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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

> normal users are stuck with a bunch of greedy clowns that make them pay for every little thing

Huh? You're not confined to Automattic or WP-Engine, there are tons and tons of regular web hosting providers with Wordpress and a bunch of other stuff included in a standard hosting package, you can use the free Wordpress, and you can self-host. That's the whole point of Wordpress being open source, and it's working as intended.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the status quo around blogging.

Static site generators are used by technologists who want to tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest devtool benchmark tool is called. Which is fine too, good for you if that's what you like to do with your time! For "normies" (or SME's who just want to publish their web content and move on), there are more than enough options around.

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> Static site generators are used by technologists who want to tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest devtool benchmark tool is called

No? Downloading Hugo, getting a random theme and writing a few articles is pretty simple and requires no more tinkering than doing the same with a Wordpress (okay, one's actions are big buttons in a UI, the other is copy pasting commands, but in terms of effort, there's barely any difference).

I use Hugo because it's light and allows me to have a blog running for free and scale to infinity (I have at least two articles that sat high up on the front page of HN, and there was neither a hug of death nor a bill associated), with zero maintenance, while also having flexibility if I need it. I haven't even checked my score on Google's whatever and I don't care about it.

As for WordPress, none of what you described can be had for free, and it requires ongoing maintenance (updates to keep up with the crappy ecosystem).

> okay, one's actions are big buttons in a UI, the other is copy pasting commands,

The difference is that the console is scary to the average user, big buttons are not.

I think you should reexamine the Hugo getting started workflow. I think it is pretty scary for a non tech literate person. Even as a programmer, I thought the initial bootstrap to getting a theme in place is clunky. Should come with an out of the box template that lets someone immediately bang out content.

I could guide Mom how to connect to a Wordpress host. I could not say the same for Hugo.

> No? Downloading Hugo, getting a random theme and writing a few articles is pretty simple and requires no more tinkering than doing the same with a Wordpress

This is not even remotely true. There are more hosts than I can count offering one click wordpress installs that dump you straight into a point where you can begin publishing.

> (okay, one's actions are big buttons in a UI, the other is copy pasting commands, but in terms of effort, there's barely any difference).

For the average non-engineering background user, this is a huge difference.

I've spent most of my IT career in hosting. You are vasltly overestimating the capabilities or care factor of a significant chunk of the user market.

> Static site generators are used by technologists who want to tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest devtool benchmark tool is called

It's relatively easy to reach a PageSpeed test result of 100 with WordPress by disabling one or two features and setting up a cache extension. For logged out users, WordPress with SuperCache set up is almost like a static website (except for the occasional cache eviction) because the HTML is almost directly served from the cache.

If you are don't know anything about cars but suddenly would need a one, would you go to the nearest car dealer you heard about from somewhere or immediately go to the specific resources where you can find a specific model and make you need at a better price?

You can then move it out of the dealer’s parking spot if you find a place cheaper.

people who know how to "self-host" can do it for free or very cheap.

Otherwise WP Engine is $30 per site.

OP says it's not only lame to exploit the knowledge asymmetry in this way but also makes web lame long term because normies don't have tools to contribute effectively.

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