#oneaday Day 126: What is WordPress doing?

You may recall a little while back I had an issue with my WordPress.com blog, the original incarnation of this site. The site’s “automated anti-spam” system had flagged my blog and taken it offline. I hasten to add that there is, of course, no spam or any other sort of inappropriate, objectionable or illegal content either on the original form of this site or this present incarnation. It was a mistake on their part, brought about by WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic increasingly relying on “AI” (spit) for more and more of their functionality.

This was the first time I’d had an issue with WordPress.com since joining in 2006. But it was serious enough that it made me move my site over to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation, which is what you’re reading right now.

For those unfamiliar with the distinction, WordPress.com is a free-with-paid-options blogging service where you can set up a blog or other website quickly and easily. Its free offering has gradually gotten worse over the years, now placing a rather obtrusive “Made with WordPress” banner on new sites created, but for the most part, I’ve always been satisfied with it for my purposes, particularly because, having been a user for so long, I had been “grandfathered” in to not having things like that banner ad.

WordPress.org, meanwhile, is an open-source project that maintains WordPress itself, which is a content management system and blogging platform you can install on any website. The main distinction is that WordPress.com is a service provided to you, while WordPress.org is both a piece of Web-based software and the community surrounding it. And one of the key differences is that while with WordPress.com, you’re stuck with preset configurations unless you pay through the nose for their extortionate “Business” plan, with WordPress.org you can tinker with and customise the core software as you see fit, either by fiddling with the code yourself, or by installing plugins.

I was dismayed to see how much “AI” rot had infested WordPress.com, and it made me no longer want to associate with the platform. Now, it seems, there is trouble with WordPress.org too, as reported by the excellent tech blog 404 Media.

I have not followed this whole saga, but it seems Automattic is having a bit of a spat with a company called “WP Engine”, which is a service that hosts websites built using WordPress. Apparently Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg branded WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” and complained about them and their investors not contributing “sufficiently” to the open source project, and that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” brand might confuse users into thinking it is an official WordPress thing.

I can sort of see his point on that last thing — though WP Engine maintains their usage is covered by fair use — but this whole thing appears to escalated beyond reasonable proportion at this point. WP Engine sent Automattic a cease and desist letter telling Mullenweg to stop having a tantrum, and Mullenweg responded with what he calls a “scorched Earth nuclear approach”, sending his own cease and desist letter to WP Engine.

It didn’t stop there. Mullenweg banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org, including, among other things, the plugin directory and the ability to automatically update plugins and themes. Not only that, he has raised a significant number of eyebrows by adding a peculiar checkbox to the WordPress.org login page, asking users to confirm that they are “not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise”.

This, of course, has had people asking what the consequences are for not ticking that box. And it seems a few individuals who have been longtime contributors to the WordPress.org project have been banned from the community simply for asking “what the hell, bro?”, to paraphrase.

This is concerning. Not being able to access the WordPress.org community doesn’t preclude anyone from building their site using the WordPress.org software, but it is a problem for those who have been helping to maintain and update it. On top of that, some contributors are quite reasonably concerned about potential legal repercussions if they do not tick the box, believing Mullenweg to be just that petty.

My simple question is… well, it’s “what the hell, bro?”

WordPress, in both its .com and .org incarnations, powers a significant chunk of the modern Web. And while blogs have somewhat fallen out of favour since the rise of social media, there are still thriving communities of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org bloggers regularly posting — and who, more to the point, likely have a significant body of work hosted on some form of WordPress derivative at this point, which it will be a pain to move somewhere else.

It’s depressing to see both incarnations of WordPress fall foul of enshittification and CEO arrogance. Because that’s what this is. Whether it’s the AI garbage being rammed into WordPress.com or whatever the fuck Mullenweg thinks he’s doing with WordPress.org right now, the WordPress name is being dragged through the mud right now. And that’s unfortunate because, AI garbage aside, WordPress is still a great product.

I hope this situation is resolved sooner rather than later. And in the meantime, if you’re still blogging on WordPress.com, you might want to pop into your Site Settings menu and tick this checkbox just so your blog isn’t scraped for AI shite.

This site is staying where it is and in the incarnation it presently has for the moment. I really hope I don’t have to migrate again, and that I can go back to recommending WordPress like I always used to. Right now, though, Automattic is a company I would advise most folks to avoid like the plague.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn’t enough, the latest feature that it’s impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is “YouTube Playables”, a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can’t possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don’t get it. Who looked at YouTube and went “you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!” Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it “gets more people into gaming”. Frankly, I’ve always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn’t belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I’d almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don’t work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk “adds value”, so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there’s no “AI” features in YouTube… yet. Don’t you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

#oneaday Day 64: Alexa, Enshittify Yourself

I got an Echo Show at some point. I think it was a birthday or Christmas present. I don’t really know what it’s for. I don’t like voice-activated tech and I legitimately don’t understand how a device that says things out loud is better than one with a screen and keyboard for anyone except blind people.

I do know, however, that said Echo Show has been gradually and subtly making itself worse ever since I first turned it on, and it’s been sitting on my bedside table ever since, the world’s most technologically advanced bedside clock.

Since I actually quite like it as a bedside clock — it has an excellent light-responsive display so it doesn’t overwhelm you with glare in the dark — I turned most of its “helpful” features off. These features mostly came in the form of “Suggestions”, and I’m pretty sure I’ve previously covered why I detest “Suggestions” from tech.

However, one thing I’ve noticed is that not only does the device sneak in new Suggestions that have to be turned off separately on a fairly regular basis, it also turns things back on that I’ve previously turned off. This is annoying.

However, this evening its enshittification reached a whole new level: it started serving me ads. Yes, the clock display was interrupted by a “Sponsored” display inviting me to find out more about the Nissan Qashqai. I do not need a new car. I have given no indication that I need a new car. I have not spoken about getting a new car in earshot of Alexa. And I certainly didn’t turn on “Show Me Ads” anywhere in the device’s settings.

Hopefully you can turn them off, but I suspect you can’t. If it’s magically turned into a bedside ad-serving machine with no opt-out possible, I think it may finally get retired. And I’ll just buy a nice digital clock with a radio and an LED display, like I had 20 years ago.

#oneaday Day 34: It took blatant enshittification before people saw Game Pass for the scourge it is

Recently, Microsoft announced a slew of changes to its Game Pass service, the subscription-based service where you get access to a bunch of games for as long as you pay for it. They have not been received all that well, to say the least, with many quite rightly pointing out that its combination of price hikes and making existing offerings significantly worse is a textbook example of enshittification.

However, prior to all this nonsense, Game Pass had some of the most rabid defenders on the entire Internet. “It’s consumer-friendly!” they’d chant like a mantra. “$12 a month for a whole library of games!”

I don’t know about you, but I consider perpetually paying for something and then not actually having anything to show for it if I decide to stop paying is anything but consumer-friendly. It’s a glorified rental service — and, more to the point, it’s absolute garbage for game makers.

You see, while Microsoft does, on occasion, offer larger developers and publishers flat fees for listing their titles on Game Pass, a lot of developers, particularly smaller ones, have to rely on a “streaming”-style income stream, where they get paid according to how much people play their games. And if you’ve been paying any attention whatsoever to how streaming has been going over the course of the last few years, you’ll know that that is an absolutely terrible deal for the artists involved.

The trouble with the Game Pass model is that it incentivises the very worst practices in the industry. With games making money according to how much they are played, we get games that are ridiculous, unnecessary timesinks. We get “live service” games. We get games that are never actually “finished”, perpetually following a “roadmap” meaning there’s never a good time to start playing because the Next Big Update is always just around the corner.

To put it another way, Game Pass encourages content, not art. It encourages the blandest, most transparent engagement bait, designed to Skinner Box people into believing they’re having a good time while they grind through their mindless Daily Objectives for the umpteenth time. And it’s an attempt to normalise people not owning things. It’s an attempt to ensure that everyone quite happily hands over the keys to their entire media collection for the sake of supposed “convenience” — and don’t ask about the games we remove from the service every month, thank you very much, we try and keep that bit quiet.

“But Game Pass makes me try games I never would have tried otherwise!” the defenders say. Bullshit. If you were interested enough to download a game on Game Pass, you’re interested enough to read up on it, download a demo where it exists or, hell, even purchase it on a digital storefront and refund it if you found it wasn’t actually something you enjoyed. (That’s a practice I kind of abhor, also, but that’s probably a subject for another day.) Taking risks on art is fun! Sometimes you find things you don’t like, sure, but in a lot of cases you’ll be very pleasantly surprised when you try something outside of your usual wheelhouse.

Game Pass is a festering boil on the arse of the industry, and the sooner we lance it, the better. It’s bad for players and it’s bad for the people who make the games. I’m glad there’s some pushback against these latest shitty moves from Microsoft — who seem to have been making a lot of such shitty moves of late, in a variety of areas — but I fear it’s too little, too late. There are already people for whom not buying games and instead “getting it on Game Pass” is the norm, and that’s a problem we’re going to have to address conclusively at some point. Because what we have right now is not by any means sustainable.

#oneaday Day 23: Why The Steam Sale Is Less Fun Than It Used To Be

You know the cliché. Steam sale rolls around, everyone jokes about locking their credit cards up. Except I haven’t felt like that about a Steam sale for a very long time. And I think this stems from a broader and well-documented problem that Steam has today: the fact it has too much choice.

Having too much choice is pretty much the very definition of a “first world problem”, but at times like this it really does highlight how it’s something of an issue. What’s doubly sad is that this problem has come about at least partly as a result of attempting to sort out a completely different problem.

Years ago, Steam was still the leading PC digital storefront, but its catalogue was much smaller. This is because it was primarily the domain of big publishers. I don’t know the ins and outs of what it took to get a game on Steam back in those days, but I know that it was out of the question for a lot of smaller developers. The few “indie” titles that did make it onto the platform tended to be celebrated, because they were often doing something very different from the highly commercial publishers. It’s from those early indie titles that we got the first steps in the direction of the “art game” movement that is thriving today.

The Steam sale during those days was an exciting time, because more often than not it was an opportunity to pick up something you’d been thinking about for a long time at a knock-down price. And because the catalogue was still at a manageable size, it was easy to discover (or rediscover) games that you might want to grab. A simple browse of the homepage would almost always result in you picking up a virtual armful of games, then checking them all out for considerably less than the price of a single undiscounted new release.

Today, though? The front page is full of an overwhelming amount of choice, and clicking through to the various curated sections doesn’t help, because those are also full of an overwhelming amount of choice.

This is the result of Steam’s increasing permissiveness of small-scale and independent developers. It’s theoretically a good thing that now pretty much anyone can get their game on Steam rather than having to sell their work independently — which means getting eyes on their own independent website — but it also means that Steam’s catalogue is no longer at a manageable size, and hasn’t been for quite some time.

I say “theoretically” a good thing, because the problem with this is self-evident: if you flood the market with that much stuff, it becomes difficult to find anything but the most high-profile titles. And that’s got to be almost as bad for indies as not being able to publish on Steam at all.

And, as much as I was in favour of Steam allowing adults-only titles on the platform after many years of rather opaque policies in that regard — policies that developers, publishers and localisers still fall foul of at times, for reasons that often remain unexplained — it’s been disappointing to see the absolute torrent of low-effort porn games flooding the market. And with the advent of AI-generated art that will actually draw dicks and fannies, that’s only going to get worse.

It’s one of those situations where, like the obsession with following the trends I talked about yesterday, it’s difficult if not impossible to put the plug back in now the flood has happened. Steam now can’t just suddenly turn around and say “actually, we fucked up and inadvertently filled our entire store with garbage, please get out”. I mean, they can, but I feel like there would be significant challenges (and likely lawsuits) thrown their way if they were to do so.

This is one of the reasons I spend a lot more time browsing and using GOG.com these days. GOG.com arguably still has a bit of a curation problem, particularly since it stopped being about just “Good Old Games” (which is where it got its name from) but it’s nowhere near as bad as Steam is. In a GOG sale, I can usually find a few things that I’m interested in playing without too much difficulty, whereas when a Steam sale rolls around, I tend not to bother even looking unless there’s something specific I had in mind.

Just another example of the gradual enshittification of everything, I guess, and a reminder that the human race should probably never, ever have nice things.