A Quick Note on WordPress vs. WP Engine

These two weeks the head of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, is making a spectacle of himself with his attitude towards WP Engine, by ignoring the integrity of the open-source license WordPress adheres to (a sentiment by David Heinemeier Hansson with which I agree), essentially firing staff that does not align with his views on the WP saga (source: TechCrunch), adding a checkbox making sure all WordPress contributors are not affiliated with WP engine (source: 9to5Mac), and trolling on Hacker News and Twitter.

(A full list of missteps Matt took can be found on bullenweg.org.)

Before I created this blog with Blogger, I tried out WordPress.com since that's what we should use initially. There were dark patterns in every single step that tries to get me to pay, and after I created the site, there is a permanent white banner on the top of every page asking people to sign up to WordPress. Undeterred, I signed up and wrote my first post, and WordPress sent an E-mail that "congratulated" me for creating my first blog post. Later I started exploring the settings, and found out that free users cannot install any plugin. The process was too much for me so I deleted my account soon after.

Compare that to the Blogger sign-up process, where you only need to type in the blog title, adjust some settings, and you're good to go. No dark patterns, permanent banners, or payments. Although the experience WordPress.com gave me isn't directly related to the recent behavior of the CEO (the head of WordPress.com, Daniel Bachhuber, even accepted the severance and left Automattic, the company behind WordPress), I'm glad I jumped ship as fast as I can. That said, my club site is still utilizing WordPress's code, so I hope the drama would have a good ending and WP would return to business as usual. Bless 'em.

— ltlnx 2024-10-13

Edit 2024-10-30: Ugh, bullenweg.com got taken down due to legal threats, so I changed the link to bullenweg.org, which hopefully stays up for now.

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