Dear WordPress

Not really -- they just like to believe it works that way. What the more people chose is based on more pragmatic issues and market factors that "what the geeks use".

And no, "we advice the rest of the family / friends what to buy" doesn't cut it either. We may do it, for OUR friends/family, but in total we are very few, and our friends/families aggregated are insignificant statistical noise to the general population. And nobody mimicks them either.

The "hacker community" doesn't even influence the general programming community (which is like 1000 times bigger). For example, most people use Java or .NET and not Haskell or Smalltalk or LISP etc -- heck, in the ranks of the millions of the general programming community, not even that many use Python. And that's why even in programming circles Wordpress wins 2 or 3 orders of magnitude to all things like Octopress aggregated

What does happen is that sometimes the Hacker community embraces a new technology first. But getting there first is not like "guiding others".

In the same sense that a tiny minority of underground music fans might have liked some obscure band 5 years before it become mainstream. That doesn't mean that they are the factor the band "made it big". If that was it, then the dozens of other obscure bands they like would have "made it big" or close to big, too.

This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html , in which he says:

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.

When you start marketing your "lite" product, and you tell people, "hey, it's lite, only 1MB," they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if it has their crucial feature, and it doesn't, so they don't buy your product.

Wordpress seems to have everyone's critical feature, or critical plug-in, or a developer intimately familiar with the platform who can be hired to write your critical plug-in. By the time "more specialised blogging engines" have the flexibility and pervasiveness of Wordpress, I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress.

Edit 2: apparently there was an organised campaign which involved contacting a certain Matt Mullenweg to get the second blog in question reinstated. It succeeded. Lovely: http://weirdward.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/email-to-matt-mull...

Are we still talking about actual code here? Because if so, I'll take that bet.