WordPress Begs You to Dump It (for SSGs), Just Like Mozilla With Firefox
2013: Back Door (Automatic Update) in WordPress and What It Means to Techrights
2023: Leaving WordPress behind
Earlier today (for comparison's sake): Firefox and Mozilla Commit Suicide With Slop, Market Share Falls to New Low
It's bad enough that WordPress became bloated, remotely controlled, and full of JavaScript that makes it not only slow but also bad in numerous other ways. In pursuit of money it is now pushing more and more slop, not to mention how it sells the work of WordPress users under the guise of "AI" (a misnomer; LLMs lack intelligence, they're just glorified plagiarism engines).
This is not the WordPress I knew back in 2004 when I got deeply involved. Automattic - not WordPress - has a rather troubling agenda. To quote David Gerard, a very longtime user of WordPress: "Automattic says that three hosting companies are going to offer basic AI as part of their paid hosting plans. This is the Microsoft strategy, where you charge more for a feature that sucks ’cos you can force it on people."
Even more worryingly, this does not boil down to some rogue employee or 'bad apple'. Quoting Gerard: "The AI push is coming straight from Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg. He’s very into the magical CEO-level promises of vibe coding, with his new tool Telex, which is supposed to compete with instant vibe-website builders like Lovable [...] You know what that means — huge job opportunities six months down the line for WordPress developers to clean up the steaming piles of poop this is certain to leave behind. Automattic’s got a track record on AI. In February 2024, Automattic did deals to sell users’ content from WordPress and Tumblr — which the users own, not Automattic — to OpenAI and Midjourney [...]"
Perhaps now is a good time to revisit: Moving Away From Content Management Systems (CMSs) and Flocking to Static Site Generators (SSGs) █