The Static Site Paradox

_realized_ utility.

Also, the article is about fully managed Wordpress vs self-hosted (or PaaS hosted) SSG. If the choice is between self-hosted Wordpress vs self-hosted SSG, I bet the outcome will be very different.

Now, you may wonder why the OP was not make an apple to apple comparison, like fully managed Wordpress vs fully managed SSG. Well, fully managed SSG does not exists, because it won't sell!

Yes, it depends on the target audience. For a personal website which the article was about, it would probably be fine for most hacker news users. If someone can’t manage to send me a mail, they probably wouldn’t see my website anyways. If you do your grandparents personal website, a proper form with a backend is better though.

Wouldn't a blog be generally simpler and, thus, generally comparatively a better candidate for a "static" site than "a social network application"?

The Hacker News pages are "static" -- correct?

For my startup's Web site, I wrote the code in ASP.NET and made the site "static" before I heard about "static": So, "static" is okay with me for what I did write. When I finally (whew!!) go live, I hope the candidate users will not mind, or even notice, that the site is "static" and not single page. Today, do nearly all users expect a "single page" site and not like "static"?

Last time I checked, my pages send for ~44KB per page, and I'd guess that that is comparatively small?

If only as a user, a single page site can be amazing, subtle, surpising, not really intuitive or obvious, but by now there may be millions of such sites with significant differences between any two, thus, requiring users, by try it and find out, to learn how to use the site. In contrast, a static site seems to stand on a history of computer interaction, e.g., with the standard controls -- text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, links -- that go back to some IBM work for the airline industry and the 3270 terminals and that by now maybe 3 billion people understand immediately, and if so then that can be an advantage.

The more people join a social media site the worse the conversation gets.

This is already happening to HN as tech people flee Reddit.

Most of the new comments on any given post are people that didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff addressed in the second paragraph.

This is an evolutionary process where the commenters that get the most engagement are those that are first to respond or react. First-mover advantage entrenches itself as those posts are boosted higher due to the engagement they receive.

Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of first impressions.

This reward cycle is amplified by more people, because engagement is very unequal on platforms that share a top comment or front page for everyone. You either make it to the first few comments or get nothing at all.

Sites like Discord or Facebook try to counteract the monopolization of engagement by an impulsive few by splitting users into smaller groups. Less competition for social interaction creates more diversity in winning strategies. Evolutionary pressures still exist, but you don't need to perfect a "winning strategy" solely to interact with other people on the platform.

Contrast Reddit or YouTube videos. The concentration of attention means it has monetary value due to SEO, product reviews, or advertising. The value of a large audience makes a platform more competitive. Competitiveness means many YouTubers and Redditors professionalize attention-seeking behaviour. This comes at the cost of quality.

I've been volunteering with a local political party to help them with their technology decisions, primarily on the web, and... based on this and prior experiences, I've come to the conclusion that agencies do their clients dirty quite often. In some cases it looks borderline intentional, in others I think it's a disconnect between client needs, agency capabilities, communication, and what's ultimately delivered.

It seems weird to say it since so many people rely on it, but wordpress is overkill for so many things. It frustrates so many clients to no end, requires ongoing maintenance that's quite expensive in some cases, and well, it requires an active server handling server-rendering and form submissions and such. The vast majority of clients simply don't need it. They don't even need themes.

This party I'm helping has something like 7 wordpress sites strewn about, all on hosts that cost way too much, some not even updated or maintained at all, sitting on servers that peak at like 40% utilization and otherwise hum along at near-zero utilization beyond what the wordpress isntance requires.

This is a lot of the internet. My experience with these folks has inspired me to build something that would meet their needs, but it's one of these things where... I don't know, if I build it, I doubt anyone would come. But yeah. Most people's needs for the internet are remarkably simple. Even Wix or similar are way, way too much. Yet those basic blogging engines totally miss the mark too. Most of these business users aren't interesting in blogging. They just want a simple home base where they can dump various types of information and let it hang out forever.

I can think of a few products which aim to fix this, but they aren't quite simple enough for the types of people we're describing. The people who know they need stuff online, but don't want to know much about it and don't want to learn much either.