The WordPress 100 Year Plan
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wordpress.com
Wordpress is only 20 years old, and whilst it’s currently a viable company there’s no guarantee that they will be so in another 20 years.
As for 100 years? Sorry, not buying it (both figuratively and literally): we’ve already seen a huge change in technology that has already deprecated many a tech stack, and that change is only increasing in velocity.
$38K is a huge sum to put down when there’s zero actual proof they’ll even be able to sustain this for 25 years, let alone 100.
And I would not bet against http, html and fundamental E/R databases. Http and html evolution can be managed by Wordpress inc. The database migrated.
I am worried that a cobol/VB style like decline of PHP is too much for the company. Because maintaining PHP is most likely very costly. But I might overrate this.
The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.
* How many new developers are picking up PHP
* How many remain using it after say 10 years
* How many end up contributing to its tooling and ecosystem
If those numbers are good in absolute terms, then I agree with you.
I'd consider Perl to be a dying language, not PHP. I'd also expect an active language's tooling to improve over the years, so that probably doesn't stand out too much for me (there's brilliant people working in various languages, in PHP I consdier Nikita Popov as one of them).
This approximates to a pyramid scheme; or maybe, the US Social Security system is another great correlate. The only way it keeps going after even only ten years is raising prices for new customers subsidizing existing customers.
That’s not going to happen, but such a small percentage of customers would sign up for this it’s effectively a non issue for the viability of the company.
Honestly, I think some regulations requiring some kind of independent trust should be required for any ‘lifetime’ subscriptions. Sorry we uhh renamed the product, your subscription is no longer valid. Sure, then refund my money.
It’s worth exactly as much as it states.
Investing this money now might be beaten by inflation, competition or happenstance. But it could also grow the business and turn into orders of magnitude more value.
I agree however that Wordpress does not have such a long term prospect.
As of now, it’s both falling behind and moving into wrong directions at the same time from a technical perspective:
It’s increasingly more complex and unstable for non-technical users.
It’s bloated, full of gotchas, very hard/finicky to integrate with standard PHP tooling and has comically bad performance. So it deters developers.
It won’t go away anytime soon. But I very much doubt that it will be as relatively popular in even 10y as it is now.
This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.
Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.
Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.
Just one question as an aside: Would you recommend self-hosting WP these days?
I am curious about the market and who buys license for the theme builders also, but only if you would care to write about that.
Generally the people who buy licenses for these products are either people who want to make their own website with WP and stumbled upon the website builder tools or, more significantly, agencies or single person companies who are making a lot of websites for small businesses. Lots of restaurant, small businesses, etc need simple websites that look good, have the info there they need, are editable without blowing up and don't want to spend a lot of money. So they will pay 400-1000 dollars to their web dev who buys a website builder license with part of it. He will know the ins and outs of the tool (like my photoshop comparison earlier) and can whip up pretty unique but "gets the job done" website on the cheap with the tooling that provides a huge amount of short cuts. Basically these tools allow beginner / non-super technical designers or web devs to short cut most of the coding, as I said before. Someone like Elementor, probably the biggest company in the space, is used by a huge number of people and businesses big and small.
On the hosting front, there are a lot of good and cheap hosting options these days. Self hosting is so much better than its ever been as PHP security and in general VPS security is a lot better that it was in the past. I don't want to recommend someone specific for paid for hosting because we may have contracts with hosting partners and like the previous post these opinions are my own and I like to keep my HN posting separate from my business but I'm more than happy to talk about that via email as well. Wowzers that was a run on sentence. Hope this helps!
I'm going to bookmark your post so I have it now. This is all interesting and exciting to think about, and it makes me think of "Should I perhaps set up another VPS?" and "Should I look into becoming a website builder using some of these tools?" or maybe "Should I learn about the WP plugin ecosystem and consider becoming a plugin developer?" and many more. I do know from past experience though that going down any of these routes could turn into something that is quite time intensive and quite likely would not yield immediate results (and my time is, at the moment, mostly spoken for, and I have a full-time job). Still, it is definitely something I am thinking about, and I guess another thought that came about after reading your post was: "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a low-or-no-cost (low-cost most likely) way for non-tech-people to self-host things?" A sort of community anti-cloud VPS thing. Maybe run by some devops folks for very cheap, with the option of providing support and resiliency features at some cost. You just made me think: The idea of a small business or restaurant needing a low-touch website with the capability to self-update it is of course a very good one that makes total sense. And taking it a step further, wouldn't it be neat if stores could run their own online shopping sites without the need to pay someone like Shopify the large amount they do, and if restaurants could run their own delivery logistics without restoring to DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Skip the dishes? I guess I lean to the free open-source direction and envision a tech community that could keep wiki docs on how to self-host these things and the folks who ran them could update the docs as needed, and write code as needed, and so on. I don't know if what I'm saying is at all realistic; I just like a few things you have said, like Vanilla WP being one of the best things to happen to the web; I am guessing it just gives so many people the ability to have a nice website... I think it's a nice avenue of exploration and I am getting fed up with the centralization of all things web.
When we except that both what we create and ourselves are transient, life become better. Concentrate on the now.
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Edit: not sure which reply to reply to, so commenting here.
My badly made point was that trying ourselves to insure the longevity of something we create is not the best use of our time and resources.
If we create something of value, and it means something to other people, it will spread, and it will be saved for the future and future generations.
Society saving things for the future is essential, and we generally do a good job of it.
Why "instead"? Do both. Writing a book doesn’t really help preserving information: unless you’re really famous you’ll sell a few copies that will go lost, and in 10-20 years it will be impossible to find a single copy of the book. Plus a Wordpress blog is accessible from anywhere, while a book –again unless if you’re very successful– is usually distributed in one country only.
Tell that to the 70% of silent films that are permanently lost.
Do we really miss them?
Ever heard of the library of Alexandria?
Yes: the end of the library of Alexandria had virtually no impact on the preservation of knowledge.
The library of Alexandria slowly declined for various centuries, and was progressively replaced by dozens of libraries in the rest of the world. We don’t know how much of its materials was lost in time, but the key thing is that knowledge of that time was not preserved by libraries but by copies of documents. What we know from Antiquity is mostly due to scribes and monks who spend their life copying content, while libraries have been mostly useless for that purpose.
History is made by people who want to make it. Shelley's Ozymandias is a paradox, not an admonition.
This is easy to say if you're not involved in the work it takes to keep something alive.
For example, the public Norwegian broadcaster NRK lost its recordings of the moon landing (which was also the first night sending) [1], which I would consider quite valuable. Indeed, there is a long list of lost TV recordings from the early days of television [2].
[1] https://www.nrk.no/urix/jakten-pa-den-historiske-apollo-send...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast
What would you say?
What would any historian say?
What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"?
> Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.
Certainly true. But some things are very, very much worth preserving and we don't necessarily know what those things are in the present.
It already seems intuitive to me that people are far too obsessed about storing anything and everything, from photos to notes to random thoughts and more. To me it seems pathological. I saw one estimate that is around 500 exabytes already... it looks a lot like those people whose basements are full of unused junk, only in virtual form. I also noticed for sure that people keep way too much stuff they never use...I've rarely met anyone who doesn't. That certainly carries over to their virtual life too.
Humans have natural instincts which makes them hoard because that would have been adaptive in times of scarcity (i.e. our ancient past). Now, in times of surplus, that instinct is mostly maladaptive.
So I DO posit that humans on average place a higher value on hoarding than they should, and that if they actually took the time to override this basal instinct with higher brain functions, then on AVERAGE they would be happier.
I don’t exactly disagree. But this sounds a lot like hoarding.
Think about it in terms of art. Social media has exploded with various digital artists of all kinds. With the tools available to us these days, I'd also posit at least some of that art in a few hundred years would be considered beyond even the renaissance masters.
However, the sheer amount of it available today compared to the past likely means most of it will be lost to history.
Taking the same logic in reverse, how many masterpieces in history were lost because they weren't important to store, or their creator went undiscovered for their entire lives?
The same can be said to all sorts of knowledge and insights. Given that digital media is largely some kind of knowledge storage, we'll likely lose a ton of those too.
Now, the problem is that LLMs are polluting our digital record. It will become harder and harder to distinguish human text from bots.
It seems like the best way to guarantee that something runs for 100 years, actually; build an investment fund whose mandate is to keep some basic websites up on a couple cheap servers.
Edit: Even if technology changes, that's just a maintenance job every year - keeping the underlying infrastructure updated. Some years it will be cheap, some years it'll be a bit more costly, but ultimately it's not impossible at all, especially if they've got a big number of clients (and thus a big fund to draw from).
I'm sorry, I don't understand your point.
If you invest that $38K then you will have $33M after 100 years time.
If you paid that $38K to Wordpress then you won't see a cent of that money back.
I don't see how it makes financial sense to give $38K to Wordpress rather than investing it yourself and paying monthly hosting fees.
You're paying for the security / peace of mind, and I'm sure you can picture some people preferring to do that than to self-manage hosting content (and updating technology over time) for 100 years.
Edit: Having said that, I don't think Wordpress is the right fit for this. I think it should've been a separate company, with a separate brand and a separate legal structure that enforced keeping things up for 100 years and enforced using the investment profits to keep the content up and maintain the infrastructure even as technology changed.
WordPress 100 years plan sounds like FM radio 100 years plan. Nice to read. But can that be useful?
We're already seeing a sharp decline in computer ownership, most people only have a phone these days.
Point being that in 100 years, the webternets of today could indeed be comparable to the FM radio, but that doesn't mean there won't be people who want it.
EDIT: Grammar
It's easy to imagine how a service like that could have started in the 60's and how it could have moved (or copied itself) online when the internet came along.
One small example: TLS. Years ago someone may have very reasonably asserted “my website doesn’t really matter, I don’t need encryption, it’ll run forever without SSL”. Then, the browser vendors universally made SSL practically required. Then; it became TLS, not SSL. Encryption algorithms change every few years. But; ok; maybe you can get some high mileage by automating integration with LetsEncrypt and praying they survive (and remain free).
A three line HTML Hello World is quite likely, I’d argue, to survive and still render in 2120, discounting nuclear winter and such. But to keep a three line HTML hello world WEBSITE hosted and running until 2120 with minimal human intervention would require many magnitudes more executing code automating interface compatibility with the changing world around it; and every line of code you add and expect to execute is a liability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957573
I think it's a clever offering by WordPress. I wouldn't pay for it, but it's an interesting technical challenge to think about!
"A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared."
I guess the first obvious takeaway is that Wordpress themselves are likely to not exist long enough to honour this deal. There's also the issue that companies that offer lifetime deals typically only do it when they are extremely cash strapped and it's basically a gamble that the initial influx of money can tide them over until a more stable revenue stream can be found, at which point all those lifetime deals are liabilities that will forever suck the company's profits.
But from the other side, no personal blog is worth preserving longer than your expected lifetime, so this is presumably aimed at companies, especially given the price point. Very few companies will survive for 100 years, so they'll probably never see the benefit of this as the probability of both them AND Wordpress both surviving 100 years is even lower.
Then there's the pricing. Assuming the money could just be invested to break-even against inflation, and so you can consider this as $380 a year, that sounds excessive for a blog hosting platform. It's also more than their "Business" tier. That said, it's actually less than their "Commerce" tier and their "Enterprise" tier is $25000+ per year. I'm guessing they won't allow the latter to transfer to this deal, so it's hard to see who they actually think would even buy this.
Today, maybe. For the human costs of hosting support in 2123, given the cost of inflation, it might not be, and these plans include technical support.
(Although you could also that the technical support work on most of these 100-year plans should be dropping over time too - especially if the human being involved passes away. You could even argue that AI might be doing the technical support in 2123.)
In any case, I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation. Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable.
To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.
Wordpress is asking you to make a one-time payment of $38k NOW. Not in the future.
Inflation means $38k right now is worth a lot more than it will be worth in the future.
So I don't understand how you came to the conclusion that the plan is cheaper after taking inflation into account.
Otherwise things like “as many copies as you can” is probably the best bet.
In any case, any initiative for fighting link rot and keeping a healthy internet are really welcome. So in that regard, sharing their playbook with their learnings on how to guarantee 100 years of service could be an incentive for other companies to offer something similar.
I hope they release more details about this service, because the video is cool but there is almost no material information on the site.
Setting aside the weirdness of making a 100 year commitment with a 20 year old company, what really does happen a century from now? Will anyone know whose responsibility it is?
While domains have come and gone, sometimes multiple times, each of my users has had a working public_html all that time. Needing to register domains and actively maintain them is definitely a shortcoming of the Internet.
There are just too many examples of companies promising things, often enough fully meaning their promises, only to be bought by big, evil companies that quickly toss those promises. Unlimited becomes limited or more costly. 100 years, I can easily see, becomes ten years at a time unless you confirm and update your billing information periodically to pay for incidentals and overages.
Also, Wordpress is horribly bad at future compatibility, so if you're going to set up a site that can't have plugins because those plugins won't work in five years, why not just make a static site?
The 100 with the Earth in the middle is the cherry on the cake.
In a 100 years, the problems of Earth will be much bigger than accessing blog posts of this time. Besides, isn't archive.org taking care of this for free?
A better investment would be to plan 38K USD worth of planting trees and environmental ventures.
They aren't an internet utility we can take for granted. A lot of things could happen in that time. They're under attack for various reasons even now, and we don't know that the tech and political landscape looks like in the future. Having the first party content host make plans for preservation doesn't hurt.
Very few blogs or posts feel relevant a year or two later, let alone a decade. The only people buying this are those with Balenciaga trainers who drink wine shilled by influencers
Inflation happens because people don't like to shop (or perhaps because they don't know how to)
I'll give you the address if you like native american aromatherapy
A 5GB gold DVD with 100 years archival life is $10.
A safety deposit box in one of the largest banks in America can be as little as $30/year.
IMO, both the bank and the data in the dvd/tape have more chances of survival in 100 years than WordPress.
$38K is an insurance policy that will keep the marketing front end of your company's site online "forever", long after you run out of VC money and shutter the company. Keeps your vanity up and running, your fond memories.
It turns your hosting costs from a monthly expense to a "permanent" capital expense that's already paid for.
Look, how old is internet right now? How much did it change since the beginning? How often do you look at a product online on an early-90s website and think "oh, that's good marketing"?
I don't think any serious business should see this as a "perfect use case". Just a big waste of money, that is.
No, the business will be closed. It would just serve as an archive of history.
Honestly, we are generating too much information, have problem archiving them all and too low attention span to consume/sort them out
As far as history is concerned, a wikipedia page describing the company and it's activities would most likely suffice.
The biggest negative is your newborn might not care or want whatever domain you picked out.
So the only real option is to buy tens or hundreds of domains and keep it secret. Then reveal the domain that most closely matched them when they’re of age, whatever that may be.
I have my own domain(s) and my kids could have subdomains as DNS intended ;)
Think like a photo book, but it's public.
You can download all of Wikipedia (text) in 5gb. 5gb was a lot in 1980, nothing now. So we need revolutions in storage that would allow at least some backups of archive.org and such outside of the 1 Internet Archive charity.
Current generation WordPress regularly updates automatically with no issues, and I’ve seen no incidents with security updates for PHP either.
Unfortunately you need several of these to make any web site plus a theme, so yes, it happens.
If you have so many clients you know it well that you can't upgrade from php 7 to 8 without the site crashing. Well, unless you are really lucky.
For example because of latest updates to PHP 8 they have deprecated the $var{key} syntax - who the fuck uses that?! I did not even know it existed until some of my clients' websites crashed after I updated PHP.
It's an absolute minefield since we moved on to the PHP 7 branch. I am glad for PHP because the language sucked before because of how lenient it was. But it creates a lot of work for me.
This is not unique to WordPress, this is how most any software running on an interpreted language would behave if you updated the interpreter by a major version and did not update the software to a supported version.
Major version upgrades in PHP are the only time BC breaks are allowed, for example.