WordPress.com launches paid newsletters | Hacker News Reader

WordPress.com launches paid newsletters

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96 pointsmarban32 comments

Maybe I'm a little picky about naming, but I've always found it so confusing that "WordPress" is the self hosted open source project and "WordPress.com" is a project like Squarespace/Wix that uses WordPress. In addition to confusing, I even see it as somewhat misleading. It would be so much better if WordPress.com was called, I don't know, Spot. I think that for the branding of both projects it would be healthy.

The CMS project is hosted in Wordpress.org. The commercial service as Wordpress.com. It's perfectly clear which is commercial and which is the community/project.

It's just that both use Wordpress, the technology, and both were started by the same person, who created Wordpress the project.

Same with Ghost. The service is also hosted in Ghost.io, and called "Ghost" - same as the open source project CMS.

Awesome that they are using the block editor to design the newsletter.

10% fees for the free plan is not to bad

The block editor is a disaster

I find it just great. What's disastrous about it? It's the right approach for web content.

I developed a plugin for it. None of the external plugins worked properly.

Creating a block plugin is super complicated, before you just added a php file, even one line in functions.php was enought for a shortcode, now I have to create a different npm project for every block.

I happen to know how to do it, but it's not easy anymore.

That's just dev side of it.

UX is a disaster, structure and content are mixed. So for users its hard to understand what's content and what's structure.

The design in edit mode and real is very different often.

Hard to see where you are adding things

>I happen to know how to do it, but it's not easy anymore.

Yes, but it's also more robust and modular than the easy "mixed mess with direct access to everything" that was the way you added such stuff before.

>UX is a disaster, structure and content are mixed. So for users its hard to understand what's content and what's structure.

Not sure what you mean with this. How is structure and content mixed UX wise? If anything I found it more separated than before: a title for example is it's own block, not just an element in a mess of HTML inside a textarea that has the whole post.

I've had given the block editor to users with experience from old WP and new WP and they didn't have any problems (or at least not any more than they'd have with the old editor).

So this is SubStack revisited I take it

I mean, WordPress has been around for decades. Substack came along and basically made “WordPress with subscriptions” - so now WP has that functionality too.

They've had paid subscriptions for years. All that's really new in this announcement is the page templates. The submission title is editorialized and inaccurate.

Is that bad?

I use ghost and have had a good experience, but more competition is great.

Do you have any feedback on Ghost? How do you like it? Any room for improvement?

I’m using Ghost too, for a daily paid newsletter since early 2022. Super happy. Lots of somewhat basic customization features were missing back then, but have been added since. Email support always responds within 24 hours. The pricing is fair (I personally like the yearly fee instead of having to pay a commission), and reliability has been overall fine - there were a couple of shorter outages (up to a few hours) but nothing too serious.

Does WP.com still syndicate your content across the internal network? I was using it in 2012 for a blog about creative writing and very quickly amassed over 2,000 followers because of the said syndication.

I haven’t touched it in years, have spammers obliterated the platform?

> I haven’t touched it in years, have spammers obliterated the platform?

I family member uses it routinely and I haven't noticed anything like that.

This is such a good idea for them

Was wondering when this might come out. Ghost doing it and having such success seemed like something that would spread to competitors.

Doesn't anyone know if this functionality will come to the open source version?

I think the paid content features are part of Jetpack the plugin.

As part of their proprietary SaaS though.

There are gobs of membership site plugins if you want to run it yourself. Wordpress as a piece of software has been used for this for a very long time.

This might be the source: https://github.com/Automattic/newspack-newsletters

Wait until they learn about AI in 3 or 4 years :)

Enlighten me about AI please.

oh just a joke given how far behind the hype curve they are on paid newsletters :)

If you're paying wordpress.com $300/year for all their features, I can highly recommend switching to AWS Lightsail for 90% savings. Exorbitant pricing.

Not sure who your comment is targeted to, but I've been working with a friend's mom - 55ish - on her WordPress website. With no tech experience she was able to spin up a site with a custom domain and get very close to launching but got bogged down in some WooCommerce details. She was also using Elementor which seemed to not play nice with WordPress.com's hosting. I suspect this is why Elementor now has their own hosting.

My point: this highly motivated but completely inexperienced woman was able to build a website on her own and get very close to launching.

I have no experience with AWS Lightsail. I'm sure it's a fine platform, but to me WordPress.com is really making the web accessible to a lot of people that otherwise wouldn't have access. Maybe it's not worth it to many with a tech background, but for her, WordPress.com is making her dreams come true.

I haven't used Wordpress in over a decade but one major selling point back then was the security. Standalone installations were hacked left and right. Often because you postponed updating. They sorted that for you.

One may complain about the prices for specific SaaS offerings, but mentioning Lightsail as a alterantive to a completely managed offer is not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

Lightsail is a pretty good middleground between fully-managed and fully-self-hosted, though. One of my WP blogs is on Lightsail and it was <5 minutes to set up and be ready; and TBH I'm pretty darn devops-challenged.

I got burned by Lightsail: did you know that if your instance exceeds its CPU "burst" quote for too long they disable the instance, without offering a clear way to get it working again?

Some notes on how I recovered from that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/aws/recovering-lightsail-data

Maybe they've fixed that issue now? This happened to me in 2021.

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