6 ms·

The WordPress 100 Year Plan

76 points by keiferski 3y ago

ugur2nd 3y ago
If WordPress has an IPO, its shares can be bought because it has guaranteed that it will survive for 100 years.
ugur2nd 3y ago
Is it ethical to buy a domain name for a newborn baby? I don't know.
- notorandit 3y ago
  I can buy anything for a newborn. Also a domain or a phone number.
  - ugur2nd 3y ago
    I can buy it too, but I wonder if there will be negative parts...
    - bombcar 3y ago
      There’s the cost, but that’s minor (for the minor). The biggest negative is your newborn might not care or want whatever domain you picked out. So the only real option is to buy tens or hundreds of domains and keep it secret. Then reveal the domain that most closely matched them when they’re of age, whatever that may be.
      - ant6n 3y ago
        then whats the point of getting the domain(s) at birth.
        bombcar 3y ago
        I don’t really know, not what I do. I have my own domain(s) and my kids could have subdomains as DNS intended ;)
        j16sdiz 3y ago
        Some people create website for new born and post life photo them. Think like a photo book, but it's public.
        bombcar 3y ago
        And you can do that for a lot less than $38k, just get GitHub pages and a domain.
- Giorgi 3y ago
  You never buy a domain, it is a rental and owner can take it back anytime without any problems.
notorandit 3y ago
50 years ago there was no internet, no mobile phones. 50 years ago there were vinyls and mag tapes and incandescent bulbs. WordPress 100 years plan sounds like FM radio 100 years plan. Nice to read. But can that be useful?
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  But digital is different. You can copy and emulate environments.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I think the thought to be considered is whether we will still use computers or the internet in a hundred years in such a way that this kind of decision today would make sense. We're already seeing a sharp decline in computer ownership, most people only have a phone these days.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Any kind of monument to the future comes with risk it won't last or won't be visible.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There are people who are seriously discussing the FM hundred year plan, and were fifty years ago.
- ghusto 3y ago
  None of those have gone away, you know. FM radio is still very much alive, vinyl is going strong. Mag tapes and incandescent lightbulbs are now niche; large companies that used mag tapes, still do, and incandescent light bulbs have a loop hole permitting their use in "heavy industry", which still uses them) — but they're still used in those spaces. Point being that in 100 years, the webternets of today could indeed be comparable to the FM radio, but that doesn't mean there won't be people who want it. EDIT: Grammar
- 3y ago
keiferski 3y ago
$38,000 seemed like a bit much, but that works out to $31.66 a month. Still more than a typical hosting plan, but I guess the assumption is that hosting won’t be so cheap in 50 years.
- Giorgi 3y ago
  why would someone assume that? for all that we know storage becomes increasingly cheap and connection increasingly stable and fast.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- veavo 3y ago
  $31.66 a month for a wordpress hosting plan is an absolute rip-off.
  - BrentOzar 3y ago
    > $31.66 a month for a wordpress hosting plan is an absolute rip-off. Today, maybe. For the human costs of hosting support in 2123, given the cost of inflation, it might not be, and these plans include technical support. (Although you could also that the technical support work on most of these 100-year plans should be dropping over time too - especially if the human being involved passes away. You could even argue that AI might be doing the technical support in 2123.)
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Today for sure. But if someone twenty years ago said I could have 100 years of Starbucks lattes for $2/each, it would have turned out to be a great deal. It depends if hosting is affected by inflation or not.
    - HyprMusic 3y ago
      But back then $2 would have been worth more than $2 is now so, assuming you paid upfront, you'd be no better off.
veave 3y ago
Funny coming from a CMS that breaks every time you update it or update the underlying PHP version.
- devmor 3y ago
  I’ve got a lot of clients with WordPress sites and this hasn’t been the case for a very long time - the only exception being poorly written 3rd party plugins. Current generation WordPress regularly updates automatically with no issues, and I’ve seen no incidents with security updates for PHP either.
  - veavo 3y ago
    >the only exception being poorly written 3rd party plugins Unfortunately you need several of these to make any web site plus a theme, so yes, it happens. If you have so many clients you know it well that you can't upgrade from php 7 to 8 without the site crashing. Well, unless you are really lucky.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Wordpress does very well on motte and Bailey - the core is performant and secure, but if you try to do anything with just core, you’re told to install any number of (quite good mind you) plugins.
      - veavo 3y ago
        Most of the time you get a new client and they have a website with a theme and plugins that haven't seen updates in years because the authors abandoned them. You have to constantly fix them. Even if you create the website yourself you really have no way of knowing for how long it will be supported, and even then, you are not going to do a complete security audit of the codebase. For example because of latest updates to PHP 8 they have deprecated the $var{key} syntax - who the fuck uses that?! I did not even know it existed until some of my clients' websites crashed after I updated PHP. It's an absolute minefield since we moved on to the PHP 7 branch. I am glad for PHP because the language sucked before because of how lenient it was. But it creates a lot of work for me.
serhack_ 3y ago
I always wondered how I can keep the content I write on the web after death. I suppose the cheapest way is to save the entire content on archive.org (and donate to it!)
- bombcar 3y ago
  The best way is to have people who care about it and are motivated to keep it around. Otherwise things like “as many copies as you can” is probably the best bet.
tomdolen 3y ago
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MissTake 3y ago
The announcement is high on promises, low on detail. Wordpress is only 20 years old, and whilst it’s currently a viable company there’s no guarantee that they will be so in another 20 years. As for 100 years? Sorry, not buying it (both figuratively and literally): we’ve already seen a huge change in technology that has already deprecated many a tech stack, and that change is only increasing in velocity. $38K is a huge sum to put down when there’s zero actual proof they’ll even be able to sustain this for 25 years, let alone 100.
- oaiey 3y ago
  I have a very high confidence that DNS survives. And I would not bet against http, html and fundamental E/R databases. Http and html evolution can be managed by Wordpress inc. The database migrated. I am worried that a cobol/VB style like decline of PHP is too much for the company. Because maintaining PHP is most likely very costly. But I might overrate this.
  - lmpdev 3y ago
    Surely it would be easier rewriting WP than proping up a dead language?
    - hahn-kev 3y ago
      Tell that to FB
      - GeneralTspoon 3y ago
        Except PHP isn’t dead - in fact it’s probably going through a renaissance. The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.
        nevi-me 3y ago
        I presume it's (Lavarel) a good default choice for someone active in PHP. Like many people, PHP was my first programming language, and I migrated away from it long ago. What's relevant for me is: * How many new developers are picking up PHP * How many remain using it after say 10 years * How many end up contributing to its tooling and ecosystem If those numbers are good in absolute terms, then I agree with you. I'd consider Perl to be a dying language, not PHP. I'd also expect an active language's tooling to improve over the years, so that probably doesn't stand out too much for me (there's brilliant people working in various languages, in PHP I consdier Nikita Popov as one of them).
pocketarc 3y ago
This is definitely interesting. At 7% annualised, those $38K would deliver around $33M over 100 years. Keeping a simple website up for those kinds of gains seems like a no-brainer. Hosting is cheap. Especially as most of these are going to be very low-traffic personal websites serving mostly cached static pages. It seems like the best way to guarantee that something runs for 100 years, actually; build an investment fund whose mandate is to keep some basic websites up on a couple cheap servers. Edit: Even if technology changes, that's just a maintenance job every year - keeping the underlying infrastructure updated. Some years it will be cheap, some years it'll be a bit more costly, but ultimately it's not impossible at all, especially if they've got a big number of clients (and thus a big fund to draw from).
- x1f604 3y ago
  > At 7% annualised, those $38K would deliver around $33M over 100 years. I'm sorry, I don't understand your point. If you invest that $38K then you will have $33M after 100 years time. If you paid that $38K to Wordpress then you won't see a cent of that money back. I don't see how it makes financial sense to give $38K to Wordpress rather than investing it yourself and paying monthly hosting fees.
  - pocketarc 3y ago
    By giving it to Wordpress, it's done, you don't have to think about it anymore, and whatever happens in your life, that content is staying up for those 100 years. You're paying for the security / peace of mind, and I'm sure you can picture some people preferring to do that than to self-manage hosting content (and updating technology over time) for 100 years. Edit: Having said that, I don't think Wordpress is the right fit for this. I think it should've been a separate company, with a separate brand and a separate legal structure that enforced keeping things up for 100 years and enforced using the investment profits to keep the content up and maintain the infrastructure even as technology changed.
phyzome 3y ago
That's stupid expensive for what it is.
BrentOzar 3y ago
There's a perfect use case for this: if you think your company stands a chance of running out of money in the future, but you just got an infusion of VC funding now... $38K isn't a large amount. $38K is an insurance policy that will keep the marketing front end of your company's site online "forever", long after you run out of VC money and shutter the company. Keeps your vanity up and running, your fond memories. It turns your hosting costs from a monthly expense to a "permanent" capital expense that's already paid for.
- aspyct 3y ago
  So you believe that your website made today will still be a good marketing tool 100 years from now? Look, how old is internet right now? How much did it change since the beginning? How often do you look at a product online on an early-90s website and think "oh, that's good marketing"? I don't think any serious business should see this as a "perfect use case". Just a big waste of money, that is.
  - BrentOzar 3y ago
    > So you believe that your website made today will still be a good marketing tool 100 years from now? No, the business will be closed. It would just serve as an archive of history.
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      This depends on how much you value the history. Honestly, we are generating too much information, have problem archiving them all and too low attention span to consume/sort them out
    - aspyct 3y ago
      I don't see the point in keeping the marketing material for dead companies. Why would you use resources on that? As far as history is concerned, a wikipedia page describing the company and it's activities would most likely suffice.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
My opinion is that we should stop obsessing about storing everything and anything. It's unhealthy...we're accumulating too much. Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.
- rco8786 3y ago
  > we're accumulating too much. What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"? > Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving. Certainly true. But some things are very, very much worth preserving and we don't necessarily know what those things are in the present.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    > What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"? It already seems intuitive to me that people are far too obsessed about storing anything and everything, from photos to notes to random thoughts and more. To me it seems pathological. I saw one estimate that is around 500 exabytes already... it looks a lot like those people whose basements are full of unused junk, only in virtual form. I also noticed for sure that people keep way too much stuff they never use...I've rarely met anyone who doesn't. That certainly carries over to their virtual life too.
    - eddieroger 3y ago
      It's worth considering that we all get to individually assign value to something, and that value is mostly an opinion, which means it's not right or wrong objectively. There are certainly extremes like those who hoard, but just because others values some things more than you do doesn't make them wrong.
      - vouaobrasil 3y ago
        I agree in one aspect, but in another aspect, I disagree. Humans have natural instincts which makes them hoard because that would have been adaptive in times of scarcity (i.e. our ancient past). Now, in times of surplus, that instinct is mostly maladaptive. So I DO posit that humans on average place a higher value on hoarding than they should, and that if they actually took the time to override this basal instinct with higher brain functions, then on AVERAGE they would be happier.
elicash 3y ago
There was a great 787 comment thread a couple years ago where people came up with all sorts of better ideas, but for 500 years. Trusts, physical archives, multiple languages, etching into various materials, shooting things into orbit, etc. And like all discussions then, blockchain. It wouldn't surprise me if that thread was the inspiration. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957573 I think it's a clever offering by WordPress. I wouldn't pay for it, but it's an interesting technical challenge to think about!
adrm 3y ago
It seems daring to propose something like this, and I would really want to know about the guarantees that they thought to be able to do this. In any case, any initiative for fighting link rot and keeping a healthy internet are really welcome. So in that regard, sharing their playbook with their learnings on how to guarantee 100 years of service could be an incentive for other companies to offer something similar. I hope they release more details about this service, because the video is cool but there is almost no material information on the site.
prmoustache 3y ago
Companies should stop promising stuff they cannot.
daneel_w 3y ago
The marketing trick of playing on the concepts of birth, childhood, life, longevity, legacy etc. for a blog/website comes off as a bit pretentious and lacking in taste, as if the WordPress subscription were a family heirloom.
- OmarShehata 3y ago
  Now that you mention it, it seems quite clever. This seems to be targeted at people who run businesses, who already spend a lot of time & money thinking about their estate & leaving it in a good state for their children to inherit. I wonder if the price point was figured out based on that (like as long as it's ballpark similar to paying attorney or whatever to provide this service for your house & business, then it makes sense to pay something similar for your digital wordpress assets)
big_paps 3y ago
I could not think of a single wordpress post or blog which would be worth preserving 100yrs.
xzel 3y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a Wordpress plugin developer and my opinions are my own. This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.
- avg_dev 3y ago
  Hi, can you perhaps explain what Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, Aveda, and Salient do? Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.
  - xzel 3y ago
    Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix. What these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient, do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from along with a visual editor. These push WP output, that is what is rendered in your browser, from simple blog to an actual website experience. They also all provide something similar to what Gutenberg does but they built it 10 years ago on the original WP PHP backend (Gutenberg is all React). WP pushing to Gutenberg has actually kind of screwed them a bit, but I digress. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who buys licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha. Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.
planetjones 3y ago
Think I would have more faith in the internet archive keeping my blog posts alive 100 years from now. I’d prefer to donate to them.
ekianjo 3y ago
People are obsessed here in the comments with the feasibility. They dont seem to grasp its just a PR or marketing move
jfengel 3y ago
I worry about my own organization being able to remember to renew its domain if we don't do it yearly. If I made a ten year payment, what happens in a decade if I'm no longer with them? Will they track down someone? Will the domain expire and get held for ransom? Setting aside the weirdness of making a 100 year commitment with a 20 year old company, what really does happen a century from now? Will anyone know whose responsibility it is?
Mizoguchi 3y ago
A LTO8 30TB tape with 30 years archival life is $60 A 5GB gold DVD with 100 years archival life is $10. A safety deposit box in one of the largest banks in America can be as little as $30/year. IMO, both the bank and the data in the dvd/tape have more chances of survival in 100 years than WordPress.
kbrannigan 3y ago
Anything Physical will outlive most digital media.
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  Literally not, physical does not have the density of digital. You can download all of Wikipedia (text) in 5gb. 5gb was a lot in 1980, nothing now. So we need revolutions in storage that would allow at least some backups of archive.org and such outside of the 1 Internet Archive charity.
keyle 3y ago
This is preposterous. The 100 with the Earth in the middle is the cherry on the cake. In a 100 years, the problems of Earth will be much bigger than accessing blog posts of this time. Besides, isn't archive.org taking care of this for free? A better investment would be to plan 38K USD worth of planting trees and environmental ventures.
- politelemon 3y ago
  > Besides, isn't archive.org taking care of this for free? They aren't an internet utility we can take for granted. A lot of things could happen in that time. They're under attack for various reasons even now, and we don't know that the tech and political landscape looks like in the future. Having the first party content host make plans for preservation doesn't hurt.
GuyverMack 3y ago
These comments are missing the point: At this rate, within a decade 100% of web content will be covered up by video ads, so there'll be nothing to see anyway. I think /. is down to about an inch of reading space at this point (on a desktop).
johnklos 3y ago
As someone who has hosted personal content and files for a quarter of a century, continuously, I'd trust individuals or a not-necessarily-for-profit group over something like this. While domains have come and gone, sometimes multiple times, each of my users has had a working public_html all that time. Needing to register domains and actively maintain them is definitely a shortcoming of the Internet. There are just too many examples of companies promising things, often enough fully meaning their promises, only to be bought by big, evil companies that quickly toss those promises. Unlimited becomes limited or more costly. 100 years, I can easily see, becomes ten years at a time unless you confirm and update your billing information periodically to pay for incidentals and overages. Also, Wordpress is horribly bad at future compatibility, so if you're going to set up a site that can't have plugins because those plugins won't work in five years, why not just make a static site?
ralferoo 3y ago
I just googled to support my hypothesis and found this: https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/disruption/articles/why-you-will-probably-live-longer-than-most-big-companies/ https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/disruption/articles/w... "A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared." I guess the first obvious takeaway is that Wordpress themselves are likely to not exist long enough to honour this deal. There's also the issue that companies that offer lifetime deals typically only do it when they are extremely cash strapped and it's basically a gamble that the initial influx of money can tide them over until a more stable revenue stream can be found, at which point all those lifetime deals are liabilities that will forever suck the company's profits. But from the other side, no personal blog is worth preserving longer than your expected lifetime, so this is presumably aimed at companies, especially given the price point. Very few companies will survive for 100 years, so they'll probably never see the benefit of this as the probability of both them AND Wordpress both surviving 100 years is even lower. Then there's the pricing. Assuming the money could just be invested to break-even against inflation, and so you can consider this as $380 a year, that sounds excessive for a blog hosting platform. It's also more than their "Business" tier. That said, it's actually less than their "Commerce" tier and their "Enterprise" tier is $25000+ per year. I'm guessing they won't allow the latter to transfer to this deal, so it's hard to see who they actually think would even buy this.
daitangio 3y ago
Hum are 380$ per year, which is a lot. My blog based on Wordpress cost me less than 118$/year with backup and domain cost (VAT Included). It seems more than a 3x cost per year, which seems a lot even considering the inflation in the next 100 years.
- ufjfjjfjfj 3y ago
  I pay $25/year for a small woocommerce web store running on a VPS... Including domain name Inflation happens because people don't like to shop (or perhaps because they don't know how to) I'll give you the address if you like native american aromatherapy
iamkoch 3y ago
This post feels like an April fools joke. Like somehow 100 year mortgages and 100 year websites go hand in hand. Very few blogs or posts feel relevant a year or two later, let alone a decade. The only people buying this are those with Balenciaga trainers who drink wine shilled by influencers
clnq 3y ago
$40k can build legacies much larger than a blog website. If one wants to buy legacy, this is a waste of money.

76 points by keiferski 3y ago

ugur2nd 3y ago

If WordPress has an IPO, its shares can be bought because it has guaranteed that it will survive for 100 years.

ugur2nd 3y ago

Is it ethical to buy a domain name for a newborn baby? I don't know.

notorandit 3y ago
I can buy anything for a newborn. Also a domain or a phone number.
- ugur2nd 3y ago
  I can buy it too, but I wonder if there will be negative parts...
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There’s the cost, but that’s minor (for the minor). The biggest negative is your newborn might not care or want whatever domain you picked out. So the only real option is to buy tens or hundreds of domains and keep it secret. Then reveal the domain that most closely matched them when they’re of age, whatever that may be.
    - ant6n 3y ago
      then whats the point of getting the domain(s) at birth.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        I don’t really know, not what I do. I have my own domain(s) and my kids could have subdomains as DNS intended ;)
      - j16sdiz 3y ago
        Some people create website for new born and post life photo them. Think like a photo book, but it's public.
        bombcar 3y ago
        And you can do that for a lot less than $38k, just get GitHub pages and a domain.
Giorgi 3y ago
You never buy a domain, it is a rental and owner can take it back anytime without any problems.

notorandit 3y ago

50 years ago there was no internet, no mobile phones. 50 years ago there were vinyls and mag tapes and incandescent bulbs. WordPress 100 years plan sounds like FM radio 100 years plan. Nice to read. But can that be useful?

actionfromafar 3y ago
But digital is different. You can copy and emulate environments.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I think the thought to be considered is whether we will still use computers or the internet in a hundred years in such a way that this kind of decision today would make sense. We're already seeing a sharp decline in computer ownership, most people only have a phone these days.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Any kind of monument to the future comes with risk it won't last or won't be visible.
bombcar 3y ago
There are people who are seriously discussing the FM hundred year plan, and were fifty years ago.
ghusto 3y ago
None of those have gone away, you know. FM radio is still very much alive, vinyl is going strong. Mag tapes and incandescent lightbulbs are now niche; large companies that used mag tapes, still do, and incandescent light bulbs have a loop hole permitting their use in "heavy industry", which still uses them) — but they're still used in those spaces. Point being that in 100 years, the webternets of today could indeed be comparable to the FM radio, but that doesn't mean there won't be people who want it. EDIT: Grammar
3y ago

keiferski 3y ago

$38,000 seemed like a bit much, but that works out to $31.66 a month. Still more than a typical hosting plan, but I guess the assumption is that hosting won’t be so cheap in 50 years.

Giorgi 3y ago
why would someone assume that? for all that we know storage becomes increasingly cheap and connection increasingly stable and fast.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
veavo 3y ago
$31.66 a month for a wordpress hosting plan is an absolute rip-off.
- BrentOzar 3y ago
  > $31.66 a month for a wordpress hosting plan is an absolute rip-off. Today, maybe. For the human costs of hosting support in 2123, given the cost of inflation, it might not be, and these plans include technical support. (Although you could also that the technical support work on most of these 100-year plans should be dropping over time too - especially if the human being involved passes away. You could even argue that AI might be doing the technical support in 2123.)
- keiferski 3y ago
  Today for sure. But if someone twenty years ago said I could have 100 years of Starbucks lattes for $2/each, it would have turned out to be a great deal. It depends if hosting is affected by inflation or not.
  - HyprMusic 3y ago
    But back then $2 would have been worth more than $2 is now so, assuming you paid upfront, you'd be no better off.

veave 3y ago

Funny coming from a CMS that breaks every time you update it or update the underlying PHP version.

devmor 3y ago
I’ve got a lot of clients with WordPress sites and this hasn’t been the case for a very long time - the only exception being poorly written 3rd party plugins. Current generation WordPress regularly updates automatically with no issues, and I’ve seen no incidents with security updates for PHP either.
- veavo 3y ago
  >the only exception being poorly written 3rd party plugins Unfortunately you need several of these to make any web site plus a theme, so yes, it happens. If you have so many clients you know it well that you can't upgrade from php 7 to 8 without the site crashing. Well, unless you are really lucky.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Wordpress does very well on motte and Bailey - the core is performant and secure, but if you try to do anything with just core, you’re told to install any number of (quite good mind you) plugins.
    - veavo 3y ago
      Most of the time you get a new client and they have a website with a theme and plugins that haven't seen updates in years because the authors abandoned them. You have to constantly fix them. Even if you create the website yourself you really have no way of knowing for how long it will be supported, and even then, you are not going to do a complete security audit of the codebase. For example because of latest updates to PHP 8 they have deprecated the $var{key} syntax - who the fuck uses that?! I did not even know it existed until some of my clients' websites crashed after I updated PHP. It's an absolute minefield since we moved on to the PHP 7 branch. I am glad for PHP because the language sucked before because of how lenient it was. But it creates a lot of work for me.

serhack_ 3y ago

I always wondered how I can keep the content I write on the web after death. I suppose the cheapest way is to save the entire content on archive.org (and donate to it!)

bombcar 3y ago
The best way is to have people who care about it and are motivated to keep it around. Otherwise things like “as many copies as you can” is probably the best bet.

tomdolen 3y ago

[dead]

MissTake 3y ago

The announcement is high on promises, low on detail. Wordpress is only 20 years old, and whilst it’s currently a viable company there’s no guarantee that they will be so in another 20 years. As for 100 years? Sorry, not buying it (both figuratively and literally): we’ve already seen a huge change in technology that has already deprecated many a tech stack, and that change is only increasing in velocity. $38K is a huge sum to put down when there’s zero actual proof they’ll even be able to sustain this for 25 years, let alone 100.

oaiey 3y ago
I have a very high confidence that DNS survives. And I would not bet against http, html and fundamental E/R databases. Http and html evolution can be managed by Wordpress inc. The database migrated. I am worried that a cobol/VB style like decline of PHP is too much for the company. Because maintaining PHP is most likely very costly. But I might overrate this.
- lmpdev 3y ago
  Surely it would be easier rewriting WP than proping up a dead language?
  - hahn-kev 3y ago
    Tell that to FB
    - GeneralTspoon 3y ago
      Except PHP isn’t dead - in fact it’s probably going through a renaissance. The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.
      - nevi-me 3y ago
        I presume it's (Lavarel) a good default choice for someone active in PHP. Like many people, PHP was my first programming language, and I migrated away from it long ago. What's relevant for me is: * How many new developers are picking up PHP * How many remain using it after say 10 years * How many end up contributing to its tooling and ecosystem If those numbers are good in absolute terms, then I agree with you. I'd consider Perl to be a dying language, not PHP. I'd also expect an active language's tooling to improve over the years, so that probably doesn't stand out too much for me (there's brilliant people working in various languages, in PHP I consdier Nikita Popov as one of them).

pocketarc 3y ago

This is definitely interesting. At 7% annualised, those $38K would deliver around $33M over 100 years. Keeping a simple website up for those kinds of gains seems like a no-brainer. Hosting is cheap. Especially as most of these are going to be very low-traffic personal websites serving mostly cached static pages. It seems like the best way to guarantee that something runs for 100 years, actually; build an investment fund whose mandate is to keep some basic websites up on a couple cheap servers. Edit: Even if technology changes, that's just a maintenance job every year - keeping the underlying infrastructure updated. Some years it will be cheap, some years it'll be a bit more costly, but ultimately it's not impossible at all, especially if they've got a big number of clients (and thus a big fund to draw from).

x1f604 3y ago
> At 7% annualised, those $38K would deliver around $33M over 100 years. I'm sorry, I don't understand your point. If you invest that $38K then you will have $33M after 100 years time. If you paid that $38K to Wordpress then you won't see a cent of that money back. I don't see how it makes financial sense to give $38K to Wordpress rather than investing it yourself and paying monthly hosting fees.
- pocketarc 3y ago
  By giving it to Wordpress, it's done, you don't have to think about it anymore, and whatever happens in your life, that content is staying up for those 100 years. You're paying for the security / peace of mind, and I'm sure you can picture some people preferring to do that than to self-manage hosting content (and updating technology over time) for 100 years. Edit: Having said that, I don't think Wordpress is the right fit for this. I think it should've been a separate company, with a separate brand and a separate legal structure that enforced keeping things up for 100 years and enforced using the investment profits to keep the content up and maintain the infrastructure even as technology changed.

phyzome 3y ago

That's stupid expensive for what it is.

BrentOzar 3y ago

There's a perfect use case for this: if you think your company stands a chance of running out of money in the future, but you just got an infusion of VC funding now... $38K isn't a large amount. $38K is an insurance policy that will keep the marketing front end of your company's site online "forever", long after you run out of VC money and shutter the company. Keeps your vanity up and running, your fond memories. It turns your hosting costs from a monthly expense to a "permanent" capital expense that's already paid for.

aspyct 3y ago
So you believe that your website made today will still be a good marketing tool 100 years from now? Look, how old is internet right now? How much did it change since the beginning? How often do you look at a product online on an early-90s website and think "oh, that's good marketing"? I don't think any serious business should see this as a "perfect use case". Just a big waste of money, that is.
- BrentOzar 3y ago
  > So you believe that your website made today will still be a good marketing tool 100 years from now? No, the business will be closed. It would just serve as an archive of history.
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    This depends on how much you value the history. Honestly, we are generating too much information, have problem archiving them all and too low attention span to consume/sort them out
  - aspyct 3y ago
    I don't see the point in keeping the marketing material for dead companies. Why would you use resources on that? As far as history is concerned, a wikipedia page describing the company and it's activities would most likely suffice.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

My opinion is that we should stop obsessing about storing everything and anything. It's unhealthy...we're accumulating too much. Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.

rco8786 3y ago
> we're accumulating too much. What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"? > Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving. Certainly true. But some things are very, very much worth preserving and we don't necessarily know what those things are in the present.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"? It already seems intuitive to me that people are far too obsessed about storing anything and everything, from photos to notes to random thoughts and more. To me it seems pathological. I saw one estimate that is around 500 exabytes already... it looks a lot like those people whose basements are full of unused junk, only in virtual form. I also noticed for sure that people keep way too much stuff they never use...I've rarely met anyone who doesn't. That certainly carries over to their virtual life too.
  - eddieroger 3y ago
    It's worth considering that we all get to individually assign value to something, and that value is mostly an opinion, which means it's not right or wrong objectively. There are certainly extremes like those who hoard, but just because others values some things more than you do doesn't make them wrong.
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      I agree in one aspect, but in another aspect, I disagree. Humans have natural instincts which makes them hoard because that would have been adaptive in times of scarcity (i.e. our ancient past). Now, in times of surplus, that instinct is mostly maladaptive. So I DO posit that humans on average place a higher value on hoarding than they should, and that if they actually took the time to override this basal instinct with higher brain functions, then on AVERAGE they would be happier.

elicash 3y ago

There was a great 787 comment thread a couple years ago where people came up with all sorts of better ideas, but for 500 years. Trusts, physical archives, multiple languages, etching into various materials, shooting things into orbit, etc. And like all discussions then, blockchain. It wouldn't surprise me if that thread was the inspiration. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957573 I think it's a clever offering by WordPress. I wouldn't pay for it, but it's an interesting technical challenge to think about!

adrm 3y ago

It seems daring to propose something like this, and I would really want to know about the guarantees that they thought to be able to do this. In any case, any initiative for fighting link rot and keeping a healthy internet are really welcome. So in that regard, sharing their playbook with their learnings on how to guarantee 100 years of service could be an incentive for other companies to offer something similar. I hope they release more details about this service, because the video is cool but there is almost no material information on the site.

prmoustache 3y ago

Companies should stop promising stuff they cannot.

daneel_w 3y ago

The marketing trick of playing on the concepts of birth, childhood, life, longevity, legacy etc. for a blog/website comes off as a bit pretentious and lacking in taste, as if the WordPress subscription were a family heirloom.

OmarShehata 3y ago
Now that you mention it, it seems quite clever. This seems to be targeted at people who run businesses, who already spend a lot of time & money thinking about their estate & leaving it in a good state for their children to inherit. I wonder if the price point was figured out based on that (like as long as it's ballpark similar to paying attorney or whatever to provide this service for your house & business, then it makes sense to pay something similar for your digital wordpress assets)

big_paps 3y ago

I could not think of a single wordpress post or blog which would be worth preserving 100yrs.

xzel 3y ago

Disclaimer: I'm a Wordpress plugin developer and my opinions are my own. This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.

avg_dev 3y ago
Hi, can you perhaps explain what Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, Aveda, and Salient do? Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.
- xzel 3y ago
  Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix. What these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient, do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from along with a visual editor. These push WP output, that is what is rendered in your browser, from simple blog to an actual website experience. They also all provide something similar to what Gutenberg does but they built it 10 years ago on the original WP PHP backend (Gutenberg is all React). WP pushing to Gutenberg has actually kind of screwed them a bit, but I digress. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who buys licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha. Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.

planetjones 3y ago

Think I would have more faith in the internet archive keeping my blog posts alive 100 years from now. I’d prefer to donate to them.

ekianjo 3y ago

People are obsessed here in the comments with the feasibility. They dont seem to grasp its just a PR or marketing move

jfengel 3y ago

I worry about my own organization being able to remember to renew its domain if we don't do it yearly. If I made a ten year payment, what happens in a decade if I'm no longer with them? Will they track down someone? Will the domain expire and get held for ransom? Setting aside the weirdness of making a 100 year commitment with a 20 year old company, what really does happen a century from now? Will anyone know whose responsibility it is?

Mizoguchi 3y ago

A LTO8 30TB tape with 30 years archival life is $60 A 5GB gold DVD with 100 years archival life is $10. A safety deposit box in one of the largest banks in America can be as little as $30/year. IMO, both the bank and the data in the dvd/tape have more chances of survival in 100 years than WordPress.

kbrannigan 3y ago

Anything Physical will outlive most digital media.

whatyesaid 3y ago
Literally not, physical does not have the density of digital. You can download all of Wikipedia (text) in 5gb. 5gb was a lot in 1980, nothing now. So we need revolutions in storage that would allow at least some backups of archive.org and such outside of the 1 Internet Archive charity.

keyle 3y ago

This is preposterous. The 100 with the Earth in the middle is the cherry on the cake. In a 100 years, the problems of Earth will be much bigger than accessing blog posts of this time. Besides, isn't archive.org taking care of this for free? A better investment would be to plan 38K USD worth of planting trees and environmental ventures.

politelemon 3y ago
> Besides, isn't archive.org taking care of this for free? They aren't an internet utility we can take for granted. A lot of things could happen in that time. They're under attack for various reasons even now, and we don't know that the tech and political landscape looks like in the future. Having the first party content host make plans for preservation doesn't hurt.

GuyverMack 3y ago

These comments are missing the point: At this rate, within a decade 100% of web content will be covered up by video ads, so there'll be nothing to see anyway. I think /. is down to about an inch of reading space at this point (on a desktop).

johnklos 3y ago

As someone who has hosted personal content and files for a quarter of a century, continuously, I'd trust individuals or a not-necessarily-for-profit group over something like this. While domains have come and gone, sometimes multiple times, each of my users has had a working public_html all that time. Needing to register domains and actively maintain them is definitely a shortcoming of the Internet. There are just too many examples of companies promising things, often enough fully meaning their promises, only to be bought by big, evil companies that quickly toss those promises. Unlimited becomes limited or more costly. 100 years, I can easily see, becomes ten years at a time unless you confirm and update your billing information periodically to pay for incidentals and overages. Also, Wordpress is horribly bad at future compatibility, so if you're going to set up a site that can't have plugins because those plugins won't work in five years, why not just make a static site?

ralferoo 3y ago

I just googled to support my hypothesis and found this: https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/disruption/articles/why-you-will-probably-live-longer-than-most-big-companies/ https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/disruption/articles/w... "A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared." I guess the first obvious takeaway is that Wordpress themselves are likely to not exist long enough to honour this deal. There's also the issue that companies that offer lifetime deals typically only do it when they are extremely cash strapped and it's basically a gamble that the initial influx of money can tide them over until a more stable revenue stream can be found, at which point all those lifetime deals are liabilities that will forever suck the company's profits. But from the other side, no personal blog is worth preserving longer than your expected lifetime, so this is presumably aimed at companies, especially given the price point. Very few companies will survive for 100 years, so they'll probably never see the benefit of this as the probability of both them AND Wordpress both surviving 100 years is even lower. Then there's the pricing. Assuming the money could just be invested to break-even against inflation, and so you can consider this as $380 a year, that sounds excessive for a blog hosting platform. It's also more than their "Business" tier. That said, it's actually less than their "Commerce" tier and their "Enterprise" tier is $25000+ per year. I'm guessing they won't allow the latter to transfer to this deal, so it's hard to see who they actually think would even buy this.

daitangio 3y ago

Hum are 380$ per year, which is a lot. My blog based on Wordpress cost me less than 118$/year with backup and domain cost (VAT Included). It seems more than a 3x cost per year, which seems a lot even considering the inflation in the next 100 years.

ufjfjjfjfj 3y ago
I pay $25/year for a small woocommerce web store running on a VPS... Including domain name Inflation happens because people don't like to shop (or perhaps because they don't know how to) I'll give you the address if you like native american aromatherapy

iamkoch 3y ago

This post feels like an April fools joke. Like somehow 100 year mortgages and 100 year websites go hand in hand. Very few blogs or posts feel relevant a year or two later, let alone a decade. The only people buying this are those with Balenciaga trainers who drink wine shilled by influencers

clnq 3y ago

$40k can build legacies much larger than a blog website. If one wants to buy legacy, this is a waste of money.