20 Years of Blogging (and WordPress Isn't the Same as It Was Back in 2004)
BEING stubborn "like a mule" (or donkey) is a sign of weakness, not a strength. It's not about principles when people refuse to reassess their position, based on new information that emerges over time (either because more becomes known or the underlying facts actually change).
Antagonism to change is related to "Sunk Cost". As Seth Godin put it earlier this month: "If you’ve invested time or money in something (a law degree, a piece of real estate, a bag of chips) that money is gone. All you have left is what you bought, and that is a gift… a gift from your former self. You don’t have to accept the gift if it’s no longer useful to you. Using a gift still has real opportunity cost, and if it’s keeping you from doing something better, walk away."
People are understandably resistant to admission they were wrong or are no longer correct. That's natural. But that can also be a yoke.
11.5 years ago we decided that Techrights would move away from WordPress. Due to technical debt it would take a whole decade to finally do this (in 2022 we developed an alternative) and it seems like others plan to do the same due to a number of recent blunders, which we last commented on at the start of the week (twice even).
I first installed WordPress and blogged in early November 2004. This means it'll soon be 20 years. In December of the same year I also installed it for a dear friend, who is now a dead friend (he died last year). If he was still alive today, he too would be able to celebrate his 20 years of blogging.
At risk of repeating myself, one factor that should encourage people to go "static" (as in, static pages) is the abundance of rogue bots on the Web. It's not 2004 anymore. Sometimes it boils down to simple economics and the ease of data replication (no database).
As one of the early adopters and contributors of WordPress (as noted before; the mailing lists' archives have ample evidence of this, as do the WordPress forums) I actively discourage people from installing WordPress. Moving away from it (after you built up data in it and actively maintain it) is another matter; it's like asking a life-long smoker to quit smoking overnight, "cold turkey". I wrote about the reasons to quit many times before; most of the reasons are purely technical and "modern" WordPress is not the same b2-like WordPress that I explored as a Ph.D. student in 2004.
I'll always have a special place in my heart for WordPress and I still administer more than half a dozen WordPress sites (that are still active and online). But the future of the Web oughtn't be WordPress. Just as many people abandon social control media (mass layoffs at Facebook are connected to this trend) more people should recognise that bloatware is bad for the planet and detrimental for the Web.
Is WordPress bloatware? Yes, it is. I know WordPress technically... well enough to say this. Sure, Drupal is no better, but we're focusing on WordPress today. █