[HN Gopher] What are you doing, WordPress.com?
___________________________________________________________________
What are you doing, WordPress.com?
Author : LordAtlas
Score : 416 points
Date : 2022-04-03 06:46 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rootprivileges.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootprivileges.net)
| mizzao wrote:
| Step one: run Substack's WordPress import.
|
| Step two: done.
|
| Looks like Substack is going to get a lot of new users...
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Well, fuck. Any recommended alternatives? Self-hosting is a non-
| starter, I'm more than happy to pay someone else to keep
| PHP/MySQL etc patched, just not $180/year (!!!) worth.
| TimothyBJacobs wrote:
| SpinupWP makes self-hosting WordPress sites really simple.
| Rarely do you ever need to actually make any changes to your
| server. You can just give it a Digital Ocean box to connect to,
| and it provides a UI to create sites and manage everything.
|
| https://spinupwp.com
| justusthane wrote:
| Just grab any shared hosting for $5-10/mo (A Small Orange for
| example). They'll keep PHP and MySQL updated for you, and many
| of them provide one click WP installs as well--and even if they
| don't, WP is very easy to install, and it has a built-in one-
| click updater.
| npteljes wrote:
| Especially easy to install because often, for the bigger
| providers, there are provider specific instructions to
| install stuff. Sometimes even from the provider themselves.
| bitwize wrote:
| At the end of the day, we must... mooooooooonetize our assets...
| tbyehl wrote:
| One of the features WordPress.com doesn't offer on a free plan is
| a proper backup that can be restored to another WordPress
| instance. Posts/Pages/Comments and Media can be exported,
| separately, but for a proper backup you need to fork over $180.
|
| I have an old site on their $13/yr custom domain plan that I'm
| probably going to let die this year because I don't wish to keep
| paying for it and it's not worth that hassle to restore to its
| original state on my own server.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| One time export and import is quite easy to do...
| goatherders wrote:
| Things cost money. The fact that they didn't used to cost money
| is not sufficient inertia for them to not cost money in the
| future.
|
| I too maintained a free WordPress blog which, I suppose, will be
| impacted by this. But my nostalgia for keeping the musings of my
| 28 year old self alive and well SHOULD cost someone money...and
| that someone should be me.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| I mostly agree, but it would have been a less painful move if
| existing blogs could have been grandfathered into the old plan.
| [deleted]
| nixcraft wrote:
| If I were to build the nixCraft blog again today, I would avoid
| WordPress. It lost core value a long time ago. They are forcing
| unwanted features with block editor (gutenberg or whatever it is
| called) and whatnot. Take a look at Classic Widgets[1] and
| Classic Editor[2] plugins. Both are downloaded over million times
| just to restore old functionality. They no longer listen to the
| community. Not to mention it is the number # 1 target for hackers
| due to its massive popularity and vulnerabilities in WP codebase.
| We need to continuously apply updates to WP and its ecosystem. I
| will not dare put WP on the Internet without Cloudflare WAF WP
| ruleset or Nginx/Apache WAF[3]. It is madness out there. However,
| I am still thankful for the WP opensource edition. I learned all
| of my JS, CSS, HTML, and PHP skills as I have done everything
| myself since 2003. Just some random Sunday rant. [1]
| https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ [2]
| https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/ [3]
| https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-waf/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-
| gb/waf/
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The block editor is controversial. I like it, but people who
| are more conservative around technology hate it with passion.
|
| I agree that it shouldn't be pushed too hard, but the WordPress
| team probably doesn't have enough resources to maintain both.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| The block editor has been called out for technical problems
| often but I feel the writing experience it offers should be
| discussed as well. For example cursor behaviour in the block
| editor is unpredictable, and with large posts the bloody
| thing starts to hang now and then.
| dmix wrote:
| What was the editor built with?
| marc_io wrote:
| It was built in React.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > probably doesn't have enough resources to maintain both.
|
| So why break a perfectly functional feature, if they are on a
| tight line? Just to compete with Notion.io? Stop trying to
| gob the next market when you don't have enough resources to
| maintain your own stack.
|
| Remember when Ubuntu created the Unity desktop and made all
| Gnome users angry, just to try to gob the mobile/tablet
| market?
|
| I've tried to use it for 2 years and left. Is Ubuntu the OS
| of _any_ mobile phone today?
| apatters wrote:
| They built Gutenberg because a significant and growing
| percentage of the user base was resorting to page builder
| plugins like Divi, Elementor etc. to create richer layouts
| than what the classic editor could handle. These plugins
| have a lot of drawbacks: non-portability of content, they
| break the WP theming model, they cost money, they've
| historically had performance/security/stability issues,
| etc.
|
| Basically WP did not want to cede control over something as
| essential as the editing experience to a bunch of third
| parties, but it was happening because of the limitations of
| the classic editor.
|
| I have issues with some elements of how they approached the
| problem but doing nothing would have been a worse choice. I
| can't say that I've seen a simple, blog-like project where
| using Gutenberg was a big negative. The classic editor will
| probably always be around, it's just a wrapper around
| TinyMCE and there's tons of community interest in keeping
| it alive.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| That's only part of the story.
|
| WordPress provides hooks that make it possible to alter
| the editing experience in the first place. It would be
| far cheaper to simply alter the API's to stop making this
| possible. Of course, that would break a ton of plugins
| and turn away a chunk of the community. So, the big
| question still remains: why offering a fundamentally
| different editing experience through Gutenberg and block
| editing?
|
| While wp.com and wp.org are different organizations, they
| are tightly intertwined through code, functionality and a
| shared design vision. WordPress itself has come a long
| way from it's original value proposition: a tool for
| bloggers. Today, it's used as a platform for managing
| media experiences that powers a big part of the marketing
| and online communication & publishing industry.
|
| There's big money in being able to sell a seamless,
| integrated, flexible editing experience that allows
| publishers to quickly design and publish online flyers,
| set up marketing / advertising / informational campaigns
| and so on. WordPress isn't the only CMS that moves
| towards such an integrated media experience. Others, like
| Drupal / Acquia, are on a single trajectory as well. And
| then there's plenty of CMS'es like CraftCMS, OctoberCMS,
| Ghost and so on.
|
| The downside is that the adding a layer of bells and
| whistles to the UI, as well as the added complexity to
| the theming API (block themes,...) tend to alienate the
| original user base. Many of those used WordPress because
| it sat at that sweet spot of being able to relatively
| easily deploy, customize and publish on your own personal
| weblog.
|
| Sure enough, WordPress still offers to create your own
| blog. But it's not the same tool as it was some 18 years
| ago. Neither is the Web the same as it was 18 years ago.
| And so, to many of its original users, wondering whether
| WordPress is still the right tool to maintain a personal
| blog in this day and age is a very real question.
| dazc wrote:
| > "The classic editor will probably always be around,
| it's just a wrapper around TinyMCE..."
|
| So why not just keep it as an option? Is it because 90%
| of current users would just do that?
|
| Adapting to the block editor hasn't turned out to be the
| end of the world but it still feels like a solution to a
| problem that never existed.
| jorams wrote:
| > So why not just keep it as an option? Is it because 90%
| of current users would just do that?
|
| They do offer it as an option, that's what the Classic
| Editor plugin is. It's provided by Automattic and
| automatically suggested when you open the plugin
| directory.
| dazc wrote:
| Correct, but didn't they say support would end at some
| near future date? This leaves it open to the whims of a
| random developer to provide an alternative and to
| continue support.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yes. Exactly. That's what open source is. Nobody is
| obliged to keep providing you with something you've been
| using.
|
| I personally really like the new editing experience. And
| had been wondering why WP was so behind the times for
| half a decade now.
| dazc wrote:
| I suppose you are right but it just seems like one of
| those 'clock wasn't broke so why mend it' situations.
| riidom wrote:
| Not sure how to interpret your last sentence, but if you
| want, it can be the OS of your mobile phone. I for example
| have UBports, coming from MozillaOS. Never had an Android
| phone in usage (or an apple phone, for that matter).
|
| And for Unity, I was kinda late to the Unity party, but as
| my first linux desktop, I liked it a lot and used it almost
| half a year beyond EOL, because I didn't know which to
| choose instead (it's Plasma now).
|
| I surely don't wanna praise Canonical here, but I would
| call them out for other things than Unity and their mobile
| efforts, e.g. Snap!
| politelemon wrote:
| If nixcraft = cyberciti.biz, your site has been invaluable to
| me over the years, I (and I'm sure countless others) really
| appreciate you running it.
| nixcraft wrote:
| yes, thank you for the kind words.
| kijin wrote:
| The vast majority of known vulnerabilities are in the plugin
| ecosystem, not WordPress itself. The core codebase is
| remarkably well-maintained (of course, due to its massive
| popularity) considering its age and dedication to backward
| compatibility.
| seanwilson wrote:
| WordPress core is lacking a lot of features you'd expect for
| basic sites though (e.g. contact forms, caching, FAQ, SEO
| tags, social sharing) so anything but basic blogs require
| plugins or custom code.
|
| A big draw of WordPress is that non-developers can customise
| it with all the plugins that are available, so saying
| WordPress is secure as long as you avoid plugins nullifies
| this. It's terrifying that a contact form or caching plugin
| that you need to install because the functionality isn't
| built-in could result in a remote code execution exploit.
| kijin wrote:
| Even if the features you mentioned were included in
| WordPress core, they would be implemented as plugins that
| can be replaced with other plugins.
|
| IMO the problem with the plugin ecosystem is not that
| they're required, but that so much of the well-known
| plugins are bloated crap.
|
| Popular SEO plugins don't stop at inserting SEO tags into
| your <head>. They come with AMP integration, an online
| robots.txt editor, automatic content generator, competitor
| site analyzer, spam blocker, and even a rudimentary caching
| feature to speed up your site! Meanwhile, caching plugins
| offer to minify your javascript, photo galleries include a
| Stripe payment gateway, and contact forms come with their
| own markup language. Everyone is trying to do everything,
| everyone is stepping on everyone else's toes, and it's
| impossible for anyone to maintain all the unrelated
| features that are bundled together in each plugin.
|
| There are really neat plugins that do one thing, do it
| well, and are easy to audit. Sadly, they are buried under
| all the spammy alternatives. WordPress really needs to
| invest in a better plugin search & ranking system that
| discourages bloat and offers incentives for high-quality
| code, perhaps by integrating some sort of static analyzer.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > Even if the features you mentioned were included in
| WordPress core, they would be implemented as plugins that
| can be replaced with other plugins.
|
| > ... Everyone is trying to do everything, everyone is
| stepping on everyone else's toes, and it's impossible for
| anyone to maintain all the unrelated features that are
| bundled together in each plugin.
|
| If these plugins were in core though, they'd likely have
| much better security and be less bloated. The problem
| with the plugin ecosystem you mention I think stems from
| monetization - there's the incentive to stuff freemium
| plugins with functionality so you can charge for paid
| features. I really don't know how WordPress can reign
| this in.
|
| I think the WordPress core that plugins build upon has
| bad security fundamentals as well e.g. the default PHP
| templating language doesn't even escape strings by
| default, most theme and plugin file permissions aren't
| locked down to read-only, Git-based versioning and
| deploys isn't built-in or widely practiced.
|
| > There are really neat plugins that do one thing, do it
| well, and are easy to audit.
|
| What plugins would you recommend? I find you can get
| pretty far with Advanced Custom Fields and an SEO plugin.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| There may be some neat plugins, which might work well,
| but the problem is, that the usual user, which Wordpress
| is targetting as audience, does not have the skills or
| knowledge to distinguish between crap plugins and plugins
| that work.
|
| When you find yourself fixing bugs in plugins or trying
| to unlimit their functionality, because in their design
| someone introduced an unnecessary limitation via the
| chosen primitives and abstractions, then you are already
| clearly above the level of skill or knowledge, that
| Wordpress targets and are able to use more advanced tools
| to better effect.
|
| Since Wordpress targets that not so experienced developer
| or simply hobby blogger audience and aims to make it
| simple for them to create a blog, that is also the group,
| from which most people arise to become plugin developers.
| That in turn leads to inexperienced developers using PHP,
| which has its own set of problems. For example treating
| HTML as a string by default, allowing for countless
| injection and XSS vulnerabilities. Or the incessant spam
| of PHP open and close "tags" in the code, intermingling
| PHP, HTML, CSS and JS in the same files, switching
| context so much, that, given a point in the code, you are
| no longer sure what context you are really in, instead of
| them using a proper template engine, or starting to not
| treat HTML as a string in other ways.
|
| The problem is the knowledge and experience gap that is
| between a person, who can write a secure and useful
| plugin and a person, who starts writing plugins, because
| they are a WP user and got some motivation to start with
| plugin writing. PHP does nothing to reduce that gap.
|
| Another problem in Wordpress itself is, that its
| recommended or assumed theme architecture encourages
| concattenation instead of composition. HTML is again
| treated as a string, that is to be concattenated from
| smaller parts. Instead what any good templating engine
| would do is to have blocks of things, which you define
| elsewhere and keep every part independent. No stuff like
| head tag open in one document and closing it in another,
| making the parts not reusable. Most people creating
| themes do not even think about this stuff. They just go
| with whatever WP assumes them to do.
| seanwilson wrote:
| So I know you can add Blade or Twig templates on top of
| WordPress to at least make your own code contribution a
| bit better (e.g. at least some automatic escaping, saner
| templates), but at what point is it a lost cause and it's
| time to move to something with a better foundation? I've
| seen people use WordPress as a headless CMS but I don't
| think the admin interface is particular good either.
|
| > The problem is the knowledge and experience gap that is
| between a person, who can write a secure and useful
| plugin and a person, who starts writing plugins, because
| they are a WP user and got some motivation to start with
| plugin writing. PHP does nothing to reduce that gap.
|
| That's my feeling. Anybody used to working with secure
| and well written codebases with CD/CI, tests and just
| basic Git versioning will want to run away when they see
| how typical WordPress sites work under the hood.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > So I know you can add Blade or Twig templates on top of
| WordPress to at least make your own code contribution a
| bit better (e.g. at least some automatic escaping, saner
| templates), but at what point is it a lost cause and it's
| time to move to something with a better foundation? I've
| seen people use WordPress as a headless CMS but I don't
| think the admin interface is particular good either.
|
| I would say, if you have a choice in the matter (many do
| not have that on the job or when a friend asks them to
| help them with their blog or shop built on top of WP),
| that at the point, where you start using a proper
| template engine and switch from the WP-assumed
| concattenation way of building things to a style of using
| composition, you are well beyond the point, where you
| should switch to something more appropriate for the job.
| reactbricks wrote:
| If you use React, have a look at React Bricks. It has a
| great foundation for Devs based on React components, but
| with top visual editing experience for Content editors.
| To be clear, I am the founder :) What do you think about
| it?
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what would you use to build nixCraft if you
| had to start over?
| nixcraft wrote:
| I will use a static blog generator (or probably write my own
| in Perl/ Python). I just want simple stuff. In the early
| days, WP was simple, and I loved it. Now, it turned into a
| hot mess--every primary functionality (like anti-spam or
| form) needed a plugin which is a significant source of pain.
| Fun fact, b2 was slowly dying and had few issues, so they
| created a b2 fork known as WP. Then Movable Type messed up
| with its userbase in 2004, and those users did mass migration
| to WP, and the rest is the history.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Security is one of the strong points of Wordpress _because_ of
| the steady flow of patches. All you have to do is install them
| quickly.
|
| If you can do that, I would not hesitate to put WP online
| without a WAF. Almost all attempts on WP sites are scripted
| attacks on vulnerabilities that have already been patched.
|
| Patches are good. Saying WP must be insecure because of all the
| patches is like saying a fancy restaurant bathroom must be
| filthy because it gets cleaned 4 times a day.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Wordpress is a security nightmare. Avoid it if you can.
| achairapart wrote:
| WordPress(.org) has completely lost it. It started outputting
| real junk in the html[0], out of the blue. This kind of stuff
| should be at least opt-in.
|
| With this block madness it turned from a "semantic publishing
| platform" to some lousy PowerPoint for the web.
|
| It's time for a hard fork, or for some new project/idea to
| disrupt it. It may take some time, but this is something
| inevitable at this point.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/38299
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| The duotones bit is odd, for sure!
|
| > With this block madness it turned from a "semantic
| publishing platform" to some lousy PowerPoint for the web.
|
| But here you're wrong. There is now _more_ semantic
| information available to content-transforming plugins, not
| less, thanks to the block editor.
|
| The content is still stored as HTML in post_content (which
| they do to support exporting the content as HTML), but
| because of its annotations, you can get the entire block
| parse tree from a single function call, on the server side:
|
| https://awhitepixel.com/blog/wordpress-gutenberg-access-
| pars...
|
| So for the first time, the semantics of page content are
| exposed in a way that does not involve trying to parse chunks
| of HTML yourself (except the "classic editor" block if you
| want to parse into that).
|
| > It's time for a hard fork, or for some new project/idea to
| disrupt it.
|
| There's already been a hard fork of WP that might suit you:
|
| https://www.classicpress.net/
| achairapart wrote:
| Ok, let's not talk about the duotone bit. Let's talk about
| patterns: https://wordpress.org/patterns/
|
| Why on earth should I include these very beautiful and also
| very random bird illustrations and colors and typography
| into my website?
|
| Are these "pattern" in the sense of reusable solution to
| common problems or just random and non-consistent design
| blocks?
|
| Also, why on earth should I control border-radii, gradient,
| colors for every single block in the editor?[0][1]
|
| This is complete madness. For two reasons at least: One,
| styles should be defined at least on a global level, using
| tokenized values and possibly exposed only to users with
| higher capabilities (designers).
|
| Two, authors and editors should focus on content, not
| styling. Many of them are unable to take rational design
| decisions. Giving them the power of styling border radii or
| gradients on multiple buttons/elements in a random fashion
| on the same page, or even on the same website, is a recipe
| for a visual disaster.
|
| Yes, you're right about how the semantic data may be
| stored. Everything else? I can still see a "lousy
| PowerPoint for the web" everywhere.
|
| What's worst, is that they are pushing these bad design
| decisions really hard. Breaking existing websites in
| production. Maybe they'll make it right someday, at least I
| hope so, but it will take years time. This is why, as I
| said, all of this should be at least opt-in.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/28541
|
| [1]: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/31585
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > Are these "pattern" in the sense of reusable solution
| to common problems or just random and non-consistent
| design blocks?
|
| They are intended to be the former but I'm sure they will
| include the latter in some cases; WP is used by really
| _everyone_.
|
| (The bird illustrations are just demonstrations of the
| content pattern, are they not?)
|
| > Also, why on earth should I control border-radii,
| gradient, colors for every single block in the editor?
|
| Personally I don't, but there may be reasons to do that.
| And it's important to note that WP now sees its main
| competition as platforms that _do_ offer that. But one
| assumes those features can be switched off by theme
| editors; many aspects of Gutenberg can be (though it 's
| three years since I did a serious Gutenberg site build so
| I might be out of date. You can certainly disable whole
| blocks, build pre-defined block styles etc).
|
| > Two, authors and editors should focus on content, not
| styling. Many of them are unable to take rational design
| decisions. Giving them the power of styling border radii
| or gradients on multiple buttons/elements in a random
| fashion on the same page, or even on the same website, is
| a recipe for a visual disaster.
|
| Putting aside the fact that you're basically sneering at
| users for wanting to make their own creative choices,
| that is only your call to make when you're managing the
| system, right? How is any of this different to the any
| number of plugins or TinyMCE Extended features that were
| available in WP before? At the end of it is still
| someone's creative discipline; nothing has changed and
| _CMS developers_ should be a bit cautious about saying
| "no, you can't ever do that, because it's tasteless".
|
| _(Edit to add: one of the real problems WP will face if
| they took a taste-first approach is a proliferation of
| hacky, ugly blocks that exist simply to serve users who
| reject that particular approach. It is far better to have
| a generic, configurable interface for core block styles
| that can be locked down on a site-by-site basis than to
| encourage a world of hacks and workarounds)_
|
| It's still becoming _more_ structured, not less. And a
| fork like ClassicPress won 't change things.
|
| If you really think all these things need to be able to
| be locked down tight: make the case, submit the patches?
| achairapart wrote:
| > And it's important to note that WP now sees its main
| competition as platforms that do offer that.
|
| I don't know about every other platform, but Squarespace
| for example is doing really well in bringing design
| consistency.
|
| > But one assumes those features can be switched off by
| theme editors;
|
| Maybe you can shut the light off but at the moment it is
| really hard or even impossible to tune them.
|
| > Putting aside the fact that you're basically sneering
| at users for wanting to make their own creative choices,
| that is only your call to make when you're managing the
| system, right?
|
| No, it's not about control. It's neither about taste.
| Individual users can do whatever they want. There are
| more complex situations where some random guy will use
| the largest font size in bold red for things he think are
| important and you still have responsibility for that
| output. In general, Gutenberg also broke the WP user
| capability system, so there is still work to do to fix
| it.
|
| > If you really think all these things need to be able to
| be locked down tight: make the case, submit the patches?
|
| Yes and I assure you I'm not the only one, but it's not
| something you can fix with a patch. There were really
| constructive discussions that led to the Global Styles
| concept for example. But oh boy it takes time. There is
| work on a theme.json standard that is still an
| undocumented, change-breaking mess.
|
| And then, on the next update they put some 50kb of
| useless svgs in your html...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| _fat_santa wrote:
| One thing I hated about Wordpress is the ecosystem around it.
| Everything was money money money. Coming from React/JS
| development, you get used to resources being out there. Need a
| solution for X? Well you will most likely find a free and OSS
| solution.
|
| With WP it seems that the smallest of add-ons cost money. Even
| for stuff that is open source elsewhere, the authors have re-
| packaged it into a subscription service.
|
| My other major gripe is the community. With almost any other
| platform you can find answers to questions pretty easy. With
| Wordpress over half the articles I found to issues were blatant
| SEO spam. Paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, tiny nugget of not
| useful info, BUY MY ADDON TO FIX THIS ISSUE FOR GOOD!
|
| Often times I came across thread where a person would post: "Oh
| I know how to fix this, but please buy my consulting services
| to learn the answer".
| richardfey wrote:
| Maybe this is due to an attempt to compete with Wix?
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Yes -- Wix (who misused GPL WP code) and Squarespace. But
| also, on the WooCommerce side, Shopify and BigCartel.
|
| The other thing is that really at this point block editors
| are everywhere; they are in every email marketing tool, they
| are in some social media sites, they are in other CMSes.
|
| A block editor isn't optional at this point. Nor is block
| layout editing.
|
| And pointing at a million people who install a plugin to keep
| the classic editor functionality is not the same as pointing
| at a million people who don't want Gutenberg.
|
| It's pointing at a million people who have a variety of
| reasons not to upgrade older existing content to blocks, but
| who still need to edit that content (e.g. complex/ill-advised
| shortcode setups, specific markup etc.)
|
| (The Classic Editor plugin is not either/or -- you can decide
| to use it per post or per user.)
| richardfey wrote:
| Do these users have a choice? e.g. export their data and
| use it on a self-hosted instance or another provider that
| wants to offer something akin the previous wordpress.com?
| TFA didn't cover this aspect.
| desas wrote:
| Yes, https://wordpress.com/support/export/
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Pointing people to one possible alternative if they just want to
| blog: use a static site generator.
|
| My company created a static site generator which pulls content
| from notion. You get the WYSIWYG editing of notion, with the
| speed and simplicity of a static site. You just have to find a
| place for static site hosting - github pages, firebase, netlify,
| etc. There are plenty out there.
|
| https://blog.tonari.no/blog-blog
| seanwilson wrote:
| > My company created a static site generator which pulls
| content from notion.
|
| What triggers the site to be rebuilt and deployed? This works
| well with how pages are usually created and edited? How about
| being able to preview what the deploy will look like before
| publishing? I haven't used Notion much btw.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| We have a slack bot you can summon to deploy the site. We
| also have a QA version of the site to proofread articles and
| see how they look before publishing. The notion database has
| a "Published" checkbox on each blog row, which controls which
| posts make it into the production blog.
| seanwilson wrote:
| This works well for non-tech people? From a developer
| perspective, static websites are a dream, but accurate live
| previews and immediate/fast deploys on edits for site
| editors can be obstacles depending on your setup.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| I won't say it's perfect, but non-tech people can use it
| no problem. I suppose it's not technically a "What You
| See Is What You Get" because there is custom styling
| applied, but whatever content they put into notion is
| stylized the same as the rest of the blog so it stays
| consistent.
| [deleted]
| kizer wrote:
| Makes me want to write a CMS/site builder. Node? Deno? Decisions
| decisions.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It's worth contemplating on Steve Job's simplicity of marketing:
| Give consumers less choices. Cut down the number of SKUs and slim
| down the product line.
|
| Wordpress options at this point are just _stressful_. Do I really
| need to keep track of page views? It's like the same absurdity
| when it comes to font licensing. Every time I want to buy a font,
| myfonts wants to inject a tracking script to track how many
| people visit the site. And then the same people complain there
| isn't money in selling fonts. Simplify and give less stress to
| customers. Explain that in the marketing copy. For SaaS where the
| marginal cost is diddly squat, increase in sales will most likely
| offset whatever last penny you want to squeeze from customers.
|
| Marketing people just don't get it. I've seen this happen in my
| own company, seen it first hand how it damages sales. Marketing
| that works with AWS doesn't work with Wordpress. Totally
| different customer needs.
|
| Ghost blog guys do it better but it can still be simplified.
|
| Edit: I just checked https://wordpress.com/pricing/ - That looks
| very simple. Two choices, sorry for the rant, I was just going by
| the article.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| I agree. Every time something like this happens, I just miss
| Posterous. I think they had it all right, including the
| simplicity. Then Twitter bought and shut them down.
|
| Edit: There's its avatar Posthaven but the Posthaven blog
| hasn't been updated since 2017.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| That font example is ridiculous, but I don't doubt it for a
| second.
|
| I see script injection as something similar to giving a spare
| set of keys out to your house.
|
| They want me to give them a spare set for the privilege of
| paying for the paint I used for the walls?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Yes, you cannot purchase any webfont from MyFonts, regardless
| of the foundry, without this:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40625980/how-does-
| myfont...
|
| License _requires_ that you do not modify the font package
| they let you download which includes @import tracking.
| [deleted]
| gary_0 wrote:
| My first thought is that stuff like this always leads to yet
| another "content churn" iteration, where even more user-authored
| stuff drops off the Internet, leaving behind an even more
| desolate wasteland of SEO spam and dead links.
|
| We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the
| GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron curtain,
| the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright lawyers. The
| lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by one, only to
| be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm planning/trying to restart my personal page/blog thing for
| a while now, and was considering good ole' Wordpress.com for
| some time, and looked to the plans and so on.
|
| Today's news just removed that option again. Internet is
| dividing further. Either you overpay for the convenience or
| self-host the whole stack yourself. Second one, backed by a
| static page generator looks more and more enticing now.
| cube00 wrote:
| There is a middle ground, generate the static site content
| yourself and then there are plenty of providers who will host
| your static content for free and even let you use your own
| domain name. Although I'm not sure why I'm telling you this
| when the website in your HN "about" already uses Jekyll.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I have a Wordpress.com blog at
| https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com. I switched there
| from Blogger. Moving all that content took me most of a
| summer (part time) even with the Blogger import tooling,
| and will be much harder if I have to go to some markdown
| tool. This is made worse due to the fact that my site
| contains finicky images and formatting and (some) LaTeX
| math. I know a move to a static site is possible but I
| absolutely dread having to do this again. The transition
| cost for existing content (and comments!) is really high.
|
| I chose Wordpress.com because (despite the fact that
| security people make fun of Wordpress) it's full-featured
| and could handle my usage for about $100/yr. Now it'll
| apparently be $180, which is an annoying surprise price
| increase. But the real annoyance is 100,000 visits per
| month for the paid plan: I've had months that easily blow
| past this limit (due to HN hugs) and I genuinely don't know
| what will happen to the site if this happens in the future.
| That limit is extremely problematic and makes me wonder if
| the company is entering a terminal decline.
| williamstein wrote:
| I'm also VERY worried about that. My company was just
| about to use wordpress.com as well, but this limit is
| insane if true, and means there's no possible way we
| could even consider using wordpress.com for our company
| blog. Like you, I have written blog posts that have
| exceeded 50K visits for one post, and two such posts
| would exceed that limit. I've done that several times,
| and it would be crazy to suddenly have a blog hosting
| platform block viewing of a blog post that turns out to
| be super popular. For us, it would be fine if they just
| charge a little more, rather than blocking viewers.
| However, the fact that they don't say what they will do
| is a deal breaker.
|
| Edit: I see the CEO has posted elsewhere to address this
| -- "Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor
| system. If you consistently go over the cap month after
| month, we will let you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit
| more to cover the cost, but we will NEVER shut off access
| to your site, nor will we ever auto-increase the amount
| you're paying."
| snek_case wrote:
| I feel the same. 100K visits is really not that much, and
| for the price they're charging... What the fuck? This is
| seriously making me consider dropping them and rolling
| out my own thing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Of course, I already started building my page via Jekyll
| (and I have the domain and the hardware to host it), but
| wanted to see if there are any more carefree options, just
| for fun actually.
|
| Looks like I'll continue building that page via Jekyll on
| the same hardware. Probably automating the "generate-
| publish" cycle a bit with some little CI/CD pipeline and
| calling it a day is a safe bet.
| antihero wrote:
| The internet has become gentrified. Money ruins everything.
| People's greed and in our terms "optimisation" is counter to
| creativity and genuine expression. We are part of the problem.
| javajosh wrote:
| As I get older I get more circumspect about loss. Loss is the
| default - an expression of the universality of decay. Almost
| all information from almost all of human history has been lost.
|
| There is a long list of extinction events in natural
| history[0], some smaller, some larger. In every case, millions
| of years of 'progress' were wiped out along with trillions of
| individual lives. And yet here we are! If it weren't for those
| past disasters, we would not be here.
|
| It does seem wasteful to lose so much, at first. But then when
| you put it in context, you realize it's not as bad as other
| fates that have, can and probably will befall us. Plus, the
| alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984
| and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by
| construction, can only be stopped in this way.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
| jholman wrote:
| I agree. Separately....
|
| I never know if the following sort of pedantry is welcome or
| unwelcome. I can only say that I would want it.
|
| I think you're using "circumspect" incorrectly. My
| understanding is that it means to only speak or act with
| caution, not rashly, because one has looked around (spect:
| look, circum: around). Usually used to describe speaking
| discreetly, so as not to offend.
|
| And my read of your comment overall is that you are more
| resigned to loss.
|
| Edit: oh darn I almost missed the opportunity to use myself
| as the example usage: "I tried to be circumspect writing this
| comment."
| stingraycharles wrote:
| For what it's worth, it may be pedantic, but as a non-
| native English speaker, it's things like these that are
| incredibly valuable: it's not often that people correct you
| on this level of "pedantry", so you'll never learn.
|
| As such, thank you for this.
| [deleted]
| fnord123 wrote:
| All creature will die and all the things will be broken.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah no. That's the logic of someone who is telling you that
| rain has always been a part of nature and that you should
| embrace rather than fight it - while they are stealing the
| tiles from your roof.
|
| What I mean is, on the one hand, you're correct: Loss in some
| sense is the default state of the universe, there will always
| be loss and there are far worse things than losing some stuff
| on the internet.
|
| On the other hand, it feels hypocritical to talk this way
| about instances of loss that we have control over. The
| current mass extinction is not simply some natural event that
| came over is and that we have to accept like Tolkien's Long
| Goodbye. It's a decidedly _un_ natural event that we know the
| causes of very well.
|
| In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet is
| not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate business
| decisions that come from a specific trend of monetization.
| smokey_circles wrote:
| just an utterly daft opinion.
|
| you cannot fight entropy, you can only feed it
| Zababa wrote:
| > In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet
| is not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate
| business decisions that come from a specific trend of
| monetization.
|
| It is the default. To keep information around "forever" you
| need people working on it forever. Current storage mediums
| don't even last 100 years. Browsers change, technologies
| get dropped (flash), people stop paying for websites
| (geocities). Bandwith isn't free. If you want to preserve
| anything you have to make an actual effort, put energy in.
| Things decay by nature.
| joenathanone wrote:
| You ignored his other point
|
| >Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable
| dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no
| exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in
| this way.
| dottedmag wrote:
| False dychotomy
| carapace wrote:
| Archive.org causes North Korea?
|
| - - - -
|
| Seriously though, I actually think that the effects of
| mass digital information on society are going to be very,
| uh, interesting going forward.
|
| I wonder about the people whose parents have been
| documenting their lives on FB since they were born, or
| the kids who have never spent more than a few hours away
| from their smart phones.
| [deleted]
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction.
| Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g.
| soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> only stable in fiction_
|
| And in fairness, Orwell himself was quite optimistic about
| 1984-world's prospects. IIRC in an appendix he opined that
| the innate human desire to innovate with language could not
| be suppressed without losing language entirely, and so
| humans would (slowly, painfully) eventually find the cracks
| and destroy the system from within.
| loceng wrote:
| So far.
|
| Both sides - "good" and "evil" - have the technology of
| this past century and on to utilize. Arguably the
| interconnectivity and instantaneous communication between
| any and every human on Earth has its advantages, however
| the internet can easily be censored once captured - and
| ideology is ripe around the world which seems to be the
| precursor to the majority of blind society being led down a
| dark path to a pit difficult to impossible to escape; if
| you even realize you're in a pit or not.
| danuker wrote:
| Everything accelerates when you have Internet.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > dystopias
|
| > soviet union
|
| what about the american imperialism covering much of the
| globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large
| amount of people already... (and growing)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U
|
| https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
| ben_w wrote:
| For all the many flaws that the USA has[0] there is a
| _massive_ difference between the cultural imperialism of
| megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say,
| invading Vietnam.
|
| For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much
| about us that they'd make the Stasi drool with envy,
| they're not the Stasi.
|
| For all that Facebook is getting blamed for enabling and
| distributing the rhetoric that led to the Rohingya
| genocide in Myanmar, that persecution predates the birth
| of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn't have any triggers to
| pull or boots to put on the ground.
|
| [0] and as a non-American, I'd add to the Tribune list
| with things that most Americans I've spoken with do not
| even acknowledge, and of those who do acknowledge them,
| most favour.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > there is a massive difference between the cultural
| imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power
| imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam.
|
| True, but one cannot exist without the other. How would
| the US invade Vietnam (or Afghanistan) without industries
| to manufacture weapons and surveillance tools? How can
| they pillage all their resources without predatory
| industry collaborating with the occupier?
|
| > For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so
| much about us that they'd make the Stasi drool with envy,
| they're not the Stasi.
|
| I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for
| a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named
| perform political-repression-as-a-service for many
| governments around the planet. The Stasi was pretty bad
| for east germany but they held no power elsewhere: now
| every political police on earth is equipped with stasi-
| like superpowers thanks to Silicon Valley.
|
| > that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and
| Facebook didn't have any triggers to pull or boots to put
| on the ground.
|
| True, but Facebook had a choice: from what i read it was
| founded as a stalking/girl-rating site by geeky
| sociopaths, which is already pretty dark. But when they
| early on censored breastfeeding women and torrent links
| while letting nazi/misogynist content go rampant was a
| very political choice in favor of very violent
| ideologies, and they should be held accountable (not
| talking about the US judicial system which is just as bad
| if not even worse).
| ben_w wrote:
| > I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working
| for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you
| named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many
| governments around the planet
|
| The NSA? No, I don't think they're for-hire.
|
| And the others aren't in the business of political
| repression: none are known for kidnapping people and
| driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation.
| Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don't remember
| Snowden mentioning it.
|
| > True, but Facebook had a choice...
|
| All of which reflects badly on the business and its
| leadership, and yet is very very different to an actual
| repressive regime.
|
| You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and
| order their parents to decide which child lives and which
| child dies, right?
|
| Even though I agree with you that Facebook going "freedom
| of speech for everything except the defining
| characteristic of mammals" is a bad thing, that's peanuts
| in comparison.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| I've always observed that defenses of the Soviet Empire
| are essentially just whataboutisms. But this is the first
| time I am seeing it literally start with the words "what
| about"
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I don't have a citation handy but think most would agree
| the global median standard of living / life expectancy /
| quality of life is substantially better than it was 100
| years ago. Ofc that's not necessarily predictive, but it
| is consistent with the belief that history's long arc
| does indeed bends toward justice.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > it is consistent with the belief that history's long
| arc does indeed bends toward justice.
|
| Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most
| metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better
| (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take)
| doesn't mean justice is rising.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Maybe substitute "improvement" for "justice"? I'd rather
| be in the bottom 5% than the middle 50, given better
| health and comfort in absolute terms. That doesn't excuse
| injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter,
| esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad
| and getting worse" comment.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the
| absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's
| "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.
|
| You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure
| also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms
| of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have
| absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries.
|
| I definitely think it's possible that some
| communities/States collapsed in the past due to local
| climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example
| desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or
| water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops
| falling into the single available source).
|
| But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A
| few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of
| hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which
| were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider
| other forms of pollution), and some time later was a
| study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-
| polluted water.
|
| In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if
| your local community respects the environment, you can be
| sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting
| everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field
| killing the insects that keep your own food sources
| available, polluting the water sources...
|
| I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be
| answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side
| of things is shocking enough that it requires no less
| than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people
| fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it,
| nothing good can come out of the system.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Well put. Mostly agreed.
| koide wrote:
| This is a great point to which I don't really have an
| answer, just a question. Why do we define justice as
| everyone having the same (or roughly the same within
| certain thresholds)? I mean, I can totally see that
| everyone having more or less the same is a good thing.
| But that is not necessarily a just thing.
|
| A related point is why are we seeing equality as
| something desirable? We don't even question it anymore.
| This is a rather new development in the last 400 years or
| so and came about after Europeans arrived at America and
| started interacting with the natives, which had this
| equality concept much more advanced than what was common
| in Europe at the time. This also leads to the recognition
| of differences between people. What does it mean for us
| to be equal? I run slower than you, should I carry the
| urgent message over the mountains because we're equal?
|
| Sorry to just add questions, but I think they are
| important questions people don't usually ask.
| MrPatan wrote:
| > Why do we define justice as everyone having the same
|
| Envy. But it is not a new feature of human nature. So my
| question is: Why is it only now (for about the last 100
| years) such a popular and successful ideology? What has
| changed?
|
| Is it mass media? Or is it not a new thing at all, but
| things happen at a bigger scale? Meaning, before you'd
| maybe get envy bursts that'd devastate a village or a
| tribe, and that'd be it, now you get it at the country
| and planet level?
| koide wrote:
| I'd say it's more than that. Culture has changed and
| morphed into something where we feel we are entitled to a
| lot, just because we exist. I don't think our culture a
| few hundred years ago was like that. Did we see revolts
| in the medieval Europe because the king had too much? Not
| for that exact reason, as far as I know. Each king wanted
| more, for sure, but not the peasants, who didn't have
| much nor expected to have much ever.
|
| Compare that to the American dream where literally
| everybody has the ability to get rich (in theory, but the
| point is that now the "peasants" in general _want_ to get
| rich).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "A related point is why are we seeing equality as
| something desirable?"
|
| Should everyone be equal before the law? Is it possible
| if half the population can't afford a lawyer?
|
| Should everyone's vote count? How does Democracy survive
| when a small group of people own half the country?
| koide wrote:
| That's but one version of equality.
|
| Equality under the law (both your examples may arguably
| fall here), but we also have equality of opportunity,
| equality of outcome, equality by mean reduction.
|
| I personally agree that equality under the law is indeed
| desirable but some other types aren't.
|
| Which ones are good and which aren't should be made
| explicit.
|
| Then we can talk about how to increase the good
| equalities and reduce the bad ones.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They don't exist in isolation, once inequality in capital
| gets large enough, it is impossible to accomplish
| equality of opportunity, or of anything at all between:
|
| 1- a child of a billionaire that had private tutoring and
| connections
|
| 2 - a child that grew up in poverty and was malnurished,
| didn't recieve proper education or attention from parents
| because they were working two jobs or perished in some
| kind of tragedy
| koide wrote:
| Yeah, as you show, full equality is unreachable. Even
| without the capital differences. Some people will have
| traumas or accidents or just bad genetics that will end
| up in inequalities.
|
| The thing is to have a destination, a goal. Which
| equalities are worth fighting for?
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| With the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be
| surprised if the American intelligence community world
| order collapses within the decade, either from within or
| from international pressure.
| grapeskin wrote:
| 70 years is an entire lifetime. North Korea has survived
| longer than that even.
|
| Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn't mean
| they'll be replaced with something better.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Communism in North Korea started after WW2, so it has 75+
| (three quarters of a century - 1946 to today), while
| communism started in Russia after WW1, but, at least
| officially, ended with fall of USSR in 1991 - so in there
| it was for 70+ years (1918 to 1991).
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Communism in North Korea ... 1946 to today
|
| For what it's worth, NK officially distanced itself from
| communism in 2009:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO253213
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29korea.htm
| l
| cheschire wrote:
| Was North Korea a dystopia for the entire 70 years or did
| they at least have a few good decades? Really asking.
| [deleted]
| deaddodo wrote:
| I mean, I'm not going to write up a whole diatribe on the
| topic, but yeah; Kim Il-sung was pretty tyrannical from
| the outset. You can say it got _really_ bad under Kim
| Jong-Il, but it was never "good".
| danuker wrote:
| You don't necessarily need an extinction event to create
| political change. People can be convinced by others' ideas.
| LightG wrote:
| That's increasingly rare these days.
|
| There's a significant proportion of tribal automatons out
| there that imbalance the arguments.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I partially agree: everything is ephemeral. Humans have an
| obsession of holding on to all things. We hoard at the
| civilizational level.
|
| That's not to say we should roll over and let everything be
| lost like tears in rain.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| This is absolutely spot-on, and I think a lot of HN will agree
| with you here...
|
| ...which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN decry
| decentralization and web3 as scam artistry.
| dgb23 wrote:
| No. This is just yet another attempt to monetize social
| interactions so it's pretty much going into the wrong
| direction.
|
| All of the things GP mentioned were just open, free, ways to
| communicate without attachments. This is why they have been
| beautiful and exciting and often of higher quality and
| honesty.
| root_axis wrote:
| Web3 is a scam for extracting cash from the uninformed, it's
| not a solution to any problems and it's orders of magnitude
| costlier to operate than a centralized server.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Not wanting to disturb your "Web 3.0" tangent, but you're
| aware you're writing on a forum where most anyone is bringing
| their project and clicks to github.com without a second
| thought?
| homarp wrote:
| >github
|
| good example: git, fully decentralized. Github: centralized
| git
|
| and of course web3 git: own a NFT of that specific
| revision.
| input_sh wrote:
| > Own an NFT with a link to that specific revision.
|
| Fixed that for you. NFTs don't store actual data, just
| links to them.
|
| And having an NFT with a link to something really brings
| nothing to the table when talking about link rot.
| ngc248 wrote:
| Because web3 decentralization is not the solution. The web
| when it started out was pretty decentralized. Consolidation
| and centralization happened because of economies of scale and
| it was convenient for the users also as compared to self
| hosting.
|
| Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are
| already seeing this.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > ...which makes it all the more baffling why many on HN
| decry decentralization and web3 as scam artistry
|
| Because "web3" is a scam. Claiming to solve this problem is
| not the same thing as solving it or solving it well.
| viksit wrote:
| All solutions to problems generally start off as toys or
| proofs of concepts. and they improve over time.
|
| See: The Wright Brothers.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| What was the problem, from an end-user perspective,
| again?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| User End Problem: The state of not being scammed
| fladrif wrote:
| My problem here, and correct me if I'm interpreting this
| incorrectly, is that web3 calls only for decentralization
| around current authorities and proposes recentralization
| around new authorities. The web as it is already has the
| technology and possibility for "decentralized" content
| creation and publishing, but as with all things it is easier
| to do so on "centralized" platforms. I don't see what web3
| offers beyond that. We will still rely on DNS, BGP, and all
| host of other technologies to connect our digital world, and
| within this framework decentralization is ingrained.
| viksit wrote:
| Agree. I've actually seen an interesting shift in such
| arguments. People will talk about decentralization being a
| good thing -- but rather than talk about web3 from the
| economic lens of decentralization the arguments always flow
| to crypto scams and environmental factors.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > People will talk about decentralization being a good
| thing -- but rather than talk about web3 from the economic
| lens of decentralization the arguments always flow to
| crypto scams and environmental factors.
|
| "web3", by the bulk of use, _is_ a pile of crypto advocacy.
|
| I want decentralization. I don't want web3. They're not the
| same. (Even if at one point they were.)
| dewey wrote:
| If you'd look into most "web3" projects you'll see they are
| extremely centralized.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I have still to see one thing this web3 is supposed to solve
| that cannot reasonably be solved with the standard web1.0
| rchaud wrote:
| It shouldn't be baffling at all.
|
| The methods of decentralization already exist and would be
| known to people that frequent this forum.
|
| "Web3" is a marketing term created by venture capitalists
| that want to fuse a tokenization layer to it from which they
| can extract perpetual payments.
| db48x wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/flash_badger
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| "Copyright lawyers" != "Rights-holders"
|
| Say what you like about lawyers, but one thing I think we'll
| agree on is that they rarely do stuff unless someone else is
| paying for their time (IAAL fwiw :)
|
| I'm only half joking, because blaming lawyers deflects from the
| real issue here, which is the fitness-for-purpose of statutory
| fair use / fair dealing doctrine.
|
| There are quite a few eminent academic lawyers worth reading on
| this topic, e.g. Boyle, Lessig, Litman, Vaidhyanathan.
| jmyeet wrote:
| The sad reality is that much of what is "lost" wasn't worth
| keeping. There's a world of difference between being a curator
| and a hoarder.
|
| You don't remember everything that happens to you. You remember
| things that are noteworthy for some reason. There is a natural
| process for the brain to preserve certain memories. The
| Internet is really no different. Things get preserved largely
| because they're worth preserving. Things that aren't... don't.
|
| As for forums, IMHO they've largely disappeared because they're
| a terrible format for maintaining information. I mean how many
| times have you done a search for "how do you do X?" and the
| first search result is a forum title asking exactly that...
| with no replies (side note: why doesn't Google downrank these
| scenarios?).
|
| Or someone asks a question and there are a bunch of irrelevant
| responses (eg "first!"), outdated information, sidetracks,
| personal attacks over some long-forgotten beef, etc. A
| chronological thread is almost never useful for finding
| information. Pinned comments are just bandaids. Stackoverflow's
| ranked answer system is better but still has issues with stale
| information. It also relies on moderation.
|
| As for Facebook, IMHO this whole hiding information in a walled
| garden I tend to find completely overblown for much the same
| reasons why forums are mostly useless.
|
| The trend I absolutely hate however is using Discord as the
| primary repository for, say, an open source project. This is
| something that is meant to be available yet the discoverability
| is absolutely horrendous. Even if you're on the right Discord,
| the search is woefully abysmal.
| Joeri wrote:
| I suppose there is always archive.org and wikipedia, but the
| more we rely on those to keep old content around the more
| worried I get about single points of failure. I remember when I
| first went online in the 90's the vision of the internet was
| decentralized content, where information would never go away
| once it was pushed online. The reality is that the internet is
| now a decentralized network of central depots, with information
| rarely jumping between those central depots, and with old
| layers of content shedding off the edge of those depots and
| falling into the abyss.
|
| Gatekeeping is essential to the modern web. Content is valuable
| and/or dangerous and therefore (b)locked away instead of freely
| copied. Some exceptions exist, of course, but we are very far
| from that 90's vision.
| astura wrote:
| >I remember when I first went online in the 90's the vision
| of the internet was decentralized content, where information
| would never go away once it was pushed online.
|
| This is incredibly bizarre, I can't imagine where this
| "vision" came from. Storage was extremely limited and
| bandwidth was expensive back then; things were being deleted
| constantly. The first web forum I participated in (in 1996)
| only had the last week's worth of messages available, the
| older ones were permanently deleted. Back then if you were
| using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail you had to constantly delete your
| old emails because you'd run out of space. I would download
| stuff and then run out of hard drive space, so it would just
| be deleted and lost forever - nobody could afford more hard
| drive space.
| brightball wrote:
| Wikipedia ends up having so many dead references when you try
| to fact check it.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| I have lost much of the content I created and published in
| the early 90s and 2000s, and mourn it in a way because my
| memory is failing and I wish to learn what has changed in my
| own life. But you're right.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The one piece that I really miss, is a detailed walkthrough
| of some really esoteric XSLT code. It was a long, well-
| demonstrated piece that I published on WebmasterWorld (I
| think they are still around).
|
| It was done around twenty years ago (no less than
| eighteen).
|
| It's absolutely worthless (XSLT - _shudder_ ), but I was
| quite proud of it.
| chaxor wrote:
| Despite how ugly xslt may look, and how little it's used,
| I think it actually solved a problem in parsing xml on
| _streams_ (xslt 3.0 I think?) in a way that really isn 't
| that simple (or used often) in any standard languages. I
| have done quite a few xml parsing scripts in
| python/Julia/etc, but despite xpaths on dom being so much
| easier to write, the OOM problems are abundant.
|
| XSLT I think had some good ideas for making xml parsing
| more performant while avoiding some of the major issues
| that crop up when processing huge amounts of data.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > locked away instead of freely copied
|
| Remember the slogan "information wants to be free"? I haven't
| heard that one in a while. Seems like once the Internet was
| profitable enough, everyone wanted their slice of the pie
| after all. Happens to every generation, I suppose.
| telmo wrote:
| The slogan was always cut short. Here's the entire thing:
|
| "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be
| expensive. ...That tension will not go away."
|
| Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you
| can read the details here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
|
| Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions.
| Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly
| predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the
| use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements
| (that could look back at you), as well as corporations
| gaining powers that used to be associated with nation
| states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it
| would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that
| it didn't have to.
| mewse wrote:
| I sometimes wonder how much those things were "predicted"
| and how much it was a case of the people with lots of
| money having read the same books we did and being primed
| toward those outcomes.
|
| I mean, we all read Snow Crash when we were teenagers and
| now the ones who grew up to be billionaires are all
| excited to build the Metaverse. Did Snow Crash "predict"
| that? Or is this just another (perhaps somewhat extreme)
| form of fandom?
|
| Similarly, would there be as many scientists trying to
| figure out how to make a "warp" drive if Star Trek hadn't
| popularised the concept? And if/when they eventually
| succeed in making warp drives practical, will we say that
| Star Trek "predicted" it?
|
| It feels like there should be a better term for "making a
| fictional concept compelling enough that it is forced
| into reality by fans of the fictional work." But I don't
| know what that term would be.
| homarp wrote:
| >"making a fictional concept compelling enough that it is
| forced into reality by fans of the fictional work."
|
| visionary ?
|
| "reality distortion field"-er ?
|
| inspiring ?
| mewse wrote:
| Oo, yeah; "inspired" is precisely the word I was looking
| for! (I'm a little embarrassed I couldn't draw it to mind
| by myself!)
|
| I'm much happier with saying (for example) "Star Trek
| inspired the modern warp drive" (I mean, if/when a real-
| world practical warp drive exists) than "Star Trek
| predicted the modern warp drive".
|
| Doesn't imply that Star Trek actually invented the thing,
| but does assign at least a certain causal link to it; not
| mere prognostication of it like "predicted" implies.
| Tenoke wrote:
| The notion that scientists wouldn't try to make cutting
| edge drives without seeing Star Trek is absurd.
| Similarly, VR and other Metaverse-related concepts are a
| somewhat natural thing to try once tech advances.
|
| Thinking this requires some heavy anti-multiple discovery
| beliefs.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You're going to have a hard time pointing to utopian
| novels from the same period.
|
| It's not that something closer to utopia was never
| possible. A lot of CS from the 70s was explicitly
| utopian. Even the Jobs "bicycle for the mind" idea was
| far more utopian than "Let's create a monopolistic
| monoculture with adtech and noise."
|
| For some reason the cyberpunk writers chose not to
| imagine it or promote it.
|
| Warp drive is similar. It seeded the idea of FTL in the
| popular consciousness and made it something almost
| everyone has heard of. Without that, it might have
| remained an abstract curiosity.
|
| In Propaganda, Bernays says that instead of preaching at
| the public you need to dramatise the behaviours and
| beliefs you want to see the public adopt. The ad industry
| is based on this, but of course it runs through fiction
| and other media too.
|
| Star Trek is one of the few attempts to dramatise a
| utopian future. Everything else is a wasteland of
| darkness.
|
| And it has certainly had an effect.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| It's not over yet.
| zo1 wrote:
| We're cheering and/or allowing stepping stones moving us
| in those directions, without realizing the long-term
| implications for the web. (Controversial list incoming)
| Things like: HTTPS everywhere, SSL, DOH, certificate
| pinning, trusted-computing, DRM, CDNs, proxies have
| disappeared, single HTML rendering engine, subscription
| (SAAS) models, moving all desktop programs into the
| browser, extinction of caching, etc.
| grumbel wrote:
| The fundamental problem with the Web is that archival was
| never part of its job. You send HTTP queries to the server
| and it answers. If somebody switches that server off, all
| that information is gone. Even just updating the server will
| inevitably destroy the content. You can try to preserve it
| with well named URLs, mirror it and such, but it's a lossy
| process. There was never a mechanism to keep URLs working
| long term and even if an URL still works, you can't tell if
| the content is still the same that was there back when the
| Link was created.
|
| As bad as the modern centralization is in a lot of other
| ways, I actually quite like the way Youtube works. Every
| video gets a unique id, a permanent URL and is immutable
| (with some exceptions). That means most videos from the very
| early days of Youtube are still around and accessible, while
| most of the Web of that time is long gone.
|
| The Web really could need a more robust way to publish
| content, just throwing stuff on a server really isn't cutting
| it.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| 'Archival' is an adjective. The gerund 'archiving' works
| nicely and is grammatical.
| groovy2shoes wrote:
| It's a substantive. It fits here fine.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| You may have a point. I'm going to go reevaluate my
| entire worldview for a bit.
|
| EDIT: nope, still not buying it. I can only make it work
| by analogy with bury->burial, archive->archival, and
| there's not enough there.
| go_prodev wrote:
| I wonder if Web3 will help to solve this? (Being
| decentralized)
| egypturnash wrote:
| It's on the blockchain _forever_!
|
| ...as long as someone finds it worth paying the costs of
| continuing to run the blockchain, and the people who run
| 51% of it don't decide to wipe out or change anything,
| and...
| archhn wrote:
| The internet was a magical place back in the day. We were all
| super excited to contribute to something so transformative. I
| remember my father excitedly putting up his 3d gifs on his
| GeoCites page.
|
| Then the corporations came with their legions of desk jockeys,
| all competing with each other for promotions dependent upon
| squeezing the internet of every last drop of value.
|
| The internet became less human, just like modern society.
| Everything about the almighty dollar. Human creativity and
| freedom be dammed.
| drran wrote:
| We can start Internet 2.0, a HackNet, just for hackers.
| Create your own DNS server, register non-commercial hacker
| sites only, create catalogue and decentralized search engine
| for these servers. Commercial operators will see no value in
| this parallel network, because google will be unable to index
| it, so spam problem will gone.
| archhn wrote:
| The arrow of time only goes one way. We can't go back now.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hmm, not a bad idea. I'll add that to my feature list for
| newnet.
| hansel_der wrote:
| >We can start Internet 2.0
|
| we're already at ipv6 and web3.0 /s
|
| deep/dark web does still exist
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I would love to be involved in this
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _because google will be unable to index it_ "
|
| Creating a DNS server is beyond Googles abilities? Why will
| Google be unable to index it? If _you_ can read the
| catalogue, they surely can.
|
| > " _Commercial operators will see no value in this
| parallel network_ "
|
| If people are using it, they will want to put ads on it.
| Why wouldn't they? And why are 'hackers' separate from
| 'people who want money for their work' in this scenario?
| drran wrote:
| These servers will not be accessible with normal DNS
| turned on, so Google may index it technically, but links
| will not work for normies, because they know nothing
| about DNS or networks. Technically competent users can
| switch DNS server, so they will.
|
| Yes, it will be possible to show ads, but ads may link to
| sites within the parallel DNS system only.
|
| Hackers, who want money for their work, are called
| security experts.
| throw10920 wrote:
| You're ignoring all of the _other_ things that have happened
| with the internet in order to specifically attack this
| nebulous idea of "corporations".
|
| You can make exactly the same argument about the influx of
| new users (Eternal September memes, "then came all of the
| normies with their friends, all competing to get the most
| upvotes on their Reddit posts), the bloating of the web
| ("then came all of the hipster developers"), sexual content,
| or any one of another half-dozen side-effects of the internet
| becoming massively more popular than it was in 1990.
|
| If anything, the web has _more_ independent content on it
| than it did a few decades ago - you just don 't see it
| because you frequent a small number of platforms, you're not
| _investing effort_ looking for it, and Google 's search
| results are incredibly gamed.
|
| I have _hundreds_ of individual blogs that I 've bookmarked
| through link-following and reading Hacker News frequently,
| without even trying to amass a collection. If you were to
| actually spend effort tracking down independent content, then
| maybe you'd actually find some.
|
| Moreover, the internet never became "less human", because it
| was never human in the first place. It was a _network_ of
| computers, a _technology_ - not your neighborhood, or
| anything resembling a community, because _technologies are
| not communities_. Your complaint is basically saying that the
| median website is more focused on profit than it was a few
| decades ago - which, aside from the fact that there 's no
| evidence to back it up, is a meaningless complaint equivalent
| to the Eternal September ones. Sure, even if the median
| website is more profit-focused - so what? There still far,
| _far_ more useful information, and interesting people to
| meet, than there were decades ago - and the internet is
| available to _everyone_ , as opposed to just those with dial-
| up (or whatever).
| archhn wrote:
| The idea of corporations dominating the internet is not
| nebulous at all.
|
| Things used to be more ad hoc. People would create their
| own websites from scratch. There was less centralization.
| Every website wasn't a boostrap clone.
|
| The pursuit of profit changed things dramatically. As soon
| as people started making big money on the internet, things
| changed. FOMO kicked in and the internet became the new
| gold rush.
|
| Idk man, it seems like you just weren't there at the
| beginning.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Combat had honor and humanity under the Bushido code. One
| skilled warrior against another.
|
| Then came guns and cannons, depersonalizing it into a
| grisly slaughter at the hands of thousands of barely-
| trained conscripts.
|
| If only we could go back.
| archhn wrote:
| Seriously. I mean, it wasn't great, but men had dignity.
| There's no dignity in getting nuked or mowed down by a
| machine gun.
| syntaxfree wrote:
| Please divert all of your charity spending to archive.org
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > We've lost so much already... the old Flash content, the
| GeoCities pages, the forums fallen under Facebook's iron
| curtain, the archives of obscure culture erased by copyright
| lawyers. The lit windows of the Internet that went dark, one by
| one, only to be replaced by gaudy commercial signage.
|
| Have we? I disagree. Why not self host with Ghost? [1]
|
| I think a golden age of decentralized tooling (payments,
| content, etc) is starting to emerge [2, 3], you just have to be
| optimistic enough to see it. Let's not reminisce about the
| "good old days," bc the good days could be ahead too.
|
| [1] https://ghost.org/docs/hosting/
|
| [2] https://balajis.com/set-up-a-paid-newsletter-at-your-own-
| dom...
|
| [3] https://balajis.com/how-to-gradually-exit-twitter/
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| They're not being kicked off the web by copyright lawyers. The
| bloggers still own their copyright. Indeed, copyright is what
| keeps them being exploited by others.
|
| They're disappearing because they don't want to pay what it
| costs in time or fees to keep their words around. If you
| believe enough in this-- and I'm not being sarcastic -- I hope
| you'll donate the time and servers and bandwidth to offer free
| hosting for these folks.
| altcognito wrote:
| Bandwidth is cheaper and cheaper yet our MBA driven world seems
| to find a way to charge more and more. Capitalism isn't about
| finding cheapest pricing anymore, it is unlimited power of
| business to charge the absolute maximum the customer is willing
| to expend because competition is gone. All of us on the cloud
| are just going to sit there with pikachu faces when rates get
| higher and higher.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| avazhi wrote:
| As you alluded to, unfortunately we aren't even left with gaudy
| corporatism. It's just an SEO shitshow now. For certain
| searches, Google is basically useless. It's the same fucking
| content copy pasted across 15 results.
| Vespasian wrote:
| It feels like there is a nieche opening up.
|
| With SEO copy content being useless to anyone but the
| provider and Google and the tech giants coming slowly but
| surely under scrutiny from lawmakers, it seems like there
| might be an opening to develop a more open web (commercially
| speaking) especially in those countries and regions that lost
| the "Big Tech" race.
|
| I know HN isn't a fan of regulations but I think FAANG and
| friends overplayed their hands and the screws are slowly
| tightening.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I have to do weird tricks when searching for dll problems to
| throw off those long lists of fix my pc spam sites. This is
| for fairly obscure third party dlls. They just round up all
| the names and create a spam page for each dll. Then probably
| black hat them to the top.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| What kind of tricks do you do?
| criddell wrote:
| Not the OP, but search for some of the exported methods
| can sometimes bring up details.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Normally add something technical and related that I
| expect to be mentioned in a stackoverflow style forum but
| not in a spam.
|
| You made me think... just search stackoveflow should be
| step 1. Roll out Google if desperate.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I've noticed this is starting to happen with Github issues
| too. Scummy websites will scrape issue threads on Github,
| repackage them into "blog posts" with "comments" and rank
| higher in SEO.
|
| It just sucks that the solution to getting ranked on google
| is never "write good content" but rather "optimize for SEO"
| xenihn wrote:
| Discord has done more to kill traditional forums than Facebook
| has.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Which frankly, should have been a complement of forums but
| not a replacement
|
| (And more frankly, the forum board softwares haven't evolved
| gracefully)
| alanh wrote:
| Is the DNS for this link failing to resolve for anyone else?
| taubek wrote:
| It seems that they didn't update all of their help pages. They
| still talk about old plans at
| https://wordpress.com/support/space-upgrade/.
|
| I just checked my old, free account and it still says that I have
| 3GB space cap.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| According to the forum, the space cap reduction only applies to
| new sites.
|
| https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrad...
| netcan wrote:
| On one hand, prices change. Services change. When a sandwich shop
| stops carrying your favourite pickles... such is life.
|
| OTOH... I do feel this is problematic. Wordpress.com isn't
| FB/Twitter, but it _is_ a meaningfully big part of social
| media... and therefore all media. A lot gets lost when the
| inevitable content loss happens.
|
| There are moral responsibilities and societal needs here that
| companies aren't going to assume. We should be accumulating an
| accessible and useful content commons. That's not compatible with
| commercial content hosting individual bloggers/users. I now think
| that the rights and wrongs of free speech in our era is much more
| complicated than I had previously thought. But whatever free
| speech ought to be, it cannot be both free and under the control
| of a few companies... even those at wordpress.com's scale.
|
| Can we really not just have a freedom (as in both freedom & $0)
| in the blogging space? Can't hosting be solved with an open
| protocol, or something like a wikipedia fondation?
|
| What we have now for social media really sucks. It sucks in terms
| of freedom. It sucks in terms of moderation. It sucks in terms of
| fake news, propaganda & such. It sucks in terms of power
| dynamics. The software/UI itself often sucks. Transparency sucks.
| Fairness sucks. It's not nice that content creators have to suck
| up to algorithm gods. The adware/spyware sucks.
|
| The fact that 2007's bogging golden age optimism resolves to this
| is terrible. Can it really be that the worldwideweb is possible,
| but blogging is only as resilient as your deal with a hosting
| company?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vohu43 wrote:
| That is why you should always try to host important stuff on your
| own. It always sucks to have dependencies of any kind.
|
| Virtual servers cost like a few bucks a month and you can easily
| set up a simple wordpress server in a few minutes.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| Managing it after is I believe the bigger problem.
| username223 wrote:
| Cutting the free tier from 3 GB to 500 MB makes it useless for
| many people: that's 500 images at okay resolution, and lots of
| people like to put photos on their blogs. And 300 "visits" (page
| hits?) per day is almost as bad, as a runaway crawler or minor
| spike in interest can blow through that in no time.
|
| I moved away from WP.com when they started putting ads on the
| free tier. I thought their business model was upselling some
| people, so monetizing the free version felt scummy. The fact that
| they're crippling the free version now makes me even more glad I
| moved away.
| mobilene wrote:
| You're going to pay for storage somehow, somewhere. For my
| photo-heavy WP.com blog (of 15 years!) I've always hosted my
| photos on Flickr. I pay the $50/year for Flickr Pro which gives
| me all the photo storage I could ever want.
|
| I agree with you about the ads on the free tier. Worse, the ads
| are extremely low quality. I complained about this (shaking my
| fist into the air, essentially) on my blog not long ago.
|
| https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/02/08/why-i-still-recommend-wo...
| [deleted]
| Derbasti wrote:
| Last year, I tried to migrate a personal picture blog away from
| WordPress.com.
|
| So I cancelled the subscription, and hit the delete-everything
| button. Which refuses to work. Because I still have a
| subscription, see, so why would I want to delete things? So I
| could just wait until the subscription period ran out, at which
| point the button would presumably work, but at that point all my
| password-protected posts and pictures would also lose their
| password-protection, becoming free for all the world to see. So,
| no thank you. I'm being cagey with details here, but it's just
| vacation pictures of my kids, nothing special.
|
| What to do instead? Click on each post, hit delete. Manually. No
| big deal, it's only a few dozen. But then, REPEAT THIS FOR EVERY
| PICTURE, because every picture has its own "post" in WordPress's
| database. Good thing I only uploaded TWO THOUSAND images.
| Seriously, clicking every single image manually was actually the
| fastest way to do it. Click all 2000 images (thank goodness there
| is that one view that at least allows multi-select), then click
| the delete button (and wait).
|
| This was _painful_. Had I known this beforehand, I would not have
| started a Wordpress.com blog.
|
| Also fun: at some point, WordPress.com had silently switched out
| all of my printable, high-resolution JPEGs for crappy, compressed
| WebPs. So I couldn't "just" import the Wordpress export into the
| next blog engine, I additionally had to finagle all of the
| pictures to point to the originals instead of the replacements.
| Of course this silent change had not in fact changed my storage
| quota. It still used three times the JPEGs' storage, which is why
| I wanted to migrate originally.
|
| Or that Wordpress.com uses a custom gallery that does not, in
| fact, export correctly, so I had to redo all the galleries when I
| imported the old posts in the new engine.
|
| Or that one time where they silently switched my theme, so all
| the galleries broke. And let's just not talk about the broken
| image upload if you're on anything but a rock-solid connection.
| (Hint: Gallery View, drag-and-drop, Edge, is the least unreliable
| process. The file picker, or directly inserting into posts, or
| Firefox or Chrome, just immediately quit as soon as the
| connection so much as drops a single packet).
|
| The blog is now generated by Publii, which is _delightful_ , but
| a very different animal.
|
| TL;DR: Migrating away from Wordpress.com is even worse than using
| it.
| nomercy400 wrote:
| Repeating a somewhat lengthy action 2000 times is for me an
| excuse to look into automating this with something like
| selenium or autohotkey. Something that automates mouse 'clicks'
| on a browser.
|
| Measure how much time it would take to remove 5 images,
| multiply by 400. Can you automate it in less? Note that you
| might learn something new, and because it is a one-time script,
| it can be super hacky.
| fmajid wrote:
| Wordpress has an API. Also, the underlying MySQL DB could be
| used, but I don't know if that is exposed by WP.com.
| Derbasti wrote:
| Well, the entire operation took maybe 20 minutes. I connected
| a graphics tablet for the occasion, which made click-click-
| clicking the pictures relatively quick.
|
| I did actually weigh that time against how long it might take
| me to find/learn/use the API, but 20 minutes for a one-time
| task seemed preferable. Plus I could listen to podcasts.
|
| Honestly, the painful part was re-importing all the original
| images and rebuilding all the galleries. But there was a
| convenient mandatory all-day online management training
| coming up at work that proved perfect for the job. That part
| took a good six hour, modulo some management training
| nonsense.
| [deleted]
| withinboredom wrote:
| Did you contact support? Seems like they'd be able to handle
| that for you.
| Derbasti wrote:
| I seem to remember I did contact support, but they were less
| than helpful. Might be misremembering, though. It was a while
| ago.
| wtmt wrote:
| I have a couple of blogs for social/community purposes on
| wordpress.com. They're not really high traffic (hopefully not as
| much as 10,000 visits a month) and posts are probably less than a
| handful each month. There's no way I'm paying the pricing
| indicated in this blog post. It is ridiculous for personal sites
| in India, and if wordpress.com forces existing blogs to move to a
| paid plan with severe restrictions, it will only lose more
| mindshare and market share in an environment where a lot of
| content is already being published in other walled gardens where
| the publishers don't have to pay directly. I believe this pricing
| move by wordpress.com is not well thought out.
|
| If it comes to it, I'll have to look for alternatives that are
| better and provide a GUI based editor. Subscription by email is
| something that visitors to the blogs seem to use. Transitioning
| that may be painful or impossible, but these aren't sites that
| have a personal connection with the subscribers. A post about the
| move should suffice for those who are really interested in
| getting notified (as opposed to the majority who follow a blog in
| the hopes of their blog being followed in return).
| [deleted]
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220403111024/https://rootprivil...
|
| https://archive.ph/orA2T
| alanh wrote:
| (Context: The link appears to have disappeared, vanishing in a
| haze of unresolved DNS queries)
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I don't know if I should still be shocked at the lack of humility
| among geeks when criticising anything to do with wordpress (much
| less specfically wordpress.com, the most-used web hosting
| platform on earth).
|
| This thread is a nonsensical place to put criticisms of
| wordpress.org because I suspect rather less than about 0.001% of
| wordpress.com's customers are using that form of wordpress
| hosting (most customers do not have the right to upload their own
| code, or do any of the things that upset HNers).
|
| Finally, I imagine the point of simplifying their price plans is
| to move to in-app modular upgrades to allow people to grow as
| they want?
| [deleted]
| zenlf wrote:
| I remember back then when Vimeo started charging content creator
| somebody did a good analysis showing that they are basically
| charging what you would have to spend if you hosted the video
| yourself. Is this the case here for WordPress?
|
| Free resources are never free. I hope changes like this will pave
| the ways for the future of self hosting.
| [deleted]
| tluyben2 wrote:
| We host all wp ourselves; it's so simple these days. I have a
| script which just gets into ssh and runs docker compose and
| dumps all the passwords. Takes seconds and currently we host
| around 20 wps which makes the cost per wp 0.05$ per month. Sure
| it can go down but it never did and if it does, we'll survive.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > we host around 20 wps which makes the cost per wp 0.05$ per
| month
|
| Were are you getting servers for $1/mo?
| m0llusk wrote:
| Everything about this screams "business opportunity". Not just
| providing alternative services, but helping with migrations also.
| People who have had their blog providers shift away from their
| needs are a whole new market segment that won't be going away any
| time soon.
| startlaunch wrote:
| Howdy. My name is Dave Martin. I'm the CEO of WordPress.com.
|
| VM (Sorry, I don't know your full name) thank you for sharing
| your concerns. Comments aren't open on your blog, so I'll weigh
| in with a few thoughts below. I'm happy to chat more about any of
| this in the comments below, or you can reach out to me directly
| via email dave.martin (at) automattic.com.
|
| You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context
| around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come
| as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me.
|
| Yes, as of this week we've gone from 5 plans down to just 2. That
| said, we're not done making changes. This was the first of a
| couple of phases of changes.
|
| Those 5 older plans that you mentioned were the culmination of
| like 10 years worth of plans and features sort of haphazardly
| being added to WordPress.com with no real strategy. With those
| older plans, it was really hard for customers to see at-a-glance
| why they should choose one plan over another.
|
| Let me address a couple of the things you mentioned in your post:
|
| - No older sites/blogs have been affected by these new price
| changes. If your site is on an older plan, there should have been
| no changes to your billing.
|
| - As you pointed out, we have historically adjusted our
| subscription plan prices in a number of regional areas to ensure
| that WordPress.com stays affordable for folks in those areas. We
| will continue to do so. Looks like we forgot to do this for the
| new Pro plan. Thanks for calling this to our attention! We will
| get this updated ASAP.
|
| - Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If
| you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let
| you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost,
| but we will NEVER shut off access to your site, nor will we ever
| auto-increase the amount you're paying.
|
| - Our mission still remains to democratize publishing. We have no
| intention of ever removing older sites from WordPress.com. Even
| if you had a custom domain that expired, your site will always
| have a default WordPress.com sub-domain and your content isn't
| going anywhere.
|
| - The Pro plan you see now (at $15/mo) is essentially the the
| exact same plan as the old Business plan (which used to cost
| $25/mo). The only difference being the default storage that is
| available and a cost savings to customers of $10/mo.
|
| - We will be announcing affordable add-ons for both the free plan
| and the Pro plan to extend both your traffic and your storage as
| needed. In fact, we plan to also add a handful of affordable add-
| ons to the free plan to make it easy for customers to pick and
| choose which additional functionality they want, without needing
| to upgrade to the Pro plan.
|
| Again, thank you for sharing. I'm sorry that I did a poor job of
| publicly sharing context around these changes, prior to making
| them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions or
| concerns.
| 6510 wrote:
| OT but perhaps interesting: When WP started Akismet perma-
| banned users from posting comments for adding links to
| comments. There was no appeal mechanism, when I got a hold of
| an employee they were unable to see if comments of mine got
| rejected nor why. It seems like something you would want to
| fix. The community (of about 50) that we moved to the platform
| died pretty fast and the bans are still in place.
| agluszak wrote:
| adventured wrote:
| > This response looks like it was generated by GPT-3 trained
| on a public relationships textbook.
|
| > Looks like we forgot to do this for the new Pro plan.
|
| > You "forgot"? That's laughable.
|
| > "Own the crisis", "be honest" and so on. I don't trust like
| that. You messed things up. You are no longer credible.
| Fixing it isn't that simple.
|
| This is an exceptionally belligerent reply (for HN). It's
| something that clearly shouldn't be tolerated on HN when
| communicating directly to another person.
|
| There's a person on the other end of your abusive reply.
|
| They made a mistake, therefore they're no longer credible. I
| pity the people in your world.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Plus, it's the weekend for God's sake. I would hope there
| are a lot of the team members that aren't available, and
| expecting instant response is unreasonable.
| devmor wrote:
| I interviewed with WordPress a couple years ago and given
| what I know about their work/life balance I would expect
| most people are not asked to work on weekends unless
| that's a regular part of their job. They seem to respect
| their employees' time.
| freedomben wrote:
| I would guess the Venn Diagram of people like GP who have
| zero tolerance for it taking time on a weekend, are also
| quite overlapped with people who would loudly shout at OP
| for calling somebody in on a weekend to deal with a PR
| issue. "You asked someone to work on the weekend,
| therefore you have no credibility as a non-evil
| employer."
| agluszak wrote:
| It's not just an ordinary person, it's the CEO of the
| company, whose priority is to manage its public image
| during the social media crisis after a callout. He has an
| interest in making anything that could just as well be
| deliberate appear to be accidental. I have no idea what the
| truth is, I simply take everything that a company
| representative says with a big grain of salt.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| It's what they do that matter most. If they didn't fix
| it, and gave "credible" reasons for delaying, that would
| cross a threshold where such suspicions would be much
| more warranted. But a quick fix, well ... fixes that.
| [deleted]
| snek_case wrote:
| A 50GB storage limit is not going to be a problem for most
| people, but the 100K hits limit is much too low for a paid
| plan. If you make the HN front page once or twice, you can
| easily bust that. There really shouldn't be a limit for a paid
| plan that costs $15/month, but if you're going to have a limit,
| at least make it based on bandwidth usage, not the number of
| hits. You're incentivizing successful bloggers to move away
| from your platform. Is that really what you want?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Thanks for this! I started the day wondering if I was going to
| need to waste some brain cycles finding some new hosting for my
| near zero traffic blog, but this response answered pretty much
| all of my concerns.
| jseliger wrote:
| This may also interest you:
| https://betonit.blog/2022/03/31/sunk-costs-and-substack/
|
| Caplan is the author of _The Case Against Education_ and
| _Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids_ , and he blogged regularly
| at Econlog for many years. His remarks are consistent with my
| own recent experiences; I've written on Wordpress since 2007:
| https://jakeseliger.com/ and, although I don't have the reach
| of Caplan, or have the need for some of the features Caplan
| does, I also find recent changes to be chalelnging. Two may not
| constitute a trend, but, if I were starting today, I'd use
| Substack or Ghost.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Did you mean "interest" in the sense of "cause for worry"? Or
| in the sense of " useful feedback"? Because this vague sort
| of complaint (the one with no detail given except of the
| posters importance) is only one of those, and not the useful
| one.
| detaro wrote:
| > _Traffic limits will only be enforced on the honor system. If
| you consistently go over the cap month after month, we will let
| you know and ask you to pay a tiny bit more to cover the cost_
|
| That really needs to be transparent. Right after Vimeo's mess
| with this is a bad time to introduce vague language around
| this, and people _will_ assume you mean "force upgrade to
| thousands-of-dollars enterprise plan".
| rexreed wrote:
| I'm a Vimeo Premium customer and I seem to have missed the
| pricing mess -- can you fwd a link? I've been getting anxious
| about our Vimeo paid subscription.
| lolinder wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30743371
|
| Here's the last discussion I read, there's a link from dang
| to another, related thread.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm not a Vimeo user, so I'm not in a position
| to know if the whole thing was overblown or not.)
| startlaunch wrote:
| Yep. On it. We will have a post up on
| https://wordpress.com/blog/ by end of day today.
| scgtrp wrote:
| Why there, and not _on the pricing page_?
| simcop2387 wrote:
| I imagine that takes longer to update than making a blog
| post. So quicker to scramble with on the weekend while
| they clarify everywhere else.
| scgtrp wrote:
| It's... a wordpress site. You can just go edit pages.
| They even have a nice easy web UI for it.
| karpierz wrote:
| They don't mean that it's technically difficult, they
| mean that the language on the pricing page has legal
| consequences, and they need to be precise with their
| updates to that page.
| scgtrp wrote:
| Or, in other words, "we want to make reassuring promises
| to make the bad PR stop, but in a way that carries
| minimal legal weight".
|
| That is not as reassuring as people seem to think it is.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Or "It's Sunday, and legal is unavailable, so for right
| now we're putting out a blog post and we'll update the
| pricing page early next week."
|
| Plus, if the pricing changes per-location as stated,
| that's significantly more complicated, and not something
| that can be done in a few hours over the weekend. I'm
| inclined to cut them some slack, I felt the response
| posted upthread was OK. Has noone else worked with legacy
| systems? The large number of pricing plans being rolled
| out haphazardly over years is very believable to me, my
| current company had a pricing option buried deep in the
| site that nobody even remembered existed anymore,
| customer service actually brought that to my attention
| after a unrelated change broke billing for those
| customers.
|
| That being said, if the changes proposed aren't updated
| on the pricing page by Tuesday, then it's safe to assume
| this is all meaningless PR fluff.
| iratewizard wrote:
| This comment thread is the core of what's wrong with nu-
| HN. The loudest and least informed are the quickest to
| make a comment and collect internet points. If you need a
| dopamine fix go to reddit.
| adampk wrote:
| Preach!
| hiitechk wrote:
| I don't think you are being realistic with this thought-
| process.
| HiroProtagonist wrote:
| Hi Dave, I just wanted to say that I applaud this response. No
| excuses, just ownership of mistakes and a plan to fix them.
|
| This is leadership.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| Seconded. Already breathing easier as well.
|
| Also, a good example of the sort of attitude we've come to
| expect from WP folks, and from which the sudden Pro-plan
| changes departed.
| agluszak wrote:
| That's not leadership, that's damage control
| bavell wrote:
| He is taking responsibility and taking action, and he did
| so in a clear and straightforward way. A good example of
| leadership.
| folkrav wrote:
| Leadership doesn't mean lack of mistakes, therefore comes
| with damage control work.
| haswell wrote:
| The two are not mutually exclusive.
| cersa8 wrote:
| I understand the frustration but as a business it makes a lot of
| sense to cut back on the plans and simplify things. It's
| happening all across the board and I myself have done so. Doubled
| the price, canceled the free plan and rolled out a single plan
| that covers everything. I was expecting push back and reduced
| customer signup but the opposite happened.
| fao_ wrote:
| To be honest, I'm just baffled that this guy apparently saw "6
| gigabytes of storage, free, forever" and his immediate reaction
| wasn't "Wow, that has to be a lot of data, I wonder how long
| they'll be offering this for" rather than "A cool deal! I can
| trust this to exist forever!".
|
| Free tiers do not make any money. So they have, what, 6 GiB of
| quota (however you want to imagine "quota" implemented) for
| thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, for 18 years. That
| adds up! It's getting more and more expensive to run
| datacenters (I can only assume they are using their own
| datacenters, and not renting space, as they've been live for
| about 18 years) via fuel costs, etc.
|
| This is the inevitable culmination of literally everyone in
| techbro culture telling non-techincally-minded people "If you
| would like a blog, you should use Wordpress. They have a high
| usage limit and are free".
|
| It turns out when everyone is using the free tier, the company
| has to tighten it's belt a bit? Who would have thought, under
| capitalism, that a company could _lose_ money. Unimaginable.
| Woah.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| If you can't afford to run something forever, you probably
| shouldn't advertise it as free forever. That's misleading. I
| disagree with your assertion that people who were misled by
| this are at fault for being gullible.
| chasil wrote:
| Quietly migrating the storage to something capable of
| transparent zstd would regain a lot of physical space.
|
| BtrFS can do it, and I bet that zfs can too.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Most of the files stored on a WordPress site are going to
| be practically incompressible -- images, video, etc.
| Applying filesystem compression won't accomplish much
| except making the files more expensive to serve.
| Razengan wrote:
| What are you doing, step wordpress?
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Wordpress.com has provided great free service. It has been really
| easy to start a blog on that or other services. The editors etc
| have worked great, it's been easy to write text and insert images
| and mathematical formulas. Thank you for the service, it has
| brought humankind forward. Wordpress is of course under no
| obligation to archive old blogs, but it's been another very nice
| extra.
| [deleted]
| viksit wrote:
| I'm surprised this hasn't devolved into a web3 debate yet ;)
| Hjfrf wrote:
| It's not a debate so much as occasional attempts at grifting
| that get shot down immediately.
| joeyzm wrote:
| Cached link:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A0ZzHl...
| hendersoon wrote:
| US$15/month in India is EXTREMELY expensive. The average monthly
| salary in the country is US$210, to give some perspective.
| Obviously there are many people particularly in urban areas who
| make far more, but that base price is sky-high.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| I'm building my own e-commerce, based on a custom super simple
| headless-cms, using a super simple custom nodejs-express-react
| server (similar to next.js, but much more simple, no client-side
| rehydration, no need for client-side JS by default), emotion for
| styles, backblaze for files upload, render.com for hosting the
| server, mlab for the db, and I guess Stripe for billing. I
| hesitated to use WordPress for a few minutes...
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Can't open.
|
| "Private Site
|
| This site is currently private. If you would like to request
| access, we'll send your username to the site owner for approval."
| [deleted]
| LordAtlas wrote:
| That's strange. I can read it fine in both normal and incognito
| windows. Try this instead?
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Frootprivileges.net%2F2...
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I can open it now.
| p0d wrote:
| As a guy of 50 I observe we are at the end of a 20 year sales
| funnel squeeze for the big online providers of free.
|
| As the article points out when companies start to charge they may
| not be charging for what we want. For example, I've just migrated
| from Gsuite free as their squeeze wants me to pay for features I
| don't want.
|
| A lot of us have been spending a lot of time at the digital mall
| and may find ourselves back in our local, smaller shops. Maybe
| not a bad thing.
| [deleted]
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but I think people are absolutely sleeping on
| gutenberg for wordpress. If you havent heard of it, its
| essentially reusable react components within the classic
| wordpress no code plugin ecosystem. Heavy development in this
| area could be the true no code solution.
| skilled wrote:
| I mean, you're not wrong but Gutenberg has a _long_ way to go
| to be considered half-respectable. I am more worried about the
| exodus it is going to cause once they do get it right.
|
| Website builder products and theme developers will wish they
| had a way to unionize once it happens because there is a lot of
| potential for the Automattic team to just take over that
| business themselves. And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come
| up in discussions, too.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > And I wouldn't be surprised if it has come up in
| discussions, too.
|
| This is an oddly hostile take about one of the best corporate
| citizens the web has, IMO.
|
| There is an open question about what happens to the theme
| market generally once truly block-configurable themes exist
| (how many themes are necessary, really?) but pivoting that
| into some evil empire fantasy about Automattic -- a business
| that rescued Tumblr, that bought Simplenote to run it for
| free forever without ads simply because Matt Mullenweg
| depends on it -- seems a little odd.
| skilled wrote:
| I think you're being a bit too sensitive about what I said.
| There was nothing hostile about it, but a simple matter of
| fact. Even if they don't have that intention now, they will
| have to discuss it because their roadmap will dramatically
| change what WordPress is and what it can do.
|
| Which is why I said it will take a _long_ time, but it is
| heading in that direction.
|
| They already released Patterns[0], which is very tiny
| inside look on where they plan to go with Gutenberg. Yeah,
| they might look cheap and not so attractive, but ultimately
| the ability to customize "blocks" is already there - it's
| just a matter of time before the capabilities of that
| customizer get cranked up to the max.
|
| [0]: https://wordpress.org/patterns/
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Right, yes, they added patterns. It's a very important
| new feature that reflects the change in the way people
| can lay out rich content.
|
| But -- considering patterns can be used by every third
| party theme in an open source CMS -- how do you get to
| talking about developers unionizing (that is, under
| threat from some corporate entity) and Automattic _taking
| over that business_ from there?
|
| The reason I read it like a corporate big bad wolf
| fantasy is that you wrote it like one.
| skilled wrote:
| Yes, it just hit me as to why you misunderstood me.
|
| I think because WordPress.org is heading into a direction
| of being a website builder itself, it will naturally hurt
| developers/businesses who make their living off of it.
|
| Yeah, cool and exciting designs might still have a
| market, but for blogs, magazine sites, portfolios - that
| ~$50 for a premium theme might be better spent elsewhere.
|
| I don't know if you're familiar with Webflow[0], but it
| started out as yet another website builder. And, in
| recent years they have added so many features and layout
| templates that I once got confused seeing the "Made with
| Webflow" badge on a landing page. It had all modern
| features like smooth page transitions, svg animations,
| cool gallery effects, etc,. You know, the things people
| pay that $50 for.
|
| If this happens, or rather when it happens, _maybe_
| Automattic will have to think hard about what it wants
| the future to look like.
|
| [0]: https://webflow.com/
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Yeah -- it absolutely is headed in the direction of being
| a website builder with luxury competition (Squarespace;
| Wix is no luxury, it's a torture).
|
| And I must say, even though I have developed themes in
| the past, I'd prefer to see Gutenberg succeed in making
| most themes irrelevant. Themes that can be customised
| without PHP entirely seem to me to be a good solution to
| a lot of people's complaints about the untidy boundary
| between plugins and themes.
|
| I am only familiar with Webflow from people who say "I've
| been trying to do this in Webflow but I'd prefer if we
| could do it in Wordpress".
| codingdave wrote:
| The problem is they lost the ability to just type as if it was
| all one document. Paragraphs are now widgets. Instead of
| dragging a widget into a document and having a paragraph wrap
| around it, you lay them all out on equal footing.
|
| People really do not care whether they are react components or
| not - but they do care if it is difficult to just type in a
| paragraph.
|
| Gutenberg does have potential, but they empowered widgets while
| making the core act of typing up a document more difficult. If
| they fix that, it has potential.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| _People_ are using block editors everywhere. Campaign
| Monitor, Sendinblue, MailChimp, SquareSpace, Wix.
|
| Arguing that the most popular content management platform
| (ever) should just stick to plain text and shortcodes is not
| really sustainable.
|
| You can just _type_ paragraphs, without any clicking. And
| before, you couldn 't just "wrap a paragraph" around a
| widget, really ever; shortcodes broke stuff like that
| routinely.
|
| (They are still improving cross-block text selection -- at
| the moment if you select from one block to another, both
| blocks select completely. But there's a solution to this that
| is very imminent)
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Forgive me if my Gutenberg knowledge is outdated, but when I
| used it for a company blog a year or two ago, it was possible
| to type as if you were writing a single document. IIRC you
| could keep your hands on the keyboard if you used \ to start
| new blocks.
|
| I also saw a lot of potential in Gutenberg's blocks back
| then. It changed our blogging workflow in some very elegant
| ways.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > its essentially reusable react components
|
| Which is exactly the problem. Many people don't want to have
| heavy React ecosystem stuff on their Wordpress instance. There
| are reasons why they have not jumped on that train before.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > I think people are absolutely sleeping on gutenberg for
| wordpress
|
| This is how I see it.
|
| I'm not sure why people believe there aren't _smart people_
| working on Gutenberg, which is an obviously challenging
| transitional strategy from blobs-of-HTML-in-a-database to a
| modern layout tool.
|
| It's forward-looking, decade-scale development. There are loads
| of challenges.
| seanwilson wrote:
| Could you elaborate? Other CMSs have nothing similar? My
| feeling is you can make an okay site with WordPress plugins
| only, but to make a great site you require custom code and
| should avoid most plugins to avoid bloat and security issues,
| and at that stage I'm not really sure how WordPress helps you
| in a way that's exceptional. The admin interface isn't
| particularly intuitive or modern, and has a lot of baggage, and
| the same could be said about the PHP API too.
| [deleted]
| kenneth wrote:
| Why do I have to scroll down not one, but two whole window
| heights below the fold to be able to see the opening line of the
| article. What does an irrelevant sunset have to Wordpress? I
| think the author could take a few design cues from Paul Graham's
| blog or from Craigslist.
|
| In fact, perhaps if he wasn't wasting his storage space with
| pretty but giant and irrelevant photos, the reduction in storage
| space wouldn't be as much of an issue.
| r2222 wrote:
| Here's a screenshot of paulgraham.com:
|
| https://ibb.co/zmmyZHH
|
| This is legitimately the worst looking and confusing site I've
| seen in a while, and should be used as an example of how to
| _not_ design a site :)
|
| Even the blog post themselves are pretty bad with left-aligned
| columns and the most low-contrast header (the "P A U L G R A H
| A M") on the top. It looks like some sort of CSS mishap rather
| than something deliberately designed.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| It's straight out of 1998.
| seszett wrote:
| On the contrary, a picture of a sunset is actually very
| relevant to the article. It is the author's unwritten answer to
| the question they ask in the article title.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I went to PaulGraham.com. There was a menu on the left so I
| clicked on some item and ended up on Amazon.com. I clicked back
| and the next thing I clicked took me to ycombinator.com.
|
| On my PC the menu is so small I can barely read the text, I
| think because he uses a gif as a menu combined with an image
| map. Wtf.
|
| On the main page there's some images without clear purpose and
| links with the titles "Taste", "Smart" and "Weird". No idea
| what that is about.
|
| I opened the site on my phone and it renders the page in the
| upper left corner and I have to zoom in to see what it shows.
|
| Is this the site which you think he should take design cues
| from? In my view the PaulGraham.com site is a complete train
| wreck.
| [deleted]
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| I can't find any other media files on that site and the one in
| use weighs 900 kB. Doesn't seem like a big deal.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > There hasn't been any official announcement from WordPress.com
| either about what we're seeing, whether these users' experiences
| are the exceptions or the rules, or anything else.
|
| So WP .com changed a bunch of stuff and there was no warning?
| What world are we living in where that's wise? And acceptable?
|
| That said, if you don't use a domain you own and control then
| you're going to be a victim to nonsense like this. And while I
| understand everyone wants something for nothing, free is never
| free. If more people took the time to understand the hidden cost
| there would be less victim'ing.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| Free is never free but why does free have to go from quite non-
| shitty to shitty overnight for no discernible reason? The point
| is here that "just here to blog" bloggers like me have been
| able to pay WP to have a custom domain, some storage, some SEO
| and some SM tools managed by WP - and nothing else. But now, to
| point a custom domain at my WP site, I need to cough up
| $180/yr. It's not just the free plan shrinking further, a fact
| you're commenting on, but that the sole alternative plan lies
| at the other extreme.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Not to worry, I'm not defending Automattic. I do some WP dev.
| I see how things tilt.
|
| But. Again. This isn't the first time a free / low cost
| offering has changed.
| skilled wrote:
| $180 per year? That seems excessive. My DigitalOcean ($6/m) box
| can handle 50,000 visitors every month without going over 15% CPU
| usage. It's running WordPress.org, using plenty of disk space,
| but is also managed entirely by me alone.
| mro_name wrote:
| here in germany you get shared hosting plus a domain name
| starting at 2 Euros monthly. No admin skills necessary.
|
| You can publish, have a legal claim on name and service and
| close to no smallprint. You can publish whatever is legal under
| local law and are responsible for it.
|
| And: do not use any content management tools. They require a
| lot of attention over time. Write html. With any text editor.
| [deleted]
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| I assume you must be technically qualified? I don't know a lick
| of VPS management. If something stopped working as expected, I
| wouldn't even know what went wrong - leave alone implementing a
| fix. WordPress.com until now - particularly in India - offered
| an excellent way out: affordable, reliable, good reputation,
| and feature-loaded. This plan change is inexplicable,
| especially also given what Mullenweg says in the interview.
| skilled wrote:
| I mean, DO does provide an out of the box WordPress
| installation. Just click "create droplet" and you have a
| WordPress site ready to go. You just need your own domain
| name (and even then, it is still cheaper than what WP.com is
| quoting).
|
| I'm not some sysadmin guru either, and mostly just look up
| tutorials when trying to achieve some goal. E.g. Install
| better caching system, optimize for ram usage, etc.
|
| But yes, I have been hosting my sites like this for over a
| decade so for me it feels like second nature. In saying that,
| I am sure there are other platforms that provide free blog
| hosting and can be used as alternatives. Sadly, it means
| you'll lose the WordPress.com subdomain, but also access to
| their network of bloggers.
|
| I remember in 2012, I started a poetry blog on WordPress.com
| and in a few months I had 2,000 subscribers - all of whom
| found me through their discovery feature. It was quite nice.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| It was, right? I hope anyone who's considering designing an
| alternative keeps this in mind. It was one of the best
| things about WordPress.com. This is also why I'm currently
| considering micro.blog.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >I mean, DO does provide an out of the box WordPress
| installation. Just click "create droplet" and you have a
| WordPress site ready to go.
|
| I have no sysadmin/web experience, but do understand the
| terminal reasonably well enough from my old job as a SWE.
|
| I currently manage a Wordpress installation on a
| ridiculously performant [1] $6/mo DigtalOcean droplet
| without issue.
|
| For me, I struggled a bit with their default Wordpress
| plugin, but there's this fantastic (also free) droplet
| called Cyberpanel. It's basically an open-source
| alternative to CPanel, and offers a graphical frontend for
| lots of common tasks (domain management, auto-renewing SSL,
| PHP settings, deployment of WordPress and other sites).
|
| Migrating from my old host was as easy as installing a
| plugin (All-in-One WP Migration, IIRC) on both the old
| server and the new DO droplet and then updating the domain
| records to point to DO.
|
| All in all, maybe a couple of afternoons of screwing
| around, but absolutely a worthwhile (and economically
| valuable!) skill to have.
|
| [1] I think I measured something like 1000 page loads per
| second (with WP Fastest Cache; crapped out at around 30
| views/s without!) before CPU hit 100%. There are free
| stress test sites online that let you do this.
| medimikka wrote:
| I am not technically qualified. I am a medic. I do medic
| things. In a pinch can open you up and fix an aortic
| aneurysm, and I can always make sure you're still alive when
| the person comes who can do those well. I am not a coder, not
| a sysadmin, and all I know about "web3" is that it seems to
| be the CrossFit for nerds.
|
| I run my blog on a $25 (not month, overall cost) Raspberry Pi
| 2[1]. I use Markdown. I (ab-)use S3 for image storage. I use
| 11ty[2].
|
| It doesn't take a coder to know how to do this. And it
| doesn't take a lot of time, either. SSL certificates are
| free, thanks to Let's Encrypt, nginx is an "apt get" away.
| That's all it takes if you want to blog(!).
|
| If you want e-Commerce or shill your newsletter or whatever
| else uses blogging backends like WordPress, then $177/year is
| a steal. If you just want to blog, the weekend with Eleventy
| and a free copy of Obsidian[3] are cheaper, less hassle, and
| you keep your data in a format that's not Wordpress' pseudo-
| XML abomination.
|
| [1] https://mikka.md/posts/supersmall/
|
| [2] https://www.11ty.dev
|
| [3] https://obsidian.md/
| mayankkaizen wrote:
| Kudos to you!
|
| However, even after reading your comment, I am not
| convinced an average guy will understand any of those
| terms. I've seen this. I've seen many many people
| struggling to set up a blog. Heck, even I struggled about
| this back in the day.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| You're profoundly overestimating how 'simple' this is, or
| even understandable, or how much even most bloggers are
| interested and/or have bandwidth to understand, what these
| things are. Whether you're saying they'll need to
| understand these things is a different matter; so far that
| hasn't been the case, and is unlikely to be going ahead.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Understanding of technology necessary to self-host a blog
| (whether it's a hobby or you're writing full-time) is not
| that different from, say, knowing enough about how
| various components of a motorcycle work to maintain and
| repair your own ride (whether it's a hobby or you do
| pizza delivery full-time). To deem it of no possible
| interest to and too difficult to understand for anyone
| not in the chosen minority of experienced software
| engineers is at best misguided, at worst elitist (when it
| comes from one).
|
| Sure, some can't be bothered. Yes, some would rather pay
| a professional who often (notably, not always) would do a
| better job. True, some things you fully grasp only after
| years of experience. Still, it's not _that_ difficult.
| You don't need to know how to write an OS or build an ICE
| from scratch to do an adequate job. People routinely
| learn to do quite complicated things out of passion and
| /or necessity even when it's far disconnected from their
| primary profession; spend some time with the right
| sources of information and you'll be alright.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| I can agree with you and still be baffled by that
| response. Knowing the tech underlying a blog and saying
| using an SSG on a Raspberry Pi is simple are different
| things.
| medimikka wrote:
| In its core, that Pi is just a small Linux server. You're
| not touching the parts of it, that are different from,
| say, a VPS. You install a web server, you edit a file,
| you are done. Maybe you init a git repo and do some post-
| update magic, but that's not even necessary if you do it
| right.
|
| If you're capable of buying a VPS you're capable of
| sticking a USB cable and an Ethernet cable into
| something.
| albedoa wrote:
| > Understanding of technology necessary to self-host a
| blog
|
| Right, but you are comparing your setup and its costs to
| wordpress.com, which is not self-hosted and does not
| require that understanding.
| [deleted]
| nindalf wrote:
| If the content is entirely static I see no reason it couldn't
| be hosted for free. I think Cloudflare, GitHub and others offer
| free static site hosting.
| sccxy wrote:
| $15 or $6 per month is not so excessive.
|
| $6 deal is better when you work for free or can find someone to
| work on it for $9/month.
|
| $15 per month premium includes:
|
| * Premium Support
|
| * Premium themes
|
| * Sell products with WooCommerce
|
| * Collect payments
|
| * Automated website backups
|
| I think setting these up will cost much more in self hosted
| version.
|
| I'm fan of self hosting, but when I calculate it to my hourly
| salary then self hosting is very expensive.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The $6 option can add on domains for each new crackpot idea
| at no additional cost so that is a bonus.
|
| But I prefer hostgator. Maybe not as performant but it
| effectively serverless 0.1 tech that makes it easy to add
| sites and administer.
| nirui wrote:
| On the article, the author wrote:
|
| > Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium,
| business and e-commerce.... But at some point late last week,
| WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single 'Pro'
| plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB
| to 500 MB.
|
| > Imagine looking for a good-quality surgical mask to wear in
| a park but finding out that the most reliable vendor in town
| has suddenly decided to sell only chemical safety masks.
|
| Yes, it contains Premium support, premium themes, commerce,
| payment support and automatic backups, but how many of those
| features you'll actually utilize? Why would you want to
| purchase their automatic backups when you already have a
| system that backs things up better? Why should you pay for
| their commerce system when you already using a better third-
| party one?
|
| It's not "But it's loaded with features" here, instead it's
| "Yes, it's loaded with features. But I (author) don't need
| most of it".
| sccxy wrote:
| Everything is getting more expensive these days.
|
| My electricity price increased 50%. I did not get any extra
| features.
|
| >>For me the problems are the massive reduction in storage
| from 3GB to 0.5GM along with this new notion of maximum
| views, set quite low. I think those two combined will
| likely drive a lot of people away.
|
| >> Me too I am only seeing my storage as 500mb and I have
| had a free site since 2013.
|
| Those people are whining because they have used service for
| almost ten years and never paid a penny for it. People
| should understand that things are never free forever.
|
| 500MB is enough for free plan. If you use more then it is
| reasonable to get premium plan or host it somewhere else
| for cheaper.
| croes wrote:
| >Everything is getting more expensive these days.
|
| Storage gets cheaper per MB
| sccxy wrote:
| Then why Dropbox, Google, OneDrive many other cloud
| providers have cut back their free packages?
| coder543 wrote:
| Most likely, they want to make more money, and they no
| longer care how many free users they lose as long as some
| of them convert to paid customers.
|
| Free users aren't generating revenue for them. In the
| past, it seemed like businesses had this idea that
| infinite free users would somehow lead to infinite
| revenue, but they seem to be moving away from this
| philosophy.
|
| Storage has been getting cheaper every year. If a
| business is skimping on their free plan, it's not because
| of rising storage costs.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| The opposite goes for offering the storage with traffic.
| AWS, gcloud, azure everyone had price adjustment last
| year especially on the storage side of things.
| coder543 wrote:
| You're saying AWS increased prices on something? Citation
| needed. They famously don't do that.
|
| They did have a price adjustment on storage, though... a
| 31% reduction for some use cases:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/s3-storage-class-
| price-...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Hosting text content online has been essentially free for
| two decades, and storage and bandwidth only got cheaper.
| $180/y is enough to serve a billion pageviews.
|
| Unless you now have the overhead of a massive VC-funded
| organization that needs to grow and hit the expected
| return multiples. People are "whining" because this is a
| 180deg turn from Wordpress' origins and their mission of
| "democratizing publishing".
|
| It is also a ton of money for anyone outside the US and
| EU - it's one month's rent in most of Brazil.
| sccxy wrote:
| I used to offer free image hosting and when I ended it, I
| got a lot of insults and bitching from freeloaders.
|
| Giving away something for free, is something I will never
| do again.
|
| Indian people were infamous sending their dick pics.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| They were abused as DDL warez host that's mainly why they
| dialed back on the storage.
| panicpanicpanic wrote:
| There's no monthly payment option. So it's never $15 a month,
| it's $180 a year.
|
| Also, what if I don't want many of those features? And I
| don't. This is why the previous plans, which were more
| graded, made sense. The annual billing option on the other
| hand caters to customers in need of all these features, who
| are also likely to be the sort of people who'd be willing to
| pay $180 at a go.
| nikanj wrote:
| What does your hourly wage come out to? If you sysadmin an hour
| per quarter, it's ($180-12*$6)/4, or $27.
|
| Personally that's way too little, and I'd absolutely go for a
| managed option
| hansel_der wrote:
| gotta include the opportunity cost of not knowing your
| supplychain when outsourcing
| midrus wrote:
| You're probably not the target market. Not everyone knows how
| to setup a server by themselves and run a blog and keep backups
| and keep it running and update it, etc..
| dawidloubser wrote:
| I guess this will push more and more bloggers to start looking at
| static site generators like Hugo ( https://gohugo.io/ ) and
| either hosting themselves, or on one of the many "built in" cloud
| hosting providers that it supports.
| fmajid wrote:
| I switched from WP to Hugo 5 years ago, and am very happy with
| that decision. Now, if only there were a good and simple Web UI
| for it so I could switch my wife and daughter's blogs over, I
| could ditch WP and PHP altogether.
| creinhardt wrote:
| Have you tried Hugo with NetlifyCMS? I've been pretty happy
| with that combo on a few small sites I run. Here's a starter:
| https://github.com/netlify-templates/one-click-hugo-cms
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I doubt it will move significantly in that direction. Sure,
| some will look into that, but I suspect most people will just
| find an alternative, accept the lower quotas or stop blogging.
|
| I think a huge majority blogging on WordPress.com have no
| interest in learning the tech stack to run something like Hugo.
| The quick start for Hugo includes command line git, which will
| probably make 99% of bloggers stop reading.
|
| (n-gate.com seems to have died, but the prediction that
| WordPress.com bloggers would switch to static site generators
| and use git for version control would probably qualify as an
| example of the comical HN-bubble.)
| genghizkhan wrote:
| It's much harder to get email subscriptions going on Hugo as
| compared to WP. Ghost might be a better option, I feel.
| manuw wrote:
| I like Hugo (or Jekyll) in combination with Netlify. I can just
| write something and push it to my GitHub repository. That's it.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I have a site in Jekyll, but the tech stack is moving all the
| time and causes compilation errors. I'm not a Ruby dev, so I
| can't compile my Jekyll site anymore, it was something along
| the lines of being programmed for Ruby 3.x while Ruby 4 is
| the default now, or something similar.
| manuw wrote:
| I switched to Hugo for this reason.
| taubek wrote:
| People use WP because it is easy to use. Almost WYSIWIG. Static
| sites are great but they have much steeper learning curve.
| gman83 wrote:
| I actually run a local instance of Wordpress and then use the
| Simply Static plugin to generate a static site that I host on
| Netlify. Works great for me.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| They'll just used managed services from providers, publishing
| SaaS products that seem to be bundled with retail domain
| offerings, or something like Squarespace.
| russellendicott wrote:
| I'm hosting one in AWS and my monthly bill is only like $10/mo
| but I have other stuff running too. Static S3 with a codebuild
| pipeline so all I have to do is commit markdown to GH when I
| want to post. Here's a writeup on how I set it up.
| http://blog.bytester.net/posts/about-blog/
| indymike wrote:
| Static site generators often require prerendering and dynamic
| content so, no won't work without ssr.
| riidom wrote:
| There is also Publii ( https://getpublii.com/ ) which is like a
| desktop app where you write your posts in, and then you can hit
| a "publish" button and it will deploy. Deployment (afair) can
| be one of the well-known names like Digital Ocean, or a simple
| FTP access to whatever shared hosting you rented.
|
| The procedure can't get a lot less technical, and for some
| people this may be the right thing. Plus, since it's a SSG
| basically, there is not much to worry about vulnerabilities.
|
| I tried it briefly and decided it's not for me (don't exactly
| remember which drawbacks killed it for me), but I think the
| approach has some value to it in general.
| cabraca wrote:
| for static sites to take off, they need a comparable usability
| to wordpress. currently there is to much technical friction for
| the common user. no wysiwyg editors for posts/pages, no point
| and click customization for layouts, no easy asset management,
| the requirement for git and a build environment.
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