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

281–290 of 457 posts

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#281

Post by whimsicalism »

harikb wrote: post #261
vasco wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here is an alternate possibility 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine" 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives

not only would i say this is a possible explanation, i would say it is the obvious explanation - and pretty ridiculous to accuse someone of having a mental breakdown based on this

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#282

Post by satvikpendem »

pants2 wrote: post #126
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.

I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.

People keep saying this but I haven't noticed any drops in quality. The default subs have always been bad, and the niche subs continue to be good, in my experience. Do you have any specific examples?

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#283

Post by whimsicalism »

kedean wrote: post #218
dangrossman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.

sure it’s petty but i still feel that wp engine kinda sucks here

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#284

Post by ismail »

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

[flagged]

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#285

Post by ggm »

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…

Hate the codebase, don't mind the front-end mostly. A compatible SQL schema rewrite in a different language with lower exposure to risk, and some of the auth issues resolved, I think a lot of people would shift camp.

I have seen national broadsheets using WP as their publish engine. How they actually write copy and approve the article stream might be another matter.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#286

Post by whimsicalism »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #168
dangrossman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.

WP engine is pretty obviously the “rent seekers” in this situation. hard to be a rent seeker if you actually built the software

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#287

Post by mrkramer »

Automattic vs. WP Engine will be ultimately decided in court but this sort of reminds me of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.[0] when Oracle got mad because of Google cashing out hard with Android. It's all about money for Matt....not about WordPress or open source community.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#288

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

harikb wrote: post #261
vasco wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here is an alternate possibility 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine" 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives

Lol, this is like every bad stereotype about the general quality of WordPress websites: "Getting rid of a checkbox is too technically complicated, so let's just change the text instead to something completely nonsensical."

I actually find your explanation even less believable than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I don't necessarily believe it is either).

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#289

Post by legitster »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #206
chrismsimpson wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.

How is this unique to "late stage capitalism"? That same sentence can be used mad lib style for any human endevor. >Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't…

> "late stage capitalism"

The term is 100 years old and was created to refer to everything after WWI. I don't think people using the term would actually subscribe to the idea that human development under capitalism peaked in the 1910s.

Furthermore, the entire concept was developed as a justification for the Nazi party and their economic ideas. Which I think is justification enough that people should stay away from lazy, doomy political tropes.

Post reply on HN