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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Superior products; that cost more money or require a programmer.

WordPress is $5 in a VPS, click a theme, add a few plugins, it’s an insecure mess but it was cheap. Need a designer? A few thousand bucks is cheaper than a programmer.

It’s not the network effects. It’s about doing things cheap and fast, for which WordPress has no parallel.

And no, this is not a problem with capitalism. Every social structure ever devised has done this. Even if you’re McDonalds and you want new marketing pages in 2 weeks for a 1 week campaign, WordPress is fine. What else are you going to do? Build a CI/CD pipeline for a 1 week website?

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Right, there's an ecosystem of tooling around Wordpress because of its long standing inertia, if a superior product was able to compete and grow it could produce the same or better level of tooling.

I wish, but this is an unsubstantiated claim.

WordPress is for people who don’t work at FAANG. If this is the best they can do so far, there is no reason to believe they’ll do better next time. And that’s okay - we can’t all be FAANG. FAANG standards would be considered delusional compared to most code out there.

Remember that WordPress is the way it is, and it still has a multi-billion dollar company behind it. This is the best a normal, non-FAANG, billionaire organization could do. Which shows, in my opinion, how much of a bubble the code quality purists actually live in.

I don't think the bar is as high as you're saying. It's a hacked together PHP product with 20 years of cruft after that. It was simply the first to become successful. Anything built today would evolve to meet the same demand of ease of use by non technical people, if the momentum of Wordpress wasn't there preventing competition.

Not even a $5 VPS - my first WP site was shared hosting. Less relevant these days, but as barriers to entry go, wordpress was only one step higher than notepad.

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