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It's actually getting wild "out there". WordPress was once a really good choice for a blogging platform. Now, majority of the "popular" plugins are strictly bus

It's actually getting wild "out there". WordPress was once a really good choice for a blogging platform. Now, majority of the "popular" plugins are strictly businesses. E.g. You can use our API for 100 calls a month, either pay up to use this plugin more or wait another 30 days to get another 100 calls. And yes, it is mostly the cost of convenience. For example, I manage my own server not because it's cheaper (which it is), but because I don't need to pay extra $50 a month to get a "managed" experience. Same goes for very mundane tasks like image compression. You can pay some company to do it on your behalf, or you can go to GitHub and grab a fully functional library to compress 1,000 photos in an instant.

harry-wood 5y ago
Yes. I didn't do much with wordpress for years, but always thought of it as a very open-source-ish community. Recently I find myself taking on a pre-existing wordpress site with a lot of plugins. I was quite surprised by the way so many plugins are available for $$$. It's sort of impressive "professionalisation" of the ecosystem. I can see it's allowing/encouraging glossy presentation, explanatory videos, documentation, and support guarantes, but there's a voice in my head thinking "Nah! These PHP snippets are all supposed to be free aren't they?"
- skilled 5y ago
  Yep. I used to spend a lot of time working with WordPress sites, maybe 5 or so years ago. I don't have any factual data for this, but I suspect that some of the plugin creators pivoted to a "greedy by design" strategy. If you have had 1,000s of bloggers write about your free product, advertising it on your behalf for years. Why not take that success and squeeze the living soul out of it? I mean, it's not like people are going to go back to their reviews or old blog posts to correct something. All the "juice" is still being passed to you, and search engines like Google are none the wiser.

harry-wood 5y ago

Yes. I didn't do much with wordpress for years, but always thought of it as a very open-source-ish community. Recently I find myself taking on a pre-existing wordpress site with a lot of plugins. I was quite surprised by the way so many plugins are available for $$$. It's sort of impressive "professionalisation" of the ecosystem. I can see it's allowing/encouraging glossy presentation, explanatory videos, documentation, and support guarantes, but there's a voice in my head thinking "Nah! These PHP snippets are all supposed to be free aren't they?"

skilled 5y ago
Yep. I used to spend a lot of time working with WordPress sites, maybe 5 or so years ago. I don't have any factual data for this, but I suspect that some of the plugin creators pivoted to a "greedy by design" strategy. If you have had 1,000s of bloggers write about your free product, advertising it on your behalf for years. Why not take that success and squeeze the living soul out of it? I mean, it's not like people are going to go back to their reviews or old blog posts to correct something. All the "juice" is still being passed to you, and search engines like Google are none the wiser.