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.

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".

We did however publish an update on our support forums, which you can find here: https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/pricing-feedback/

I will circle back to this thread with additional updates as they are shared publicly.

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.

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.)

This is leadership.

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.

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.

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.

Edit: There's its avatar Posthaven but the Posthaven blog hasn't been updated since 2017.

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?

License requires that you do not modify the font package they let you download which includes @import tracking.

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.

https://archive.ph/orA2T

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.

Sorry, what do you mean by "forever" in this instance?

10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years?

200 years?

500 years?

What if you start out being able to afford it but suddenly lose most of your funding overnight as result of bad press, and then have a court case on top of that?

What if millions more people are using the internet and blogging than ever before? What if file sizes suddenly inflate to the point that what was tens of thousands of images, is now only a hundred images?

The difference between 2002 and 2022, technology-wise, is extremely vast. 20 years is a very long time for a company providing a web service to have lasted.

This really doesn't hold up on any level, the more questions you ask about the conditions of "forever", and the more you bring reality into the whole thing, huh.

BtrFS can do it, and I bet that zfs can too.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I just checked my old, free account and it still says that I have 3GB space cap.

https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/reason-behind-plan-upgrad...

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.)

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.

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.

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...

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.

But. Again. This isn't the first time a free / low cost offering has changed.

https://spinupwp.com

Virtual servers cost like a few bucks a month and you can easily set up a simple wordpress server in a few minutes.

Step two: done.

Looks like Substack is going to get a lot of new users...

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.

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

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 unnatural 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.

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.

>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.

- - - -

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.

Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced with something better.

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.html

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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?

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).

This is a projection. Revolts are as old as power and inequalities. For the most well-known/well-studied of those, see this wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts

(it's important to understand that most revolts are silently crushed and never documented, and that even for those that were documented in their time we did not necessarily keep good track of those documents over the centuries)

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?

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.

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

The thing is to have a destination, a goal. Which equalities are worth fighting for?

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.

Disclaimer: i'm not well-versed in anthropology/history, but this has been studied and debated by scholars [0]

If you've ever been to the countryside, you'll notice that everything feels slower. The fast, ever-working "lifestyle" we know today apparently originated in with early capitalism/industrualism and was itself subject to stark opposition (for example from the luddites, who contrary to popular belief were not anti-tech but rather early anti-capitalists).

When that new rhythm was expanded to all areas of life with mass-industrialization in the 18th/19th century, thinkers of the time pointed the absurdity to replace legal slavery with what they called "wage slavery". [1]

[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

have you been to India or another country with a similar wealth disparity in the global south?

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.

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).

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.

I didn't say "for hire" specifically. But they certainly pass intel to friends as part of the 5 eyes & other intelligence agreements, as well as on specific operations, such as in Rojava or in Ukraine.

Also worth mentioning although i can't find the link right now: ex-3letter-agency workers who started working for a private company contracted by saudi intelligence services who were employed for political repression (although the job was advertised as hunting down terrorists).

> 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.

And yet the DHS does just that, both for deportations [0] and political repression [1].

> Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it.

Snowden wasn't concerned by kidnapping: he was really afraid the NSA would drone the entire neighborhood he was hiding in (which is arguably worse), like USA police who not so long ago (1985) bombed an entire neighborhood (destroying 65 houses) and killed 5 children for the sake of political repression. [2]

But kidnapping is definitely a thing though maybe not by NSA: see CIA black sites and the inhumane treatment of detainees post-9/11 (waterboarding, etc).

> You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right?

I appreciate the distinction. From my political activities, I'm acquainted with many political refugees, some of whom have been tortured while others had family members imprisoned/disappeared/executed.

But it's worth noting that our "democratic" (cough cough) governments have a strong history of doing that too, and only recently have they stopped because they've improved the subtlety of their counter-insurrection techniques. Still, there's plenty of people framed by State services [3], plenty of political prisoners [4], people mutilated by police forces or outright executed...

Some people would even argue that dictatorship/fascism is the logical byproduct of liberal democracy and its (supposedly enlightened) centralized control and enforcement structures. What if Trump had been reelected (or worse, had successfully seized power), do you think you would have kept your social comfort very long?

The same problems apply in France where i reside, where a new form of anti-muslim nazism is rising (thanks to the media oligarchy spreading FUD). The last time the nazis seized power, we had genocide after genocide, even long after WWII ended (see also, french genocide in Algeria and the 1961 Vel d'Hiv sweep).

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/13/dhs-migrants-guatemala-...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-pr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/30/black-panthe...

The United States of America, always an ally and at service to friendly right-wing politicians from around the world.

"What was the sense at the time of the degree to which the United States was involving itself in undermining Allende’s government?

MS: I think most people knew, and part of this was because a scandal broke in 1972 that the Chilean subsidiary of ITT had lobbied the CIA to intervene and fund different renegade military factions in Chile to try to keep Allende out of office during that brief two-month window between when he was elected in September of 1970 and when he would be sworn in, in November 1970.

So it was fairly common knowledge that, despite the public declarations by the White House that they were neutral toward Chile or that they had no official oppositional stance to him, behind the scenes, the CIA as well as the White House were actively opposed to Allende."

source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/salvador-allende-chile-coup-p...

great recent docu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

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.

There's a significant proportion of tribal automatons out there that imbalance the arguments.

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."

As such, thank you for this.

That’s not to say we should roll over and let everything be lost like tears in rain.

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.

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.

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.

(forming nouns, especially of verbal action.): arousal, arrival, bestowal, betrothal, denial, disposal, proposal, rental, rival, reversal, removal, subdual, submittal, transmittal

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-al#English

That said, substantivization of adjectives is common. Even adjective is itself a word that was originally an adjective, but has been substantivized into a noun. It's a well-known linguistic process:

"Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

This process has become especially common in Modern English as inflexional endings have been abandoned and speakers rely almost entirely on word order to deduce parts of speech. Converting a word from one part of speech to another simply involves putting it into the proper place in the sequence. However, substantivization of adjectives is not exclusive to English (in Latin, for example, you can slap practically any adjective into the neuter and use it as a noun, whence we receive such words as animal and dual).

Language in general is very flexible.

...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...

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Thinking this requires some heavy anti-multiple discovery beliefs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

visionary ?

“reality distortion field”-er ?

inspiring ?

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.

It was done around twenty years ago (no less than eighteen).

It’s absolutely worthless (XSLT -shudder), but I was quite proud of it.

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.

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.

You made me think… just search stackoveflow should be step 1. Roll out Google if desperate.

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.

It just sucks that the solution to getting ranked on google is never "write good content" but rather "optimize for SEO"

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.

This line of thinking seems insightful. Its flawed, though, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's glib.

There's an attempt to respond to an question of ought by gesturing at what is, as if that settles it. It doesn't, even if the premises are granted. Which brings us to the second thing: they shouldn't be.

People can and do forget things that are worth remembering. People remember things that are inconsequential.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

we're already at ipv6 and web3.0 /s

deep/dark web does still exist

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.

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.

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."

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.

…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.

See: The Wright Brothers.

Even in web3 there will be a similar cycle. In fact we are already seeing this.

good example: git, fully decentralized. Github: centralized git

and of course web3 git: own a NFT of 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.

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.

"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.)

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.

(And more frankly, the forum board softwares haven't evolved gracefully)

I agree that it shouldn't be pushed too hard, but the WordPress team 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I personally really like the new editing experience. And had been wondering why WP was so behind the times for half a decade now.

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!

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.