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WordPress Is in Trouble

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Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#191

Post by TeMPOraL »

dangrossman wrote: post #86
beshrkayali wrote: post #64

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpr…

I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give…

You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs.

It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#192

Post by carlosjobim »

karaterobot wrote: post #17

I've had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want to turn off automatic updates, since I'm worried he might just go nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog, or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky as well. I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't know full details. But, h…

[flagged]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#193

Post by ValentineC »

ezekg wrote: post #20

I'm still in the camp that Matt is attempting to force a fork because he's done with WP. Maybe he believes it can't live without his magic touch (lmao). Either that or he's lost his mind. :)

> Maybe he believes it can't live without his magic touch (lmao).

If 2025 Matt tried to fork b2/cafelog back in 2003, I think a good number of people in the PHP and blogging communities would have told him to, very kindly, fork off.

Or, all that money and power corrupted him over the years.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#194

Post by esskay »

frereubu wrote: post #151
hn8726 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...

Ah I see, I thought you were talking about him personally.

He doesn't actually do any development himself at all. IIRC his last commit was something like 15 years ago.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#195

Post by Suppafly »

jjmarr wrote: post #132
llm_trw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts hate you're fine. The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.

> The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits. Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/ [2] https://archive.is/OkfOY

What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply commenting in another sub, especially for just one comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme of the sub.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#196

Post by tylershuster »

I don't understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.

HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-friendly but really, just click "Content->Add New->Page" and you're already running at the speed of WordPress.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#197

Post by refulgentis »

beshrkayali wrote: post #64

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpr…

Not a mental breakdown, but, a memento mori for all of us:

The problem with success is even when success is a reality, it's effects are temporary.

You get hungry even though you have just eaten.

The most telling moment for understanding what's going was Matt responding to successful critics by saying they weren't successful enough

I can't remember exactly what he said, & too much has happened for me to find it with 5 minutes of Googling. Something like "oh yeah well you only got to $2B valuation and it took 1000 engineers, what do you know"

If there is a breakdown here, it's one I've seen before, but wasn't cognizant of until I saw it 100x over at Google, sometimes tragically: you got everything you thought you wanted, but you're bored enough to need a new challenge, but you're not cognizant enough of it to effectively make that choice _before_ your actions show you that you need to.

Doesn't help any that it would amount to "backing down" in this scenario, he can't say that now without people thinking he was forced out somehow.

When I think about this, I also remember:

- the somewhat odd acquisitions over the past few years, Tumblr, that one cross-platform messaging app that got a ton of press for insisting they'd do iMessage....another strong indicator of boredom with the day-to-day, IMHO.

- His clear, repeated, focus is on money. It's never in primary focus, but it's always there, in everything lashing out that is publicized. If you're unhappy, and you're not sure why, and you have everything you thought you wanted, one easy thought train to jump on is "the compensation is not commensurate for the work"

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#198

Post by andix »

bsimpson wrote: post #148
andix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection. Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?

When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more money and expertise that put them outside the reach of junior hobbyists. This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.

I don't know any PaaS solution that is not at least a magnitude more complex than a simple PHP shared hoster.

As much as I hate PHP, the typical LAMP shared hosting is by far the most simple kind of PaaS.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#199

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #189
lolinder wrote: post #67

> Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but Mullenweg still holds all the keys. This move by Matt to pull out of development all but guarantees a fork. The biggest argument against was the work that Automattic was putting into WordPress would be very hard to replicate in a new project. But if the community is going to be expected to do ~all of the work anyway, there's no reason to do that work inside Ma…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#200

Post by andix »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #160
andix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection. Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?

> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces? I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth... I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of su…

>> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?

>I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...

Sorry ;)

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