Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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I hope someone eventually does a deep-dive on the organizational structure of WordPress and how much of a mess it is.

As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.

These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.

oh yeah, Shopify isn't also ultimately controlled by a single individual /s. Try Solidus for something controlled by a community!

Shopify is a public company and thus subject to far more regulations and expected behavior of the CEO.

I also specifically did not merely say that being controlled by one person was bad, but that it was bad in the context of also being slow at decision making. In many cases having a single decision maker is a must for being dynamic.

Haven’t heard of Solidus, but I’ll check it out.

Regulations maybe, but CEO expectations? Doesn't seem to be happening.

Shopify's CEO was in the news just recently for arguing that rich people should be able to cast more votes. That's the most naked anti-democracy stance I've heard in ages.

(And this is before we get into funding "deport-the-foreigners-and-minorities" DHH's Omarchy.)

Or just don't use these hacky solutions and just make a gd ecom website. It's 2026, use claude if you have too. There is no reason for shopify to exist (or wordpress for that matter, but at least wordpress isn't for profit). They say AI should kill SaaS, but it should actually kill all these dumb abstraction PaaS.

I say this as someone who has recently helped a few friends move their ecom stores off shopify, and wow, I didn't know such a horrible paradigm could exist. I genuinely think it would be easier for someone to learn a web stack in 2026 than learn to piece together whatever spaghetti monster shopify, and similar hacks are.

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