Jetpack, Automattic's WordPress plugin, publishes posts on WordPress performance, security vulnerabilities, and product updates.
HN commenters link it mainly in WordPress hosting debates, citing its advice to disable post revisions for performance, a point raised in the WP Engine dispute.
I wouldn't say "less populated". This phrasing yields vast green pastures and the odd pioneer who could just drive a stake anywhere and claim acres upon an acres for themselves.
I don't think that's a correct comparison. The Web isn't a physical commons that suddenly got crowded. It's a mesh of hypertext and interlinked pages that just keeps expanding infinitely in all directions.
How information gets linked is a reflection of our collective mental model. The crux then is to control or influence where links are pointing to. Creating a hyperlink is arguably the most powerful thing you can do on the Web.
Hence why true walled gardens such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,... discourage adding links to your content. The shoddy way to add a link in a comment (if possible) is totally intentional.
Then there's the fact that in the past decade billions have started using social media to publish their thoughts. But then you have to consider that those same billions never truly left those walled gardens. It's like they entered the theater but keep lingering forever in the foyer.
This isn't bad in itself... unless you start to consider that all content is equal and turn this into a zero sum game: you either move towards social media, or you publish your content on your own domain.
If you're a small commercial venture, arguably there's little point in investing in a 200k$ website and you're better off starting a FB page. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely, you might derive a…
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Automattic (WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, .blog, Polldaddy, Gravatar) | Search Wrangler | Full Time | REMOTE
We're a distributed company with employees in >60 countries. Help us influence search and recommendations for the 30% of the Web that runs on WordPress.
We're looking to take our Elasticsearch infrastructure up a few notches. A bit on what we're working on:
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One of Matt's complaints was that WPE disabled revisions...which JetPack (owned by Automattic) suggests to do in order to improve performance. https://jetpack.com/blog/wordpress-revisions/
I ran servers for an agency with ~1200 WordPress installs on Azure VMs, and I disabled revisions on every one of the sites. How is that different? Did I fiddle too much, despite it being in official documentation on how to do so? Even despite it being actually recommended by Automattic itself for performance improvements? Many of his complaints don't add up. The copyright and WP confusion, I get...but the rest is largely non-sense. Even his Stripe/Woocommerce complaint is largely bunk.
The best outcome is for Matt to step down, Wordpress.org/WP Foundation gets sold to multiple hosting providers (WordPress.com, WPE, 1&1, GoDaddy, etc) and they all commit x amount of money to the project (given it is a very important platform for all of them) and in exchange WPE drops its suit. Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen, because some of this seems very ego driven.
> does anyone know why the functionality there requires a wordpress.com account (or rather, are there any efforts towards being able to self-host that part?)?
The list is long: http://jetpack.me/features/ (probably half of those require the connection)
Examples include stats (a pain to scale on shared hosting), related posts (also known to kill database servers), site uptime monitoring, image CDN (including on the fly thumbnailing), and so on.
It basically provides the things that you probably don't want to self-host. You get some of the scaling of WordPress.com while being able to do your own thing (plugins, custom theme, etc.).
> Is it simply because no such product exists?
It's definitely possible! You could self-host WordPress, then use the Jetpack plugin, which can support premium content options (https://jetpack.com/support/newsletter/paid-newsletters/). You could also do this with WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2020/06/04/premium-content-and-paid-newsletters/)
I'm sure there are even more solutions, or you could roll your own -- WordPress is extremely flexible.
Disclaimer: I work for Automattic. I haven't set up a premium blog before, but it's definitely possible to self-host something very similar to substack.