Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WordPress Is in Trouble

anderegg.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 457 posts

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#251

Post by vasco »

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…

I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#252

Post by treyd »

nottorp wrote: post #55
hombre_fatal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a reminder how much "right place at the right time" plays into the phenomenon of ubiquity, from Wordpress to Harry Potter to Zoom to Javascript. There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the right time".

You mean there aren't already 20 unfinished projects reimplementing Wordpress in Rust?

Not yet there aren't. Perhaps we should form a committee to start a few and ensure that none of them actually have thr critical mass go succeed!

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#253

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#254

Post by akadruid1 »

tylershuster wrote: post #196

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 infini…

Wordpress is clunky but it never broke backwards compatibility.

HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they lost. They extended the life of d7 over and over but never made a compelling replacement. To this day, 7 is still more widely deployed than 8,9 or 10 ever were[2].

I think it's interesting to observe the fate that Python 3 narrowly avoided. Python 3 wasn't a compelling replacement until at least 3.5. In a nearly parallel universe they're all using torch.rb instead of pytorch.

[1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/did-breaking-backward...

[2]https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#255

Post by mikeyouse »

65 wrote: post #82
mrtksn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he drink that psychoactive wine?

Perhaps he tried some Ayahuasca and now "doesn't care about anything" and it reinforced his narcissism. Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been affected by it. Just a guess, though.

I don't know about the 'don't care about anything' part - but there's some speculation out there about a "one shot theory" where some people can't handle the psychological impacts of a ayahuasca trip and their brain is scrambled by that 'one shot' and they're never the same.. a number of relatively normal people who do a retreat don't really come back all the way. Combined with the frequency of later onset schizophrenia and while life might feel pretty stable for a middle-aged person, your mental ability is more precarious than most people think.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#256

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #192
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]

[deleted]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#257

Post by throwpoaster »

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…

Stimulants are a heck of a drug.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#258

Post by danudey »

brendanyounger wrote: post #249
terminalbraid wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed What are the consequences, exactly?

I suspect they gave him a timeline to IPO and/or sell or he's kicked out as CEO. His recent actions are those of a man with a deadline and nothing to lose.

Assuming that is the case: WordPress the company only needs to stay stable and valuable until everything goes through; if it burns down after that he's still met his obligations (to an extent).

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#259

Post by zdragnar »

encom wrote: post #216
Suppafly wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When r/thedonald was around, I would debate misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line regularly. Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing o…

If you like British panel shows (or any version of taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal lol.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#260

Post by legitster »

Spunkie wrote: post #24

Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern was Chinese/Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match. Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.

It's crazy how almost overnight Wordpress went from a quiet and unassuming piece of the internet infrastructure to crazy techbro's personal fiefdom.

Suddenly Wordpress's weird technical quirks and idiosyncrasies make sense.

Post reply on HN