Unattributed

I would like to supply a TLDR; for this document, but it's too long for there to be a simple summary. The closest would be the conclusion of the article, but there is a lot of information along the way that would be lost if you jump to that. Therefor, if you clicked on this article, I would recommend reading it completely.

Introduction

I read Jola's article The social contract of writing the other day, and was impressed by their well reasoned arguments. I then read the response from Segun Famisa: No. You can't tell it was written by AI, and felt that it was quite a bit off the point.

Jola's primary arguments were:

• The use of LLMs are homogenizing writing. Their repetitive use of specific idioms and patterns that are frequently occurring. Like, statistically too frequent to be an anomaly.
• Even if you don't use an LLM in your writing, you are being caught up in the blast-radius of LLM written works. These works have been tainted are affecting how you write.
• Writing that is assisted by the use of LLMs is a violation of the social contract between the author and their audience.

Segun, on the other hand, seems to have disagreed with concept that LLM assisted writing can be identified. He makes the arguments that:

• The tools used to identify LLM written works often fail.
• In order to judge a piece of writing you need to know the author of the work to determine if they wrote it.
• The reason for things like em-dashes, and unusual vocabulary is due more to the social background of the people who trained the LLMs.

There is a lot to be said about both of these pieces. I have some things that haven't been considered to toss into the discussion surrounding the use of LLMs in writing. And, along the way, I want to rebut a couple of the arguments that have been made.

I Am the Author

Before we dig into the exceptionally muddy waters of the ethical questions of using LLMs in writing it's necessary to be clear about this: I am the sole author of this article. Yes, I use some tools to assist in the writing of this article: (self-hosted) LanguageTool and Harper. Why? Because my grammar and spelling sucks.

But, rest assured, all the words on your screen were typed by me. All the awkward analogies, idioms, and other quirks of this text emerged from my mind, and not from an LLM. I will most certainly guarantee that this will lead vocabulary choices that are unusual, and may, therefore, not read in the same way that others might have written this.

And, I am the one making the choice to use properly formatted em-dashes and ellipses throughout this text. These have only been the convention for typeset prose since the invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around the year 1440.

Donald Knuth spent years working on TeX, trying to find a way to automate properly typeset texts. Along the way he solved many problems that were far more complicated than anyone had thought they were. I don't understand why we don't honor the work of Knuth and use these machines to the fullest extent of their capabilities, especially when it comes to typesetting.

I do feel like these silly “tell-tales” were originally intended as a joke: “An em-dash? No one writes like that! Right?” and somewhere along the way the joke was lost.

Simple Tell-Tales Are a Lie

That's one of the first things I would like to contribute to the discussion. Simple, easy, tell-tales just aren't a reality. LLMs are not simple pieces of software that are just glorified “autocomplete” machines as some people would try to have us believe.

Even a cursory study of how an LLM is designed and trained will make this fact self-evident. While I am not an expert in this field (far from it), I have watched and read enough background information to have some appreciation for the complexity of the accomplishments in the field.

The facts are that there are many elements that go into an LLM:

• The design of the neural network
• The design of the model
• The algorithms used in the model
• The information used to train the model
• The people who performed the training
• The person(s) interacting with the model
• The bugs / shortcoming of the agents

This is only a top-level view of some of the factors. It's pretty clear that the resulting output from an LLM can be vastly different based on changes to any or all of these factors. This also points to the fact that this should still be considered a research technology, and not something that is being implemented as a tool for the public to use, In my opinion.

Given this level of complexity, how can we think that there are simple tell-tales for LLM written works? It's simply ridiculous.

There Are Indicators of LLM Writing

There is a whole field of study around linguistics which can, using varying methods be used to identify patterns in written language. This is often used with historically significant documents to verify the authorship of said documents.

How is this done? By analyzing works known to be authored by a person, and comparing the documents in question to the known writings of the author. This process involves numerous factors:

• Vocabulary of the author
• Unique grammatical constructs employed by the author
• The overall structure of a document
• The presentation of arguments, explanations, etc.
• Other narrative or exposition elements
• The references or supporting evidence

This idea of examining the constructs and patterns found within a document isn't limited to written bodies of work. These concepts are applied to analyze things like music compositions.

Then why have tools like OpenAI's AI Classifier failed?

Because it's kind of like a dog chasing its own tail. A dog generally chases its own tail not because it wants to catch it, but because the activity itself is fun. The dog knows how to catch its tail, it does so all the time by laying down bending over to get to its tail.

An LLM trying to analyze a text to determine its provenance is like the dog chasing its tail. It can do the assigned activity, but the results are unlikely to end in success. Why? Quite simply, an LLM is likely unable to make a distinction between the information it has been trained on versus information it has generated. In terms of an LLM these two things are equal. The LLM written document is the result of the information it was trained on. What things can it do to find a distinction?

The Author's Social Contract

This is a topic that authors discuss at length. The question of the relationship between an author and their audience is frequently questioned.

Take, for example, a mystery author. Just how much information do they have to present to the reader throughout the text to make the solution satisfying? Is there an issue with presenting too many facts that lead to the solution? What amount of misdirection is appropriate in a story? Where is the line between misdirection and confusing the reader to the point frustration?

Similarly, Science Fiction authors faced the dilemma of writing “hard” Sci-fi, aka basing the technology strictly on known science and technology, versus using known science and technology as the basis for more advanced systems. In some cases, is there a basis for inventing whole new scientific concepts or principles in order to introduce a new technology to their world. Where is the line? What will the reader accept or reject?

These, and many more, types of questions exist throughout all genres of fiction writing. And, likely exist through many more forms of written communication. This discussion is something that is not going away anytime in the future. And now, there is a new topic to add to this: what is the line with LLMs?

Jola's reference to the Oxide Computing RFD 576 brings a lot of subtlety to the questions surrounding the use of LLMs in writing. It simultaneously seems to be advocating for some roles for LLMs, while still acknowledging that there are issues and dangers in using LLMs.

The issue I see with this is there is little to no objective measurement for the effective use of LLMs in their environment. I see this as a missed thought that needs to be carefully addressed. For example, it is suggested that LLMs can be used as research assistants (which is something that I've thought about myself). However, the document warns of the propensity for LLMs to make things up, insert claims that aren't true, or hallucinate, or fail in other ways. Therefore, the user of the LLM for research needs to verify all the claims in the output, and go through all the references to make certain they are valid.

When I considered this question, I started to wonder what the impact would be on my personal research process? In other words, I wondered if the time that I would save would be sufficiently greater than the amount of time I needed to validate the work of the LLM? While I have no experiential data on which make such a judgment, I do have an experience that informed my thoughts on this topic.

A few years ago I asked ChatGPT to write a profile of an artist I am deeply familiar with. I asked it to write a profile under 500 words in length to be used in the liner notes for a new release by said artist. The results were scary. The first part was not all that bad, it got the artists real name, his approximate age, and the region of the world he was from. It then went on to explain his style of music, and his range within that style of music.

Then things fell completely apart. It started listing the most popular releases from the artist. First, several of the releases were little known works by him. But if that wasn't bad enough, it listed a work that he has publicly and widely disavowed. And, to take things to the last level: it made up two works.

I spent over an hour researching the releases, especially because I couldn't any reference to any of these works in the artists online discographies. Once I had determined all the facts surrounding those works, I went back to the LLM and challenged it on the works it had listed. It took numerous exchanges to get it to recognize the fictional works, but it would never explain where those works had come from. As for the disavowed work, it did acknowledge that the artist had disavowed it, but wouldn't answer why that work had been included on the list.

Realize, this is only a 500 word profile. About 2 pages of typewritten text. Several hours spent in validating, and interrogating the LLM about its output. This was a task that would have taken me approximately 30 minutes to complete. At this point I saw that using an LLM for such tasks had an actual negative impact on my work process.

Now, a sample set of one does not make for a good basis to draw broader conclusions. However, when considering what is the line with LLMs, it should be considered whether the use of the tool is going to significantly contribute to the quality of the work, or if it is going to become an unduly burdensome tool. While some roles, such as a proofreading or critiquing one's writing might be a viable and useful option, other areas such as researching, writing assistance, or editing a work might be more burden than useful.

Does AI Fit?

There is something that I have been thinking about. We have been worried that LLM writing are changing the way that we communicate. However, isn't that something that we have been doing throughout history? Consider a few brief examples.

Pens

Yeah, this might seem like a boring way to start things, but there are things that we have to consider, seriously.

The first writing implements were reeds or feathers that were cut to a point, and slit in them. When dipped into an ink pot they held a small amount of ink to allow a person to write. This was an actual advancement over earlier forms of writing. And, because of the limited education, at the time, only Royalty (and possibly extremely wealthy people) had access to these tools. From the quill, we moved on the dip pen. Same concept as before, but now we had nibs made from steel.

The next major change would be to what we now call “dropper” pens, but were referred to at the time as reservoir pens. These were pens where the barrel portion was treated as a reservoir which could be filled with ink. The ink would flow into a part of the pen known as the feed. The feed was connected to the nib, and supplied ink to it. There is a lot of uncertainty about when this was first invented. There are claims that such a pen was invented in the mid-900s in Egypt, but there is no physical evidence of such a pen existing. It is also believed that Leonardo da Vinci may have made one for his own use. His journals contain designs for such a pen, and it's notable that his journals reflect a more continuous ink flow than other writings of the same period. However, there is definitely evidence that there were reservoir pens being produced and sold in 17th century Germany.

Innovation in the design and manufacture of pens remained steady through the 19th century. However, at the beginning of the 20th century a new era of fountain pens was born when self-filling pens began hitting the market. These pens used various mechanisms to allow the pens to be filled by sucking ink into the barrel of the pen. These pens quickly became runaway hits with the general population.

However, their years were numbered. There were efforts to come up with what is known now as the ballpoint pen dating all the way back to the late 1880s. However, all the early versions of such a pen had problems with ink flow, reliability, and material choices. These were much the same issues that had plagued the progress in fountain pen development. However, László Bíró and his brother György decided to undertake this problem in the 1930s, and by 1938 they filed for their first patent for the Biro pen. After World War II, the design of the pen was refined, and eventually came down in price to the point where it was easily accessible to the general public, and quickly supplanted the fountain pen.

The first patented typewriter was developed in 1829. Known as the Typographer by William Austin Burt. (There were several machines before this one, but this is the first extensively documented machine.) In the mid-19th century the desire and need for speeding up communications brought the development of the typewriter to the forefront of technology. Typists, stenographers, and telegraphers could take down information at the rate of approximately 130 words per minute, whereas people writing with a pen tended to top out around 30 words per minute.

The first commercially successful typewriter was patented in 1868, and was sold under the name “Shoales and Glidden Typewriter”. In 1873 Remington would bring its first typewriter to market. In the early 1900s the design of typewriters reached a point where the design was somewhat standardized, and there were at least a dozen notable manufacturers of typewriters.

The first electric typewriter began production in 1900. However, the first practical electric typewriter wasn't produced until 1914, and successfully brought to market in 1920. From the 1920s to the 1940s the main company producing electric typewriters (Northeast Electric Company) changed hands several times, saw its typewriter division spun-off into a separate company, and was eventually acquired by IBM.

IBM would take the technology, and being producing its Electromatic series of typewriters, which introduced the ability to vary the spacing of the characters, producing a typewritten page the appeared more like a typeset document. In 1961 IBM would introduce the Selectric typewriter, which used a typeball, which could be changed, enabling different fonts or type styles to be achieved.

The final step in the development of the typewriter was the electronic (not to be confused with electric typewriters). Electronic typewriter distinctions were the use of the daisy wheel type head, and using circuitry to control the type head, instead of the purely mechanical mechanisms of the previous electric typewriter.

The typewriter market began to recede in the 1990s after the invention of the personal computer. Of course, much of the invention around the typewriter continues on today in the computer keyboards used by many people.

Getting to the Point

Why discuss the invention and progression of pens and typewriters? They are highly relevant to this discussion, as other communication inventions throughout the ages. These were just the two most direct examples that came to my mind.

What is worth considering is how did these technologies impact the work of creating written documents? The progress from using a quill / reed and ink or dip pens to the self filling fountain pens enabled writers to expand on their work. It made it easier for them to write in a continuous flow of thoughts. Writers like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway were known to use fountain pens in composing their works. How much would they have been impacted if they only had a dip pen to work with? The invention of the ballpoint pen took writing to another level altogether, being more portable than fountain pens, and requiring fewer and less messy refills.

The typewriter removed many of the restrictions of the pen in terms of the speed at which a work could be produced, and the accuracy and legibility of the document produced by an author. The penmanship of the author was less of an issue. The speed at which a document could be typed was up to four times the speed of handwriting, and potentially higher with the invention of the electric and electronic typewriters. And, by the time electric and electronic typewriters emerged, the ability to correct the text as it was written was greatly improved.

We can move along and look at what the personal computer and the internet have enabled for authors… That is such a large topic I didn't even want to start writing about it.

Is AI Next?

Is AI the next fountain pen or typewriter? Is this a technology that will have impact on writing? That seems to be a foregone conclusion at this point as we look at the works that are being produced now.

The question then becomes where will AI fit in? AI is current still in its early stages, not the mature technology that the marketers and AI companies would like us to believe that it is. But, is there a point where it crosses the point of maturity and become a tool that is going to be seen in the same way as earlier tools were?

There were authors that resisted using typewriters. There were authors that resisted using specific brands of pens (there is a humorous story in which H. P. Lovecraft complained bitterly when he was forced to use a Conklin fountain pen after losing his Waterman pen. Meanwhile, Mark Twain was so in love with the Conklin pens that he endorsed them.)

What It Looks Like

The final question I have been asking myself win regard to AI and writing is: what does it look like? That is, if, and when the technology reaches a point where it is considered to be mature enough to become just another tool for writers and artists?

This is another question that I don't have an answer for, and I don't have any predictions on it. I only have some hopes for what will come. What hopes do I have?

My hope is that the technology will not remain under the direction of large corporations. I would rather see the technology becoming something that individuals chose implement for themselves, and have the ability to customize what it does for them, and how they interact with it.

This basically means local LLM implementations. We have machines that are capable of running small local LLM's right now. (I'm typing this on an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ system right now). I think there are ways to allow individuals to implement and customize this tool in the same manner that many of us chose to install and customize our Linux systems. I think this could also open the door(s) to ways of correcting the wrongs of the current AI industry in terms of their use of other people's property. But that's a whole other thought process that I have been going through, which belongs in a different article.

Conclusion

The future of AI as it stands is uncertain. There are people that are both bullish and bearish on the state of the industry from a business standpoint. I tend to align myself more with the bears. I believe that the financing is a shame, and there will (hopefully) be either some kind of market correction, or day of reckoning where these companies are concerned.

While the things that many people think are tells really aren't, that doesn't mean it isn't possible to identify AI generated writing more accurately given the correct set of linguistic analysis tools. And at this point we should be identifying these works as the technology is really not at a level where it should be so broadly accepted.

When I look at a company like Oxide Computers I am encouraged that they are taking an approach that addresses many of the subtleties of the questions surrounding AI. However, what I am not encouraged by is that the missed the singularly most critical point: how does one quantify the usefulness of this technology? My personal experience showed me that it could quite easily and substantially get in my way, turning a thirty-minute task into two hours of work. That's not a productivity boon.

But, I am also wondering if we are looking at this form the wrong perspective. Throughout history there have been technologies that have substantially impacted our ability to write and create. Has the impact of those technologies been positive or negative? That's a question with an unknown answer, and one that should be researched more deeply in order to understand what we should expect as the impact of AI.

I know there have been artists and creators that have resisted the technologies that I brought up in this article. I mentioned that one author couldn't stand a self-filling fountain pen (Lovecraft), while another (Twain) loved it so much he endorsed the company. There were authors that resisted using the typewriter when it became a reasonably commonplace and affordable tool for writing, despite all of its benefits.

Where does AI fit in for writers? I don't know, but I do have some hopes for it. The primary hope is that it is a technology that does not remain in the hands of large corporations. I hope that it instead becomes a personal technology that the individual can implement for themselves, and customize it to integrate it into their life.

	FediRing
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Sometimes I cannot, for the life of me, understand what spammers are thinking. For that matter, I am not even certain they have more than a single brain cell left. Take this one for example, sending eight messages in a single minute:

Eight spam messages in a single minute

Now, look, I get it. They are really trying to get attention. But really, do they think this message will actually accomplish anything?

I mean seriously, all of these messages just hit my spam filter and got dumped into a folder for me to double-check.

But, if it was just these eight messages I might have forgiven it as a one-off, drive-by spamming. But no, that was just the spam from tonight. They've been at this for two weeks now. Every few days they drop by the site that has that contact form, spam eight messages at me, and move on.

I mean, it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic: there are fifty-six messages from this spammer in my folder. And they've been doing this exact same thing every time: spam eight messages and then move on.

But, they are trying to be a bit strategic… They don't do it every day. It seems they are on some kind of rotation: doing their spamming once every two-three days. Like that is going to make any kind of difference???

Do they really think this going to work? Does it ever work on anyone? I mean, I just have to wonder: where are their brain cells hiding?

There are a total of one hundred and sixty-six messages in my spam folder. They make up fifty-six of them, that is over one third of the spam messages in that folder. Guess it makes the cleanup all that much easier.

<delete>

	FediRing
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Responding To My Former Web Host TOC:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

In part two I stated that I thought that would be the end of this series of posts, and yet here I am with part three. This one will be the absolute final post as I don't have anything more to say to my web host. However, the response I received just now really should be documented. I said in part two that I respected the people I worked with at this hosting company, and that continues to be the case.

So, with that, here is the last exchange.

My Response To The Support Person

Thank you for the response. You have largely understood the issues that I brought up, and had some insightful feedback.

I would like to clarify something, as I think I didn't provide a proper context for you.

At no point did I feel that the infrastructure was in my way. That is quite far from the case. I am actually a former IT Server / Infrastructure engineer. My understanding of your underlying design is why I decided to go with your service in the first place. I was tired of working with hosting services that really didn't understand how to implement a solid infrastructure. Even though there were aspects of the environment I didn't use, it was good to know they were available if I needed them. (And, if I had migrated one of my other sites, I am quite certain I would have needed them.)

My “using a sledgehammer when all I really need is a screwdriver” is typical of me. I've always tended to look at requirements / specs, and design solutions that are overkill.

The “optimization issue” was really only frustrating the first time it happened. Since I didn't have the familiarity with the codebase to know where to look for the issue I was left in a situation where I couldn't find the answer on my own. Once support had tracked down the issue, it was mostly just an infrequent annoyance, which is why I didn't make any noise about it. (If it had been a serious enough issue, I would have pushed the issue to your dev group.)

The only thing that really didn't fit for me is WordPress. I can tell you understand that level of frustration I am feeling with that. ;)

As to the pricing, while it wasn't a major issue for me, I did find it annoying. I would think that Enterprise customers would likely find it frustrating too. I know most of the places I worked preferred to be able to have fixed rate contracts for a given term, and then be able to re-negotiate when that term was up. This kind of pricing structure would likely have never flown in any of the environments I worked in. (OTOH — all the companies I worked for had their own infrastructure, and WordPress wasn't considered an Enterprise class platform.)

Response From My Former Web Host

Thank you for the clarification and for sharing more about your background.

That context definitely helps me better understand where you were coming from.

It’s great to hear that the infrastructure itself was actually one of the reasons you chose our service. I completely understand the “sledgehammer vs screwdriver” approach as well, especially from an engineering perspective where building for flexibility and scalability becomes second nature.

I also appreciate you clarifying the optimization issue. That makes perfect sense, especially when the main frustration was initially not knowing where to look within an unfamiliar codebase rather than the issue itself being critical.

And yes, I completely understand your feelings about WordPress. It can definitely become the limiting factor, particularly for users coming from more traditional infrastructure and engineering environments.

Your feedback regarding the pricing structure is also very valid. Predictability is important, especially in enterprise environments where fixed-term budgeting is often preferred.

Thank you again for the thoughtful feedback and for taking the time to explain your experience in more detail. We genuinely appreciate it.

Wishing you all the best,

What I Didn't Provide Detail About

When I said above:

And, if I had migrated one of my other sites, I am quite certain I would have needed them.

I was referring to the dev/test environment feature they offer. The site I haven't migrated relies heavily on a WordPress plugin that is no longer available. The company that produced it completely pulled it from the market, doesn't offer any support for it, and didn't bother to make the code available for it.

This left me with 250-350 posts that rely on a plugin that is no longer available or supported, with no clear migration path.

I've since dumped the contents of that site. All the information from that plugin is stored in metadata in each post. When I dumped it (into a Jekyll compatible flat-file format), all the metadata came along with the posts. Now I just need to extract that data from the JSON section of each file, and translate into an appropriate format for presentation here.

Along with this, I need to test all the URI's in the posts. Given the age of the posts, I know there are quite a few that are no longer available… This is going to be true for all ~500 posts on that site.

This is a task that is going to be annoying. I am going to have to find some way to automate it. Manual intervention isn't an option.

Conclusion

To summarize everything:

• My former web hosts infrastructure was overkill for my needs. But, given my IT Infrastructure background I deliberately chose it.
• I did foresee needing part of that infrastructure for migrating one site, which I never worked on.
• I only had two actual issues with the hosting service:
  • First was an incident with a plugin that caused issues, but that was more of an annoyance once the source of the problem was found.
  • Second was the instability of their pricing. In my experience that wouldn't fly in an enterprise environment. (Then again, WordPress was never accepted in any enterprise environment I worked in.)
• Finally, the real issue I had wasn't with them, but with WordPress. From their implementation of Gutenberg to the addition of AI support in 7.0 Automattic seems to be on the path to complete enshittification of the platform. I consider that process to be complete now.

	FediRing
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Responding To My Former Web Host TOC:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

I stated the other day that I was surprised my former web host emailed me asking for feedback after I'd closed out my account. No survey, or feedback form, just a straightforward email.

And now I am surprised again. Why? Yesterday morning I received a response to that email. Only nine or ten hours after I sent it. And, much to my pleasure, the representative largely understood what I was talking about. She had some interesting and relevant comments.

So, here I am, presenting part two of this email exchange. I plan to respond to her email to clear up a minor mis-perception I think she has, but otherwise I feel like she's really taking my feedback and handling it properly.

(And this is something I have to say… I have respect for all the people I worked with at this host. They were very professional, responsive, and good at resolving issues. This email is further indication of the customer service this hosting service provided.)

---

First of all, thank you for taking the time to share such thoughtful and detailed feedback. We genuinely appreciate the level of insight you provided, and I can tell this wasn’t a decision you made lightly.

I’m glad to hear that, overall, you found value in the infrastructure and services we built. At the same time, I completely understand the frustrations you experienced, especially with the recurring optimization issue and the feeling of having to repeatedly reapply fixes after updates. I can absolutely see how that would become frustrating over time, particularly when your setup was intentionally kept simple and close to the default WordPress experience.

Your comments regarding testing against default WordPress themes and preserving user-defined optimization settings are especially valuable, and I’ll be sure to pass that feedback along to the relevant team. Even though the underlying issue may have been more nuanced, the impact on your workflow was very real, and that matters.

I also appreciate your honesty about pricing and feature fit. It makes complete sense that a platform designed for agencies, developers, and more complex website management can feel excessive when your primary focus is writing rather than maintaining large-scale web infrastructure. Sometimes the best solution is the one that stays out of the way and lets you focus on the work you actually care about.

And regarding WordPress itself, while experiences and preferences naturally vary, I can certainly understand your perspective on how the platform has evolved over the years. For users whose priority is writing efficiency and simplicity, the shift toward block-based editing and increasingly visual workflows hasn’t always been a welcome change. It’s clear you’ve given a lot of thought to your workflow and the tools that best support it, and it sounds like you’ve found an approach that aligns much more closely with how you prefer to work.

It’s great to hear that you were able to migrate your sites successfully and settle into a solution that better fits both your workflow and your budget.

Thank you again for having been with us and for giving our platform a chance over the years. We truly appreciate your support, your candid feedback, and the professionalism with which you shared your experience.

Wishing you all the best with your writing and your new setup moving forward.

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Categories: #Article, #Feature Tags: #Webhosting, #Customer-Service, #email, #rants

	FediRing
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Responding To My Former Web Host TOC:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

I got an email yesterday that was somewhat unexpected. My former hosting service asked me to send an email about why I had closed out my account. This is something I haven't experienced before… A company that wants an actual email, they don't just want some form or survey filled out. They want to actually hear everything that I have to say… Well, I decided that I would take them up on it.

And now, I am presenting this email to document all the gory details. But, let's be clear: I spend a lot of it talking about their service, and one issue that I had. Most of that was a minor annoyance, not something that pushed me to make the decision to switch. As I document in the second half of this message, the primary reason is the enshittification of WordPress.

Hopefully you enjoy the parts of this where I get completely unhinged when talking about certain topics. ;)

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You know the saying: “It's not you, it's me?” Typically, it's a lie, right? Well, in this case it's about 90% percent true.

There's very little that I had a problem with from the standpoint of your infrastructure. I think you've done an excellent job of designing a system that is well integrated, and provides the services that are needed to manage a professional environment.

However, where I did run into some friction centered around one of the plugins that you provide. I don't recall which one it was, but almost every time it was updated it kept breaking the image rendering on my site's home page. One of your support people found the issue: it was the JS optimization one of your plugins that was breaking things. The annoyance was every time the plugin would update, I would have to go back into my site and fix the issue. It was only recently I found the feature that allowed me to snapshot the settings so I could apply them quickly without having to look up the support issue to remember how to fix the problem.

The real reason this was quite annoying: I was always using the current default WordPress template. I didn't need anything too fancy that the default theme didn't offer. Personally, I really think that your Q&A process should be testing against several configurations of the default template to make certain that it isn't breaking things. (Although, in this case, that might not have worked… IIRC the problem was the plugin overwriting the settings the user had implemented, instead of preserving them.)

The pricing was more than I really want to invest. When I looked at things, your service was running me over $800/yr. When I add the additional services I required, that expense jumped to somewhere between $1000-1200/yr. There's no way I can justify spending $300-400 per website, that's excessive for me. This wasn't helped by the changes in your pricing structure over the years.

My replacement solution has my expenses down to $200-250/yr to run five websites. It's not the same as having a full infrastructure setup such as yours, however, it will meet my needs better (which I'll explain more about later.)

The other thing about your environment was: it's like using a sledgehammer when all I really require is a screwdriver. I'm not in the business of website design. I'm in the “business” of writing.

This means that features like having a staging environment are, mostly, non-features for me. If anything I just require a test environment for making changes to the layout of my sites… I don't need a full mirror of my site, there's nothing so complicated that I have to be concerned about major side effects. (Honestly, the whole staging environment was one of the most attractive features that sold me on your service initially. It was surprising to me that I never used it because it wasn't necessary.) There are several other features of your environment that were like that.

But the single biggest issue has nothing to do with you. It is the fact that Automattic has done everything they possibly could to turn WordPress into a steaming pile of horse manure over the last eight or so years. And now, with the addition of AI integration, the enshittification process is complete. WordPress is no longer a tool for writers. It's a tool for visual web development, and the spreading of as much slop as possible.

I tried to give WordPress a chance with the Gutenberg editor. But block editors are just not for writing, they are for page design / layout. Look at the tools that writers use: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Write. Hell, George R. R. Martin is still using a copy of WordStar from the 1980s, and there are other authors that are still using WordPerfect from the 1990s.

The thing is, the editor is getting in the way of the writing process. It puts things in the path of the writing process that just shouldn't be there. I shouldn't have to think about inserting a heading, I should just be able to hit a quick shortcut and have it done. And, if I want to select text across two paragraphs to join / edit a couple of sentences, it shouldn't be a five-step process (try selecting the last word in one paragraph and keep selecting into the next paragraph see what happens… One of the most annoying things to have been forced on writers in the last decade.)

But it's not limited to the editor itself. It's the whole block based website layout. It just gets in the way, and it makes things a lot less efficient and quite a bit more annoying. I just went and looked at one of my other websites that is still using a pre-Gutenberg and pre-Block layout configuration, and I couldn't believe my eyes: this site that I hadn't looked at for over a year was a lot more responsive than anything I've worked on with any current theme. And this is still a current installation of WordPress: the host that site is on is performing similar services to yours: providing automatic updates to the current versions of WordPress and any plugins, full backups, etc. While there are still a lot of differences (from the plugin stack that it's running, to the network infrastructure itself), the fact is that the older theme was just a lot easier to render.

And then, over time, the whole block and patterns system in WordPress has just made things even worse. I tried recently to reconfigure my home page to make it into a minimalist layout: simple image, title, and date for each post, with the title being the link to the article. Would you believe that I spent two days trying to get the layout that I wanted, and failed? Why? I don't know, I'm still baffled. I just moved things around in the homepage template to make a simple list. Furthermore, I found there were things that should have been extremely simple that I couldn't get it to do, like make smaller, thumbnail sized versions of the featured images. And for some reason the date for all the articles on the homepage were the current date — despite me not moving the date element outside the query loop.

So now, things I had been able to do in previous versions of WordPress were breaking in the latest version. And then I found this fucking bullshit:

WordPress AI Connectors screen.

And I lost it. I had been considering moving off WordPress for years, and now (as I previously stated) seeing that the enshittification was complete, I decided that I needed to dump WordPress. (And don't even get me started on emDash.)

I had been thinking for a long time about moving my sites to a static website generator. However, I wasn't completely happy with what it would take to integrate one into my tool chain / working environment. However, a little over a week ago I tested out a couple of really simple platforms that offer a middle ground between a static generator and an online environment. After a little testing and evaluation, I ran the numbers and determined that it would be very effective at reducing my expenses. And, because it integrates into my working environment, I can ensure backups are handled properly (I have a triple-backup system, that includes offsite physical backups).

So, I migrated all three sites that were hosted with you over a period of three-four days, and shut down everything last weekend.

No looking back now. Thanks for the service you provided.

George

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