Unattributed

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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