Am I the only one horrified at the thought that people will still be using Wordpress in 100 years? I can't really imagine the world in which that happens, it has to have the kind of bleakness to it that in its own way surpasses cyberpunk dystopias.
Similarly it doesn’t seem too unlikely that people would be publishing on a platform called Wordpress in 2123.
If there’s anything left of the original PHP code, it will probably have been transformed and rewritten many times over by AI because we already have the capability for that, just missing some context window to process a Wordpress-sized code base.
The NYT is a media property and a trademark, they can choose to deliver their content on any platform they want.
Wordpress is one of such platforms to deliver content (like the hot metal typesetting machine). Other sites could still be around and ditch Wordpress for any other new platform that comes up. And GP would be horrified to think that 100 years from now, people would still use said platform to deliver their content.
Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.
Wordpress is the technology, if it changes, it becomes something else.
That's the difference, explained.
They own the Wordpress trademark just like NYT owns theirs. Somebody who buys a 100-year registration from Wordpress will have the service delivered on whatever Wordpress has become by 2123.
People use WP because it's a technology they understand and can put to a particular use. If that changes, said people may not use it anymore.
If the NYT decides to change their content delivery platform to, literally, whatever, people would still go read the NYT. Their audience doesn't care.
If WP becomes a different product (a static site generator for Rust, deployed with Kubernetes?), their customer base will drop to ~0 overnight.
There are lots of examples of software platforms transitioning to a new foundation while retaining a compatibility shim for those bits of the old applications that customers still need. Text-mode COBOL applications are deployed on Windows 11, which itself has almost nothing in common with Windows 1.0.
Wordpress.com would need to maintain compatibility with some PHP+MySQL plugins. This doesn’t seem insurmountable, especially as AI code translation is now a thing.
You're imagining this change happening in a world where people still care about Wordpress.
Try imagining instead, a world where Wordpress is already a dead technology that nobody would use for a greenfield project, and it's only "legacy" sites that haven't been modified in 10 years (but which are owned by brick-and-mortar companies that continue faithfully paying the hosting bills every month) that are still hosted on Wordpress.com.
Can you not then see the value in some company buying up Wordpress.com, and migrating its customers over to a Wordpress-compatibility-shim over their own service that's based on a not-dead technology?
Just because Wordpress 6.3 is a php monstrosity with a security-disaster-riddled ecosystem doesn't mean Wordpress 12 has to use php and can't have sandboxed extensions. For all we know, Wordpress 12 could be a fancy frontend for a static site generator (marketed as "ultra-caching" or whatever)
Wordpress does the job. It's not particularly good at anything, but it works damn well. Wordpress is 40% of all sites in the world.
I'm ready for brain uploads and immortality and unlocking the rest of the galaxy for exploration. I'm tired of everyone turning to dust.
(and rivets. Joints. Pipes. Flanges, if we're unlucky)
All of that over ~1 decade. Can you even imagine where we'll be in 50 years?
You're there today.
If we're not careful, buying slightly faster smartphones.
Also, between 2010 and 2020, cancer death rates declined from 173 to 144 per 100,000 population, i.e. a 17% decrease in the US [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
That's something like a billion and a half people who absolutely think the world is different between 2013 and 2023.
Putting these people in an urban job where they then earn $3 a day is then considered progress, regardless of impact on quality of life. For instance the biggest contemporary driver in decline of poverty has been the rise of China. It saw people go from raising large families in rural areas to living in densely packed cities, making iPhones for $3 a day in factories surrounded by suicide nets.
I'm obviously not saying economic development is bad, but that measuring it by metrics is stupid, especially the way the World Bank does which is simply looking at a fixed level of $ consumption/production. What should matter is quality of life. That's obviously what you're referencing, but the metrics are not.