remove 5 images, multiply by 400. Can you automate it in less? Note that you might learn something new, and because it is a one-time script, it can be super hacky.
I did actually weigh that time against how long it might take me to find/learn/use the API, but 20 minutes for a one-time task seemed preferable. Plus I could listen to podcasts.
Honestly, the painful part was re-importing all the original images and rebuilding all the galleries. But there was a convenient mandatory all-day online management training coming up at work that proved perfect for the job. That part took a good six hour, modulo some management training nonsense.
I just checked my old, free account and it still says that I have 3GB space cap.
https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrad...
I think a huge majority blogging on WordPress.com have no interest in learning the tech stack to run something like Hugo. The quick start for Hugo includes command line git, which will probably make 99% of bloggers stop reading.
(n-gate.com seems to have died, but the prediction that WordPress.com bloggers would switch to static site generators and use git for version control would probably qualify as an example of the comical HN-bubble.)
The procedure can't get a lot less technical, and for some people this may be the right thing. Plus, since it's a SSG basically, there is not much to worry about vulnerabilities.
I tried it briefly and decided it's not for me (don't exactly remember which drawbacks killed it for me), but I think the approach has some value to it in general.
I moved away from WP.com when they started putting ads on the free tier. I thought their business model was upselling some people, so monetizing the free version felt scummy. The fact that they're crippling the free version now makes me even more glad I moved away.
I agree with you about the ads on the free tier. Worse, the ads are extremely low quality. I complained about this (shaking my fist into the air, essentially) on my blog not long ago.
https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/02/08/why-i-still-recommend-wo...
So WP .com changed a bunch of stuff and there was no warning? What world are we living in where that's wise? And acceptable?
That said, if you don't use a domain you own and control then you're going to be a victim to nonsense like this. And while I understand everyone wants something for nothing, free is never free. If more people took the time to understand the hidden cost there would be less victim'ing.
But. Again. This isn't the first time a free / low cost offering has changed.
Virtual servers cost like a few bucks a month and you can easily set up a simple wordpress server in a few minutes.
Step two: done.
Looks like Substack is going to get a lot of new users...
We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.
…which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.
Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.
Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.
See: The Wright Brothers.
"web3", by the bulk of use, is a pile of crypto advocacy.
I want decentralization. I don't want web3. They're not the same. (Even if at one point they were.)
good example: git, fully decentralized. Github: centralized git
and of course web3 git: own a NFT of that specific revision.
Fixed that for you. NFTs don't store actual data, just links to them.
And having an NFT with a link to something really brings nothing to the table when talking about link rot.
All of the things GP mentioned were just open, free, ways to communicate without attachments. This is why they have been beautiful and exciting and often of higher quality and honesty.
The methods of decentralization already exist and would be known to people that frequent this forum.
"Web3" is a marketing term created by venture capitalists that want to fuse a tokenization layer to it from which they can extract perpetual payments.
Gatekeeping is essential to the modern web. Content is valuable and/or dangerous and therefore (b)locked away instead of freely copied. Some exceptions exist, of course, but we are very far from that 90’s vision.
Remember the slogan "information wants to be free"? I haven't heard that one in a while. Seems like once the Internet was profitable enough, everyone wanted their slice of the pie after all. Happens to every generation, I suppose.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away."
Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you can read the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions. Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements (that could look back at you), as well as corporations gaining powers that used to be associated with nation states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that it didn't have to.
I mean, we all read Snow Crash when we were teenagers and now the ones who grew up to be billionaires are all excited to build the Metaverse. Did Snow Crash “predict” that? Or is this just another (perhaps somewhat extreme) form of fandom?
Similarly, would there be as many scientists trying to figure out how to make a “warp” drive if Star Trek hadn’t popularised the concept? And if/when they eventually succeed in making warp drives practical, will we say that Star Trek “predicted” it?
It feels like there should be a better term for “making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced into reality by fans of the fictional work.” But I don’t know what that term would be.
visionary ?
“reality distortion field”-er ?
inspiring ?
I'm much happier with saying (for example) "Star Trek inspired the modern warp drive" (I mean, if/when a real-world practical warp drive exists) than "Star Trek predicted the modern warp drive".
Doesn't imply that Star Trek actually invented the thing, but does assign at least a certain causal link to it; not mere prognostication of it like "predicted" implies.
Thinking this requires some heavy anti-multiple discovery beliefs.
It's not that something closer to utopia was never possible. A lot of CS from the 70s was explicitly utopian. Even the Jobs "bicycle for the mind" idea was far more utopian than "Let's create a monopolistic monoculture with adtech and noise."
For some reason the cyberpunk writers chose not to imagine it or promote it.
Warp drive is similar. It seeded the idea of FTL in the popular consciousness and made it something almost everyone has heard of. Without that, it might have remained an abstract curiosity.
In Propaganda, Bernays says that instead of preaching at the public you need to dramatise the behaviours and beliefs you want to see the public adopt. The ad industry is based on this, but of course it runs through fiction and other media too.
Star Trek is one of the few attempts to dramatise a utopian future. Everything else is a wasteland of darkness.
And it has certainly had an effect.
It was done around twenty years ago (no less than eighteen).
It’s absolutely worthless (XSLT -shudder), but I was quite proud of it.
XSLT I think had some good ideas for making xml parsing more performant while avoiding some of the major issues that crop up when processing huge amounts of data.
As bad as the modern centralization is in a lot of other ways, I actually quite like the way Youtube works. Every video gets a unique id, a permanent URL and is immutable (with some exceptions). That means most videos from the very early days of Youtube are still around and accessible, while most of the Web of that time is long gone.
The Web really could need a more robust way to publish content, just throwing stuff on a server really isn't cutting it.
...as long as someone finds it worth paying the costs of continuing to run the blockchain, and the people who run 51% of it don’t decide to wipe out or change anything, and...
EDIT: nope, still not buying it. I can only make it work by analogy with bury->burial, archive->archival, and there's not enough there.
(forming nouns, especially of verbal action.): arousal, arrival, bestowal, betrothal, denial, disposal, proposal, rental, rival, reversal, removal, subdual, submittal, transmittal
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-al#English
That said, substantivization of adjectives is common. Even adjective is itself a word that was originally an adjective, but has been substantivized into a noun. It's a well-known linguistic process:
"Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)
This process has become especially common in Modern English as inflexional endings have been abandoned and speakers rely almost entirely on word order to deduce parts of speech. Converting a word from one part of speech to another simply involves putting it into the proper place in the sequence. However, substantivization of adjectives is not exclusive to English (in Latin, for example, you can slap practically any adjective into the neuter and use it as a noun, whence we receive such words as animal and dual).
Language in general is very flexible.
This is incredibly bizarre, I can't imagine where this "vision" came from. Storage was extremely limited and bandwidth was expensive back then; things were being deleted constantly. The first web forum I participated in (in 1996) only had the last week's worth of messages available, the older ones were permanently deleted. Back then if you were using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail you had to constantly delete your old emails because you'd run out of space. I would download stuff and then run out of hard drive space, so it would just be deleted and lost forever - nobody could afford more hard drive space.
Then the corporations came with their legions of desk jockeys, all competing with each other for promotions dependent upon squeezing the internet of every last drop of value.
The internet became less human, just like modern society. Everything about the almighty dollar. Human creativity and freedom be dammed.
we're already at ipv6 and web3.0 /s
deep/dark web does still exist
Creating a DNS server is beyond Googles abilities? Why will Google be unable to index it? If you can read the catalogue, they surely can.
> "Commercial operators will see no value in this parallel network"
If people are using it, they will want to put ads on it. Why wouldn't they? And why are 'hackers' separate from 'people who want money for their work' in this scenario?
Yes, it will be possible to show ads, but ads may link to sites within the parallel DNS system only.
Hackers, who want money for their work, are called security experts.
You can make exactly the same argument about the influx of new users (Eternal September memes, "then came all of the normies with their friends, all competing to get the most upvotes on their Reddit posts), the bloating of the web ("then came all of the hipster developers"), sexual content, or any one of another half-dozen side-effects of the internet becoming massively more popular than it was in 1990.
If anything, the web has more independent content on it than it did a few decades ago - you just don't see it because you frequent a small number of platforms, you're not investing effort looking for it, and Google's search results are incredibly gamed.
I have hundreds of individual blogs that I've bookmarked through link-following and reading Hacker News frequently, without even trying to amass a collection. If you were to actually spend effort tracking down independent content, then maybe you'd actually find some.
Moreover, the internet never became "less human", because it was never human in the first place. It was a network of computers, a technology - not your neighborhood, or anything resembling a community, because technologies are not communities. Your complaint is basically saying that the median website is more focused on profit than it was a few decades ago - which, aside from the fact that there's no evidence to back it up, is a meaningless complaint equivalent to the Eternal September ones. Sure, even if the median website is more profit-focused - so what? There still far, far more useful information, and interesting people to meet, than there were decades ago - and the internet is available to everyone, as opposed to just those with dial-up (or whatever).
Things used to be more ad hoc. People would create their own websites from scratch. There was less centralization. Every website wasn't a boostrap clone.
The pursuit of profit changed things dramatically. As soon as people started making big money on the internet, things changed. FOMO kicked in and the internet became the new gold rush.
Idk man, it seems like you just weren't there at the beginning.
Then came guns and cannons, depersonalizing it into a grisly slaughter at the hands of thousands of barely-trained conscripts.
If only we could go back.
With SEO copy content being useless to anyone but the provider and Google and the tech giants coming slowly but surely under scrutiny from lawmakers, it seems like there might be an opening to develop a more open web (commercially speaking) especially in those countries and regions that lost the "Big Tech" race.
I know HN isn't a fan of regulations but I think FAANG and friends overplayed their hands and the screws are slowly tightening.
You made me think… just search stackoveflow should be step 1. Roll out Google if desperate.
It just sucks that the solution to getting ranked on google is never "write good content" but rather "optimize for SEO"
(And more frankly, the forum board softwares haven't evolved gracefully)
There is a long list of extinction events in natural history[0], some smaller, some larger. In every case, millions of years of 'progress' were wiped out along with trillions of individual lives. And yet here we are! If it weren't for those past disasters, we would not be here.
It does seem wasteful to lose so much, at first. But then when you put it in context, you realize it's not as bad as other fates that have, can and probably will befall us. Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way.
> soviet union
what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing)
For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi.
For all that Facebook is getting blamed for enabling and distributing the rhetoric that led to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground.
[0] and as a non-American, I’d add to the Tribune list with things that most Americans I’ve spoken with do not even acknowledge, and of those who do acknowledge them, most favour.
True, but one cannot exist without the other. How would the US invade Vietnam (or Afghanistan) without industries to manufacture weapons and surveillance tools? How can they pillage all their resources without predatory industry collaborating with the occupier?
> For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi.
I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet. The Stasi was pretty bad for east germany but they held no power elsewhere: now every political police on earth is equipped with stasi-like superpowers thanks to Silicon Valley.
> that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground.
True, but Facebook had a choice: from what i read it was founded as a stalking/girl-rating site by geeky sociopaths, which is already pretty dark. But when they early on censored breastfeeding women and torrent links while letting nazi/misogynist content go rampant was a very political choice in favor of very violent ideologies, and they should be held accountable (not talking about the US judicial system which is just as bad if not even worse).
The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire.
And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation. Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.
> True, but Facebook had a choice…
All of which reflects badly on the business and its leadership, and yet is very very different to an actual repressive regime.
You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?
Even though I agree with you that Facebook going “freedom of speech for everything except the defining characteristic of mammals” is a bad thing, that’s peanuts in comparison.
The United States of America, always an ally and at service to friendly right-wing politicians from around the world.
"What was the sense at the time of the degree to which the United States was involving itself in undermining Allende’s government?
MS: I think most people knew, and part of this was because a scandal broke in 1972 that the Chilean subsidiary of ITT had lobbied the CIA to intervene and fund different renegade military factions in Chile to try to keep Allende out of office during that brief two-month window between when he was elected in September of 1970 and when he would be sworn in, in November 1970.
So it was fairly common knowledge that, despite the public declarations by the White House that they were neutral toward Chile or that they had no official oppositional stance to him, behind the scenes, the CIA as well as the White House were actively opposed to Allende."
source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/salvador-allende-chile-coup-p...
great recent docu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
I didn't say "for hire" specifically. But they certainly pass intel to friends as part of the 5 eyes & other intelligence agreements, as well as on specific operations, such as in Rojava or in Ukraine.
Also worth mentioning although i can't find the link right now: ex-3letter-agency workers who started working for a private company contracted by saudi intelligence services who were employed for political repression (although the job was advertised as hunting down terrorists).
> And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation.
And yet the DHS does just that, both for deportations [0] and political repression [1].
> Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.
Snowden wasn't concerned by kidnapping: he was really afraid the NSA would drone the entire neighborhood he was hiding in (which is arguably worse), like USA police who not so long ago (1985) bombed an entire neighborhood (destroying 65 houses) and killed 5 children for the sake of political repression. [2]
But kidnapping is definitely a thing though maybe not by NSA: see CIA black sites and the inhumane treatment of detainees post-9/11 (waterboarding, etc).
> You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?
I appreciate the distinction. From my political activities, I'm acquainted with many political refugees, some of whom have been tortured while others had family members imprisoned/disappeared/executed.
But it's worth noting that our "democratic" (cough cough) governments have a strong history of doing that too, and only recently have they stopped because they've improved the subtlety of their counter-insurrection techniques. Still, there's plenty of people framed by State services [3], plenty of political prisoners [4], people mutilated by police forces or outright executed...
Some people would even argue that dictatorship/fascism is the logical byproduct of liberal democracy and its (supposedly enlightened) centralized control and enforcement structures. What if Trump had been reelected (or worse, had successfully seized power), do you think you would have kept your social comfort very long?
The same problems apply in France where i reside, where a new form of anti-muslim nazism is rising (thanks to the media oligarchy spreading FUD). The last time the nazis seized power, we had genocide after genocide, even long after WWII ended (see also, french genocide in Algeria and the 1961 Vel d'Hiv sweep).
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/13/dhs-migrants-guatemala-...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-pr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/30/black-panthe...
Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take) doesn't mean justice is rising.
You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries.
I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source).
But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water.
In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources...
I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.
have you been to India or another country with a similar wealth disparity in the global south?
Disclaimer: i'm not well-versed in anthropology/history, but this has been studied and debated by scholars [0]
If you've ever been to the countryside, you'll notice that everything feels slower. The fast, ever-working "lifestyle" we know today apparently originated in with early capitalism/industrualism and was itself subject to stark opposition (for example from the luddites, who contrary to popular belief were not anti-tech but rather early anti-capitalists).
When that new rhythm was expanded to all areas of life with mass-industrialization in the 18th/19th century, thinkers of the time pointed the absurdity to replace legal slavery with what they called "wage slavery". [1]
[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
A related point is why are we seeing equality as something desirable? We don't even question it anymore. This is a rather new development in the last 400 years or so and came about after Europeans arrived at America and started interacting with the natives, which had this equality concept much more advanced than what was common in Europe at the time. This also leads to the recognition of differences between people. What does it mean for us to be equal? I run slower than you, should I carry the urgent message over the mountains because we're equal?
Sorry to just add questions, but I think they are important questions people don't usually ask.
Should everyone be equal before the law? Is it possible if half the population can't afford a lawyer?
Should everyone's vote count? How does Democracy survive when a small group of people own half the country?
Equality under the law (both your examples may arguably fall here), but we also have equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, equality by mean reduction.
I personally agree that equality under the law is indeed desirable but some other types aren't.
Which ones are good and which aren't should be made explicit.
Then we can talk about how to increase the good equalities and reduce the bad ones.
1- a child of a billionaire that had private tutoring and connections
2 - a child that grew up in poverty and was malnurished, didn't recieve proper education or attention from parents because they were working two jobs or perished in some kind of tragedy
The thing is to have a destination, a goal. Which equalities are worth fighting for?
Envy. But it is not a new feature of human nature. So my question is: Why is it only now (for about the last 100 years) such a popular and successful ideology? What has changed?
Is it mass media? Or is it not a new thing at all, but things happen at a bigger scale? Meaning, before you'd maybe get envy bursts that'd devastate a village or a tribe, and that'd be it, now you get it at the country and planet level?
Compare that to the American dream where literally everybody has the ability to get rich (in theory, but the point is that now the "peasants" in general want to get rich).
This is a projection. Revolts are as old as power and inequalities. For the most well-known/well-studied of those, see this wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts
(it's important to understand that most revolts are silently crushed and never documented, and that even for those that were documented in their time we did not necessarily keep good track of those documents over the centuries)
I wasn't saying revolts didn't exist, just that they weren't about wanting to be rich.
Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced with something better.
For what it's worth, NK officially distanced itself from communism in 2009:
Both sides - "good" and "evil" - have the technology of this past century and on to utilize. Arguably the interconnectivity and instantaneous communication between any and every human on Earth has its advantages, however the internet can easily be censored once captured - and ideology is ripe around the world which seems to be the precursor to the majority of blind society being led down a dark path to a pit difficult to impossible to escape; if you even realize you're in a pit or not.
And in fairness, Orwell himself was quite optimistic about 1984-world's prospects. IIRC in an appendix he opined that the innate human desire to innovate with language could not be suppressed without losing language entirely, and so humans would (slowly, painfully) eventually find the cracks and destroy the system from within.
There's a significant proportion of tribal automatons out there that imbalance the arguments.
What I mean is, on the one hand, you're correct: Loss in some sense is the default state of the universe, there will always be loss and there are far worse things than losing some stuff on the internet.
On the other hand, it feels hypocritical to talk this way about instances of loss that we have control over. The current mass extinction is not simply some natural event that came over is and that we have to accept like Tolkien's Long Goodbye. It's a decidedly unnatural event that we know the causes of very well.
In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet is not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate business decisions that come from a specific trend of monetization.
>Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way.
- - - -
Seriously though, I actually think that the effects of mass digital information on society are going to be very, uh, interesting going forward.
I wonder about the people whose parents have been documenting their lives on FB since they were born, or the kids who have never spent more than a few hours away from their smart phones.
you cannot fight entropy, you can only feed it
It is the default. To keep information around "forever" you need people working on it forever. Current storage mediums don't even last 100 years. Browsers change, technologies get dropped (flash), people stop paying for websites (geocities). Bandwith isn't free. If you want to preserve anything you have to make an actual effort, put energy in. Things decay by nature.
I never know if the following sort of pedantry is welcome or unwelcome. I can only say that I would want it.
I think you're using "circumspect" incorrectly. My understanding is that it means to only speak or act with caution, not rashly, because one has looked around (spect: look, circum: around). Usually used to describe speaking discreetly, so as not to offend.
And my read of your comment overall is that you are more resigned to loss.
Edit: oh darn I almost missed the opportunity to use myself as the example usage: "I tried to be circumspect writing this comment."
As such, thank you for this.
That’s not to say we should roll over and let everything be lost like tears in rain.
Say what you like about lawyers, but one thing I think we'll agree on is that they rarely do stuff unless someone else is paying for their time (IAAL fwiw :)
I'm only half joking, because blaming lawyers deflects from the real issue here, which is the fitness-for-purpose of statutory fair use / fair dealing doctrine.
There are quite a few eminent academic lawyers worth reading on this topic, e.g. Boyle, Lessig, Litman, Vaidhyanathan.
Today's news just removed that option again. Internet is dividing further. Either you overpay for the convenience or self-host the whole stack yourself. Second one, backed by a static page generator looks more and more enticing now.
Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and calling it a day is a safe bet.
I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that security people make fun of Wordpress) it’s full-featured and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it’ll apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per month for the paid plan: I’ve had months that easily blow past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don’t know what will happen to the site if this happens in the future. That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if the company is entering a terminal decline.
Edit: I see the CEO has posted elsewhere to address this -- "Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount you're paying."
You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't.
As for forums, IMHO they've largely disappeared because they're a terrible format for maintaining information. I mean how many times have you done a search for "how do you do X?" and the first search result is a forum title asking exactly that... with no replies (side note: why doesn't Google downrank these scenarios?).
Or someone asks a question and there are a bunch of irrelevant responses (eg "first!"), outdated information, sidetracks, personal attacks over some long-forgotten beef, etc. A chronological thread is almost never useful for finding information. Pinned comments are just bandaids. Stackoverflow's ranked answer system is better but still has issues with stale information. It also relies on moderation.
As for Facebook, IMHO this whole hiding information in a walled garden I tend to find completely overblown for much the same reasons why forums are mostly useless.
The trend I absolutely hate however is using Discord as the primary repository for, say, an open source project. This is something that is meant to be available yet the discoverability is absolutely horrendous. Even if you're on the right Discord, the search is woefully abysmal.
This line of thinking seems insightful. Its flawed, though, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's glib.
There's an attempt to respond to an question of ought by gesturing at what is, as if that settles it. It doesn't, even if the premises are granted. Which brings us to the second thing: they shouldn't be.
People can and do forget things that are worth remembering. People remember things that are inconsequential.
Have we? I disagree. Why not self host with Ghost? [1]
I think a golden age of decentralized tooling (payments, content, etc) is starting to emerge [2, 3], you just have to be optimistic enough to see it. Let's not reminisce about the "good old days," bc the good days could be ahead too.
[1] https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/
[2] https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-dom...
They're disappearing because they don't want to pay what it costs in time or fees to keep their words around. If you believe enough in this-- and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hope you'll donate the time and servers and bandwidth to offer free hosting for these folks.
I agree that it shouldn't be pushed too hard, but the WordPress team probably doesn't have enough resources to maintain both.
So why break a perfectly functional feature, if they are on a tight line? Just to compete with Notion.io? Stop trying to gob the next market when you don’t have enough resources to maintain your own stack.
Remember when Ubuntu created the Unity desktop and made all Gnome users angry, just to try to gob the mobile/tablet market?
I’ve tried to use it for 2 years and left. Is Ubuntu the OS of any mobile phone today?
Basically WP did not want to cede control over something as essential as the editing experience to a bunch of third parties, but it was happening because of the limitations of the classic editor.
I have issues with some elements of how they approached the problem but doing nothing would have been a worse choice. I can't say that I've seen a simple, blog-like project where using Gutenberg was a big negative. The classic editor will probably always be around, it's just a wrapper around TinyMCE and there's tons of community interest in keeping it alive.
So why not just keep it as an option? Is it because 90% of current users would just do that?
Adapting to the block editor hasn't turned out to be the end of the world but it still feels like a solution to a problem that never existed.
They do offer it as an option, that's what the Classic Editor plugin is. It's provided by Automattic and automatically suggested when you open the plugin directory.
I personally really like the new editing experience. And had been wondering why WP was so behind the times for half a decade now.
WordPress provides hooks that make it possible to alter the editing experience in the first place. It would be far cheaper to simply alter the API's to stop making this possible. Of course, that would break a ton of plugins and turn away a chunk of the community. So, the big question still remains: why offering a fundamentally different editing experience through Gutenberg and block editing?
While wp.com and wp.org are different organizations, they are tightly intertwined through code, functionality and a shared design vision. WordPress itself has come a long way from it's original value proposition: a tool for bloggers. Today, it's used as a platform for managing media experiences that powers a big part of the marketing and online communication & publishing industry.
There's big money in being able to sell a seamless, integrated, flexible editing experience that allows publishers to quickly design and publish online flyers, set up marketing / advertising / informational campaigns and so on. WordPress isn't the only CMS that moves towards such an integrated media experience. Others, like Drupal / Acquia, are on a single trajectory as well. And then there's plenty of CMS'es like CraftCMS, OctoberCMS, Ghost and so on.
The downside is that the adding a layer of bells and whistles to the UI, as well as the added complexity to the theming API (block themes,...) tend to alienate the original user base. Many of those used WordPress because it sat at that sweet spot of being able to relatively easily deploy, customize and publish on your own personal weblog.
Sure enough, WordPress still offers to create your own blog. But it's not the same tool as it was some 18 years ago. Neither is the Web the same as it was 18 years ago. And so, to many of its original users, wondering whether WordPress is still the right tool to maintain a personal blog in this day and age is a very real question.
And for Unity, I was kinda late to the Unity party, but as my first linux desktop, I liked it a lot and used it almost half a year beyond EOL, because I didn't know which to choose instead (it's Plasma now).
I surely don't wanna praise Canonical here, but I would call them out for other things than Unity and their mobile efforts, e.g. Snap!
A big draw of WordPress is that non-developers can customise it with all the plugins that are available, so saying WordPress is secure as long as you avoid plugins nullifies this. It's terrifying that a contact form or caching plugin that you need to install because the functionality isn't built-in could result in a remote code execution exploit.
IMO the problem with the plugin ecosystem is not that they're required, but that so much of the well-known plugins are bloated crap.
Popular SEO plugins don't stop at inserting SEO tags into your <head>. They come with AMP integration, an online robots.txt editor, automatic content generator, competitor site analyzer, spam blocker, and even a rudimentary caching feature to speed up your site! Meanwhile, caching plugins offer to minify your javascript, photo galleries include a Stripe payment gateway, and contact forms come with their own markup language. Everyone is trying to do everything, everyone is stepping on everyone else's toes, and it's impossible for anyone to maintain all the unrelated features that are bundled together in each plugin.
There are really neat plugins that do one thing, do it well, and are easy to audit. Sadly, they are buried under all the spammy alternatives. WordPress really needs to invest in a better plugin search & ranking system that discourages bloat and offers incentives for high-quality code, perhaps by integrating some sort of static analyzer.
> ... Everyone is trying to do everything, everyone is stepping on everyone else's toes, and it's impossible for anyone to maintain all the unrelated features that are bundled together in each plugin.
If these plugins were in core though, they'd likely have much better security and be less bloated. The problem with the plugin ecosystem you mention I think stems from monetization - there's the incentive to stuff freemium plugins with functionality so you can charge for paid features. I really don't know how WordPress can reign this in.
I think the WordPress core that plugins build upon has bad security fundamentals as well e.g. the default PHP templating language doesn't even escape strings by default, most theme and plugin file permissions aren't locked down to read-only, Git-based versioning and deploys isn't built-in or widely practiced.
> There are really neat plugins that do one thing, do it well, and are easy to audit.
What plugins would you recommend? I find you can get pretty far with Advanced Custom Fields and an SEO plugin.
When you find yourself fixing bugs in plugins or trying to unlimit their functionality, because in their design someone introduced an unnecessary limitation via the chosen primitives and abstractions, then you are already clearly above the level of skill or knowledge, that Wordpress targets and are able to use more advanced tools to better effect.
Since Wordpress targets that not so experienced developer or simply hobby blogger audience and aims to make it simple for them to create a blog, that is also the group, from which most people arise to become plugin developers. That in turn leads to inexperienced developers using PHP, which has its own set of problems. For example treating HTML as a string by default, allowing for countless injection and XSS vulnerabilities. Or the incessant spam of PHP open and close "tags" in the code, intermingling PHP, HTML, CSS and JS in the same files, switching context so much, that, given a point in the code, you are no longer sure what context you are really in, instead of them using a proper template engine, or starting to not treat HTML as a string in other ways.
The problem is the knowledge and experience gap that is between a person, who can write a secure and useful plugin and a person, who starts writing plugins, because they are a WP user and got some motivation to start with plugin writing. PHP does nothing to reduce that gap.
Another problem in Wordpress itself is, that its recommended or assumed theme architecture encourages concattenation instead of composition. HTML is again treated as a string, that is to be concattenated from smaller parts. Instead what any good templating engine would do is to have blocks of things, which you define elsewhere and keep every part independent. No stuff like head tag open in one document and closing it in another, making the parts not reusable. Most people creating themes do not even think about this stuff. They just go with whatever WP assumes them to do.
> The problem is the knowledge and experience gap that is between a person, who can write a secure and useful plugin and a person, who starts writing plugins, because they are a WP user and got some motivation to start with plugin writing. PHP does nothing to reduce that gap.
That's my feeling. Anybody used to working with secure and well written codebases with CD/CI, tests and just basic Git versioning will want to run away when they see how typical WordPress sites work under the hood.
I would say, if you have a choice in the matter (many do not have that on the job or when a friend asks them to help them with their blog or shop built on top of WP), that at the point, where you start using a proper template engine and switch from the WP-assumed concattenation way of building things to a style of using composition, you are well beyond the point, where you should switch to something more appropriate for the job.
React makes user stylesheets more difficult to write and in my experience often creates tons of overhead in the DOM tree. Often sites do not use SSR, so all they show me is a white screen (because why care about adding any note about the site only working with tons of JS?) and I close the tab. When React sites actually work somewhat, they are usually sluggish and break basic browser functionality like the back button, bookmarkability and others. It takes a lot of care to avoid these issues, when developing with React, so I am not a fan of React or things based on React.
For me personally React is somewhat of a plague of the "modern web". I am sorry to express it this harshly. React and its ilk create a lot of pain for me. Not everything has to be a SPA. Most things actually do not have to be a SPA.
The other thing is that really at this point block editors are everywhere; they are in every email marketing tool, they are in some social media sites, they are in other CMSes.
A block editor isn't optional at this point. Nor is block layout editing.
And pointing at a million people who install a plugin to keep the classic editor functionality is not the same as pointing at a million people who don't want Gutenberg.
It's pointing at a million people who have a variety of reasons not to upgrade older existing content to blocks, but who still need to edit that content (e.g. complex/ill-advised shortcode setups, specific markup etc.)
(The Classic Editor plugin is not either/or -- you can decide to use it per post or per user.)
With this block madness it turned from a "semantic publishing platform" to some lousy PowerPoint for the web.
It's time for a hard fork, or for some new project/idea to disrupt it. It may take some time, but this is something inevitable at this point.
> With this block madness it turned from a "semantic publishing platform" to some lousy PowerPoint for the web.
But here you're wrong. There is now more semantic information available to content-transforming plugins, not less, thanks to the block editor.
The content is still stored as HTML in post_content (which they do to support exporting the content as HTML), but because of its annotations, you can get the entire block parse tree from a single function call, on the server side:
https://awhitepixel.com/blog/wordpress-gutenberg-access-pars...
So for the first time, the semantics of page content are exposed in a way that does not involve trying to parse chunks of HTML yourself (except the "classic editor" block if you want to parse into that).
> It's time for a hard fork, or for some new project/idea to disrupt it.
There's already been a hard fork of WP that might suit you:
Why on earth should I include these very beautiful and also very random bird illustrations and colors and typography into my website?
Are these "pattern" in the sense of reusable solution to common problems or just random and non-consistent design blocks?
Also, why on earth should I control border-radii, gradient, colors for every single block in the editor?[0][1]
This is complete madness. For two reasons at least: One, styles should be defined at least on a global level, using tokenized values and possibly exposed only to users with higher capabilities (designers).
Two, authors and editors should focus on content, not styling. Many of them are unable to take rational design decisions. Giving them the power of styling border radii or gradients on multiple buttons/elements in a random fashion on the same page, or even on the same website, is a recipe for a visual disaster.
Yes, you're right about how the semantic data may be stored. Everything else? I can still see a "lousy PowerPoint for the web" everywhere.
What's worst, is that they are pushing these bad design decisions really hard. Breaking existing websites in production. Maybe they'll make it right someday, at least I hope so, but it will take years time. This is why, as I said, all of this should be at least opt-in.
They are intended to be the former but I'm sure they will include the latter in some cases; WP is used by really everyone.
(The bird illustrations are just demonstrations of the content pattern, are they not?)
> Also, why on earth should I control border-radii, gradient, colors for every single block in the editor?
Personally I don't, but there may be reasons to do that. And it's important to note that WP now sees its main competition as platforms that do offer that. But one assumes those features can be switched off by theme editors; many aspects of Gutenberg can be (though it's three years since I did a serious Gutenberg site build so I might be out of date. You can certainly disable whole blocks, build pre-defined block styles etc).
> Two, authors and editors should focus on content, not styling. Many of them are unable to take rational design decisions. Giving them the power of styling border radii or gradients on multiple buttons/elements in a random fashion on the same page, or even on the same website, is a recipe for a visual disaster.
Putting aside the fact that you're basically sneering at users for wanting to make their own creative choices, that is only your call to make when you're managing the system, right? How is any of this different to the any number of plugins or TinyMCE Extended features that were available in WP before? At the end of it is still someone's creative discipline; nothing has changed and CMS developers should be a bit cautious about saying "no, you can't ever do that, because it's tasteless".
(Edit to add: one of the real problems WP will face if they took a taste-first approach is a proliferation of hacky, ugly blocks that exist simply to serve users who reject that particular approach. It is far better to have a generic, configurable interface for core block styles that can be locked down on a site-by-site basis than to encourage a world of hacks and workarounds)
It's still becoming more structured, not less. And a fork like ClassicPress won't change things.
If you really think all these things need to be able to be locked down tight: make the case, submit the patches?
I don't know about every other platform, but Squarespace for example is doing really well in bringing design consistency.
> But one assumes those features can be switched off by theme editors;
Maybe you can shut the light off but at the moment it is really hard or even impossible to tune them.
> Putting aside the fact that you're basically sneering at users for wanting to make their own creative choices, that is only your call to make when you're managing the system, right?
No, it's not about control. It's neither about taste. Individual users can do whatever they want. There are more complex situations where some random guy will use the largest font size in bold red for things he think are important and you still have responsibility for that output. In general, Gutenberg also broke the WP user capability system, so there is still work to do to fix it.
> If you really think all these things need to be able to be locked down tight: make the case, submit the patches?
Yes and I assure you I'm not the only one, but it's not something you can fix with a patch. There were really constructive discussions that led to the Global Styles concept for example. But oh boy it takes time. There is work on a theme.json standard that is still an undocumented, change-breaking mess.
And then, on the next update they put some 50kb of useless svgs in your html...
If you can do that, I would not hesitate to put WP online without a WAF. Almost all attempts on WP sites are scripted attacks on vulnerabilities that have already been patched.
Patches are good. Saying WP must be insecure because of all the patches is like saying a fancy restaurant bathroom must be filthy because it gets cleaned 4 times a day.
With WP it seems that the smallest of add-ons cost money. Even for stuff that is open source elsewhere, the authors have re-packaged it into a subscription service.
My other major gripe is the community. With almost any other platform you can find answers to questions pretty easy. With Wordpress over half the articles I found to issues were blatant SEO spam. Paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, tiny nugget of not useful info, BUY MY ADDON TO FIX THIS ISSUE FOR GOOD!
Often times I came across thread where a person would post: "Oh I know how to fix this, but please buy my consulting services to learn the answer".
As the article points out when companies start to charge they may not be charging for what we want. For example, I've just migrated from Gsuite free as their squeeze wants me to pay for features I don't want.
A lot of us have been spending a lot of time at the digital mall and may find ourselves back in our local, smaller shops. Maybe not a bad thing.
Website builder products and theme developers will wish they had a way to unionize once it happens because there is a lot of potential for the Automattic team to just take over that business themselves. And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come up in discussions, too.
This is an oddly hostile take about one of the best corporate citizens the web has, IMO.
There is an open question about what happens to the theme market generally once truly block-configurable themes exist (how many themes are necessary, really?) but pivoting that into some evil empire fantasy about Automattic -- a business that rescued Tumblr, that bought Simplenote to run it for free forever without ads simply because Matt Mullenweg depends on it -- seems a little odd.
Which is why I said it will take a long time, but it is heading in that direction.
They already released Patterns[0], which is very tiny inside look on where they plan to go with Gutenberg. Yeah, they might look cheap and not so attractive, but ultimately the ability to customize "blocks" is already there - it's just a matter of time before the capabilities of that customizer get cranked up to the max.
But -- considering patterns can be used by every third party theme in an open source CMS -- how do you get to talking about developers unionizing (that is, under threat from some corporate entity) and Automattic taking over that business from there?
The reason I read it like a corporate big bad wolf fantasy is that you wrote it like one.
I think because WordPress.org is heading into a direction of being a website builder itself, it will naturally hurt developers/businesses who make their living off of it.
Yeah, cool and exciting designs might still have a market, but for blogs, magazine sites, portfolios - that ~$50 for a premium theme might be better spent elsewhere.
I don't know if you're familiar with Webflow[0], but it started out as yet another website builder. And, in recent years they have added so many features and layout templates that I once got confused seeing the "Made with Webflow" badge on a landing page. It had all modern features like smooth page transitions, svg animations, cool gallery effects, etc,. You know, the things people pay that $50 for.
If this happens, or rather when it happens, maybe Automattic will have to think hard about what it wants the future to look like.
[0]: https://webflow.com/
And I must say, even though I have developed themes in the past, I'd prefer to see Gutenberg succeed in making most themes irrelevant. Themes that can be customised without PHP entirely seem to me to be a good solution to a lot of people's complaints about the untidy boundary between plugins and themes.
I am only familiar with Webflow from people who say "I've been trying to do this in Webflow but I'd prefer if we could do it in Wordpress".
Which is exactly the problem. Many people don't want to have heavy React ecosystem stuff on their Wordpress instance. There are reasons why they have not jumped on that train before.
People really do not care whether they are react components or not - but they do care if it is difficult to just type in a paragraph.
Gutenberg does have potential, but they empowered widgets while making the core act of typing up a document more difficult. If they fix that, it has potential.
Arguing that the most popular content management platform (ever) should just stick to plain text and shortcodes is not really sustainable.
You can just type paragraphs, without any clicking. And before, you couldn't just "wrap a paragraph" around a widget, really ever; shortcodes broke stuff like that routinely.
(They are still improving cross-block text selection -- at the moment if you select from one block to another, both blocks select completely. But there's a solution to this that is very imminent)
I also saw a lot of potential in Gutenberg’s blocks back then. It changed our blogging workflow in some very elegant ways.
This is how I see it.
I'm not sure why people believe there aren't smart people working on Gutenberg, which is an obviously challenging transitional strategy from blobs-of-HTML-in-a-database to a modern layout tool.
It's forward-looking, decade-scale development. There are loads of challenges.
Gutenberg has doubled down on blobs of HTML in the database: everything within `<body>` is stored as one big blob if using "full site editing", including additional markup defined using HTML comments. There is far less separation between data and how it's presented than there ever was with the "classic" editor.
This is not correct, surely?
Yes, if you're using FSE you're getting a template from that which is more or less a page. FSE replaces the header/footer/sidebar/widget area thing with an editable scheme.
That is, on one level, a big chunk of HTML -- but it is stored as a block graph (see below). And as far as I am aware the work has been done to allow it to produce HTML5 semantic tags?
There is an insertion point in the FSE template for content from hooks or the loop, which may or may not be returning block graphs. Post content can also now contain loops as created by query blocks, etc.
And yeah, Gutenberg stores as HTML internally.
But the distinction I am drawing here still holds.
The classic model was a blob of post content that was minimally post-processed to expand shortcodes. It didn't attempt to understand the HTML except in a minimal way to figure out if a shortcode should end up in a wrapper tag.
The rest of it was sent straight out into the page (after autop). TinyMCE then tried to deal with it, and had to recognise shortcode patterns. That is what I mean by a "blob": most HTML was handled in an unthinking, unprocessed manner. As text.
In the Gutenberg era they still do store HTML in post_content (for good reason) but it is in a form that can be serialised and deserialised into blocks -- it is not simply markup; it's a complete serialisation format.
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/01/17/editor-technical-...
https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/explanations/ar...
And unlike in the Classic Editor era where the HTML is handed to TinyMCE for it to sort out, and then sent back and stored as whatever it submitted (minimally filtered), WP can now serialise and deserialise that information as a block graph in both PHP and JS, and there are hooks at both sides.
Yes -- the stored content can be rendered in its frozen form (and will be, by any theme that doesn't know about blocks).
But it can be processed as a block graph instead.
So in fact the data is being stored in a much more semantically accessible way; not only dumb HTML processed with what amounts to regexps.
The fact that it's _also_ effectively HTML in post_content rather than, say, JSON in a new column is a design decision to maximise compatibility.
This thread is a nonsensical place to put criticisms of wordpress.org because I suspect rather less than about 0.001% of wordpress.com's customers are using that form of wordpress hosting (most customers do not have the right to upload their own code, or do any of the things that upset HNers).
Finally, I imagine the point of simplifying their price plans is to move to in-app modular upgrades to allow people to grow as they want?
Free resources are never free. I hope changes like this will pave the ways for the future of self hosting.
Were are you getting servers for $1/mo?
I'm not some sysadmin guru either, and mostly just look up tutorials when trying to achieve some goal. E.g. Install better caching system, optimize for ram usage, etc.
But yes, I have been hosting my sites like this for over a decade so for me it feels like second nature. In saying that, I am sure there are other platforms that provide free blog hosting and can be used as alternatives. Sadly, it means you'll lose the WordPress.com subdomain, but also access to their network of bloggers.
I remember in 2012, I started a poetry blog on WordPress.com and in a few months I had 2,000 subscribers - all of whom found me through their discovery feature. It was quite nice.
I have no sysadmin/web experience, but do understand the terminal reasonably well enough from my old job as a SWE.
I currently manage a Wordpress installation on a ridiculously performant [1] $6/mo DigtalOcean droplet without issue.
For me, I struggled a bit with their default Wordpress plugin, but there's this fantastic (also free) droplet called Cyberpanel. It's basically an open-source alternative to CPanel, and offers a graphical frontend for lots of common tasks (domain management, auto-renewing SSL, PHP settings, deployment of WordPress and other sites).
Migrating from my old host was as easy as installing a plugin (All-in-One WP Migration, IIRC) on both the old server and the new DO droplet and then updating the domain records to point to DO.
All in all, maybe a couple of afternoons of screwing around, but absolutely a worthwhile (and economically valuable!) skill to have.
[1] I think I measured something like 1000 page loads per second (with WP Fastest Cache; crapped out at around 30 views/s without!) before CPU hit 100%. There are free stress test sites online that let you do this.
I run my blog on a $25 (not month, overall cost) Raspberry Pi 2[1]. I use Markdown. I (ab-)use S3 for image storage. I use 11ty[2].
It doesn't take a coder to know how to do this. And it doesn't take a lot of time, either. SSL certificates are free, thanks to Let's Encrypt, nginx is an "apt get" away. That's all it takes if you want to blog(!).
If you want e-Commerce or shill your newsletter or whatever else uses blogging backends like WordPress, then $177/year is a steal. If you just want to blog, the weekend with Eleventy and a free copy of Obsidian[3] are cheaper, less hassle, and you keep your data in a format that's not Wordpress' pseudo-XML abomination.
Sure, some can’t be bothered. Yes, some would rather pay a professional who often (notably, not always) would do a better job. True, some things you fully grasp only after years of experience. Still, it’s not that difficult. You don’t need to know how to write an OS or build an ICE from scratch to do an adequate job. People routinely learn to do quite complicated things out of passion and/or necessity even when it’s far disconnected from their primary profession; spend some time with the right sources of information and you’ll be alright.
If you're capable of buying a VPS you're capable of sticking a USB cable and an Ethernet cable into something.
With VPS, you typically must know how to SSH and be able to find your way around the system entirely without a GUI (which could be jarring at first). Personally, when starting out, I was always anxious about messing something up so that it makes the server impossible to boot remotely.
Pi, meanwhile, is just another computer you physically have and can do all the normal things you do with a computer you physically have with. It has some hardware peculiarities, but then it’s also simpler to set up than building your own desktop (which, by the way, is another thing non-engineers routinely do).
Right, but you are comparing your setup and its costs to wordpress.com, which is not self-hosted and does not require that understanding.
However, even after reading your comment, I am not convinced an average guy will understand any of those terms. I've seen this. I've seen many many people struggling to set up a blog. Heck, even I struggled about this back in the day.
$6 deal is better when you work for free or can find someone to work on it for $9/month.
$15 per month premium includes:
* Premium Support
* Premium themes
* Sell products with WooCommerce
* Collect payments
* Automated website backups
I think setting these up will cost much more in self hosted version.
I'm fan of self hosting, but when I calculate it to my hourly salary then self hosting is very expensive.
Also, what if I don't want many of those features? And I don't. This is why the previous plans, which were more graded, made sense. The annual billing option on the other hand caters to customers in need of all these features, who are also likely to be the sort of people who'd be willing to pay $180 at a go.
But I prefer hostgator. Maybe not as performant but it effectively serverless 0.1 tech that makes it easy to add sites and administer.
> Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium, business and e-commerce.... But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB.
> Imagine looking for a good-quality surgical mask to wear in a park but finding out that the most reliable vendor in town has suddenly decided to sell only chemical safety masks.
Yes, it contains Premium support, premium themes, commerce, payment support and automatic backups, but how many of those features you'll actually utilize? Why would you want to purchase their automatic backups when you already have a system that backs things up better? Why should you pay for their commerce system when you already using a better third-party one?
It's not "But it's loaded with features" here, instead it's "Yes, it's loaded with features. But I (author) don't need most of it".
My electricity price increased 50%. I did not get any extra features.
>>For me the problems are the massive reduction in storage from 3GB to 0.5GM along with this new notion of maximum views, set quite low. I think those two combined will likely drive a lot of people away.
>> Me too I am only seeing my storage as 500mb and I have had a free site since 2013.
Those people are whining because they have used service for almost ten years and never paid a penny for it. People should understand that things are never free forever.
500MB is enough for free plan. If you use more then it is reasonable to get premium plan or host it somewhere else for cheaper.
Storage gets cheaper per MB
They did have a price adjustment on storage, though… a 31% reduction for some use cases: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/s3-storage-class-price-...
Free users aren't generating revenue for them. In the past, it seemed like businesses had this idea that infinite free users would somehow lead to infinite revenue, but they seem to be moving away from this philosophy.
Storage has been getting cheaper every year. If a business is skimping on their free plan, it's not because of rising storage costs.
Unless you now have the overhead of a massive VC-funded organization that needs to grow and hit the expected return multiples. People are “whining” because this is a 180° turn from Wordpress’ origins and their mission of “democratizing publishing”.
It is also a ton of money for anyone outside the US and EU - it’s one month’s rent in most of Brazil.
Giving away something for free, is something I will never do again.
Indian people were infamous sending their dick pics.
Personally that’s way too little, and I’d absolutely go for a managed option
You can publish, have a legal claim on name and service and close to no smallprint. You can publish whatever is legal under local law and are responsible for it.
And: do not use any content management tools. They require a lot of attention over time. Write html. With any text editor.
I too maintained a free WordPress blog which, I suppose, will be impacted by this. But my nostalgia for keeping the musings of my 28 year old self alive and well SHOULD cost someone money...and that someone should be me.
OTOH... I do feel this is problematic. Wordpress.com isn't FB/Twitter, but it is a meaningfully big part of social media... and therefore all media. A lot gets lost when the inevitable content loss happens.
There are moral responsibilities and societal needs here that companies aren't going to assume. We should be accumulating an accessible and useful content commons. That's not compatible with commercial content hosting individual bloggers/users. I now think that the rights and wrongs of free speech in our era is much more complicated than I had previously thought. But whatever free speech ought to be, it cannot be both free and under the control of a few companies... even those at wordpress.com's scale.
Can we really not just have a freedom (as in both freedom & $0) in the blogging space? Can't hosting be solved with an open protocol, or something like a wikipedia fondation?
What we have now for social media really sucks. It sucks in terms of freedom. It sucks in terms of moderation. It sucks in terms of fake news, propaganda & such. It sucks in terms of power dynamics. The software/UI itself often sucks. Transparency sucks. Fairness sucks. It's not nice that content creators have to suck up to algorithm gods. The adware/spyware sucks.
The fact that 2007's bogging golden age optimism resolves to this is terrible. Can it really be that the worldwideweb is possible, but blogging is only as resilient as your deal with a hosting company?
In fact, perhaps if he wasn't wasting his storage space with pretty but giant and irrelevant photos, the reduction in storage space wouldn't be as much of an issue.
On my PC the menu is so small I can barely read the text, I think because he uses a gif as a menu combined with an image map. Wtf.
On the main page there's some images without clear purpose and links with the titles "Taste", "Smart" and "Weird". No idea what that is about.
I opened the site on my phone and it renders the page in the upper left corner and I have to zoom in to see what it shows.
Is this the site which you think he should take design cues from? In my view the PaulGraham.com site is a complete train wreck.
This is legitimately the worst looking and confusing site I’ve seen in a while, and should be used as an example of how to not design a site :)
Even the blog post themselves are pretty bad with left-aligned columns and the most low-contrast header (the “P A U L G R A H A M”) on the top. It looks like some sort of CSS mishap rather than something deliberately designed.
"Private Site
This site is currently private. If you would like to request access, we'll send your username to the site owner for approval."
My company created a static site generator which pulls content from notion. You get the WYSIWYG editing of notion, with the speed and simplicity of a static site. You just have to find a place for static site hosting - github pages, firebase, netlify, etc. There are plenty out there.
What triggers the site to be rebuilt and deployed? This works well with how pages are usually created and edited? How about being able to preview what the deploy will look like before publishing? I haven't used Notion much btw.