The announcement is high on promises, low on detail.
Wordpress is only 20 years old, and whilst it’s currently a viable company there’s no guarantee that they will be so in another 20 years.
As for 100 years? Sorry, not buying it (both figuratively and literally): we’ve already seen a huge change in technology that has already deprecated many a tech stack, and that change is only increasing in velocity.
$38K is a huge sum to put down when there’s zero actual proof they’ll even be able to sustain this for 25 years, let alone 100.
$38k is a huge sum, but the problem is, it’s not enough. $1USD in 1920 inflated to roughly $15USD here in 2023. The same thing is going to happen, by design, between now and 2120.
This approximates to a pyramid scheme; or maybe, the US Social Security system is another great correlate. The only way it keeps going after even only ten years is raising prices for new customers subsidizing existing customers.
I'm worried it might be too low as well, but we did a ton of modeling and tried to build in a quantum of safety for unknown unknowns. I expect this will cost more in the future.
They could invest that money and use the returns to fund development.
That’s not going to happen, but such a small percentage of customers would sign up for this it’s effectively a non issue for the viability of the company.
Honestly, I think some regulations requiring some kind of independent trust should be required for any ‘lifetime’ subscriptions. Sorry we uhh renamed the product, your subscription is no longer valid. Sure, then refund my money.
Getting 38k now is very different from getting 38k over a 100years.
It’s worth exactly as much as it states.
Investing this money now might be beaten by inflation, competition or happenstance. But it could also grow the business and turn into orders of magnitude more value.
I agree however that Wordpress does not have such a long term prospect.
As of now, it’s both falling behind and moving into wrong directions at the same time from a technical perspective:
It’s increasingly more complex and unstable for non-technical users.
It’s bloated, full of gotchas, very hard/finicky to integrate with standard PHP tooling and has comically bad performance. So it deters developers.
It won’t go away anytime soon. But I very much doubt that it will be as relatively popular in even 10y as it is now.
And I would not bet against http, html and fundamental E/R databases. Http and html evolution can be managed by Wordpress inc. The database migrated.
I am worried that a cobol/VB style like decline of PHP is too much for the company. Because maintaining PHP is most likely very costly. But I might overrate this.
Disclaimer: I'm a Wordpress plugin developer and my opinions are my own.
This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.
Hi, can you perhaps explain what Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, Aveda, and Salient do?
Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.
Gutenberg is attempting to be a Frontend / UI style site editor (example here: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg ). An amazing example of this type of editor is Webflow. Lesser examples include Square Space and Wix. What these other plugins, Divi/Elem/Avada/Salient, do is provide professional templates that allow users to build from along with a visual editor. These push WP output, that is what is rendered in your browser, from simple blog to an actual website experience. They also all provide something similar to what Gutenberg does but they built it 10 years ago on the original WP PHP backend (Gutenberg is all React). WP pushing to Gutenberg has actually kind of screwed them a bit, but I digress. You can think of them, and Webflow imo, kinda like photoshop for websites, or maybe Figma for web development. They allow designers to learn a tool instead of CSS / JS. What I think the WP theme builders really excel at is getting something that looks modern and fast really really quickly. I'm happy to talk about the market and who buys licenses for the WP theme builders but this post would be a book! haha.
Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.
My opinion is that we should stop obsessing about storing everything and anything. It's unhealthy...we're accumulating too much. Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.
> What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"?
It already seems intuitive to me that people are far too obsessed about storing anything and everything, from photos to notes to random thoughts and more. To me it seems pathological. I saw one estimate that is around 500 exabytes already... it looks a lot like those people whose basements are full of unused junk, only in virtual form. I also noticed for sure that people keep way too much stuff they never use...I've rarely met anyone who doesn't. That certainly carries over to their virtual life too.
I see it less as us storing too much, but rather that it's impossible for us to tell what will be truly of historical significance (and thus worth preserving) in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years.
Think about it in terms of art. Social media has exploded with various digital artists of all kinds. With the tools available to us these days, I'd also posit at least some of that art in a few hundred years would be considered beyond even the renaissance masters.
However, the sheer amount of it available today compared to the past likely means most of it will be lost to history.
Taking the same logic in reverse, how many masterpieces in history were lost because they weren't important to store, or their creator went undiscovered for their entire lives?
The same can be said to all sorts of knowledge and insights. Given that digital media is largely some kind of knowledge storage, we'll likely lose a ton of those too.
It's worth it for historians and people curious about the past. We have lots of accounting and tax register and genealogies and war stories of ancient times, but too few stories from the common people. How their daily life were, etc. This is honestly a huge loss.
Now, the problem is that LLMs are polluting our digital record. It will become harder and harder to distinguish human text from bots.
It depends, of course, on your definition of value. It sounds a bit circular: if it is valuable, it will survive. If it doesn't survive, it isn't valuable.
For example, the public Norwegian broadcaster NRK lost its recordings of the moon landing (which was also the first night sending) [1], which I would consider quite valuable. Indeed, there is a long list of lost TV recordings from the early days of television [2].
Off the top of my head, thing of value that didn’t naturally survive (that we know about) would include Aristotle’s second book of poetics (completely gone) and most of Sappho’s poetry (of which only fragments survive).
Imagine if we found an ancient monastery hidden deep inside a mountain and containing 100 books. Then we found a note from the copyist saying that most stuff wasn't worth preserving so these are only the 100 books he liked the most out of 10,000
This is definitely interesting. At 7% annualised, those $38K would deliver around $33M over 100 years. Keeping a simple website up for those kinds of gains seems like a no-brainer. Hosting is cheap. Especially as most of these are going to be very low-traffic personal websites serving mostly cached static pages.
It seems like the best way to guarantee that something runs for 100 years, actually; build an investment fund whose mandate is to keep some basic websites up on a couple cheap servers.
Edit: Even if technology changes, that's just a maintenance job every year - keeping the underlying infrastructure updated. Some years it will be cheap, some years it'll be a bit more costly, but ultimately it's not impossible at all, especially if they've got a big number of clients (and thus a big fund to draw from).
By giving it to Wordpress, it's done, you don't have to think about it anymore, and whatever happens in your life, that content is staying up for those 100 years.
You're paying for the security / peace of mind, and I'm sure you can picture some people preferring to do that than to self-manage hosting content (and updating technology over time) for 100 years.
Edit: Having said that, I don't think Wordpress is the right fit for this. I think it should've been a separate company, with a separate brand and a separate legal structure that enforced keeping things up for 100 years and enforced using the investment profits to keep the content up and maintain the infrastructure even as technology changed.
None of those have gone away, you know. FM radio is still very much alive, vinyl is going strong. Mag tapes and incandescent lightbulbs are now niche; large companies that used mag tapes, still do, and incandescent light bulbs have a loop hole permitting their use in "heavy industry", which still uses them) — but they're still used in those spaces.
Point being that in 100 years, the webternets of today could indeed be comparable to the FM radio, but that doesn't mean there won't be people who want it.
I think the Internet is more like electricity vs vinyl. In the US at least, how we transmit electricity has been fairly consistent for around 100 years - a toaster from the 20s will still work today in the same outlets. I think the Internet, and html, will be the same - small changes over time but fundamentally the same.
I think that’s true, but those “small changes” end up being large enough that they practically require a human in the loop for maintenance. In comparison; you’re right about the toaster, as there are practically no changes which need to be made to an otherwise working toaster from 1920 to get it functional in 2023.
One small example: TLS. Years ago someone may have very reasonably asserted “my website doesn’t really matter, I don’t need encryption, it’ll run forever without SSL”. Then, the browser vendors universally made SSL practically required. Then; it became TLS, not SSL. Encryption algorithms change every few years. But; ok; maybe you can get some high mileage by automating integration with LetsEncrypt and praying they survive (and remain free).
A three line HTML Hello World is quite likely, I’d argue, to survive and still render in 2120, discounting nuclear winter and such. But to keep a three line HTML hello world WEBSITE hosted and running until 2120 with minimal human intervention would require many magnitudes more executing code automating interface compatibility with the changing world around it; and every line of code you add and expect to execute is a liability.
Imagine there were a "100 year magazine" where you submit 100 articles and each year a magazine is sent with your next article for 100 years.
It's easy to imagine how a service like that could have started in the 60's and how it could have moved (or copied itself) online when the internet came along.
I think the thought to be considered is whether we will still use computers or the internet in a hundred years in such a way that this kind of decision today would make sense.
We're already seeing a sharp decline in computer ownership, most people only have a phone these days.
There was a great 787 comment thread a couple years ago where people came up with all sorts of better ideas, but for 500 years. Trusts, physical archives, multiple languages, etching into various materials, shooting things into orbit, etc. And like all discussions then, blockchain. It wouldn't surprise me if that thread was the inspiration.
"A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared."
I guess the first obvious takeaway is that Wordpress themselves are likely to not exist long enough to honour this deal. There's also the issue that companies that offer lifetime deals typically only do it when they are extremely cash strapped and it's basically a gamble that the initial influx of money can tide them over until a more stable revenue stream can be found, at which point all those lifetime deals are liabilities that will forever suck the company's profits.
But from the other side, no personal blog is worth preserving longer than your expected lifetime, so this is presumably aimed at companies, especially given the price point. Very few companies will survive for 100 years, so they'll probably never see the benefit of this as the probability of both them AND Wordpress both surviving 100 years is even lower.
Then there's the pricing. Assuming the money could just be invested to break-even against inflation, and so you can consider this as $380 a year, that sounds excessive for a blog hosting platform. It's also more than their "Business" tier. That said, it's actually less than their "Commerce" tier and their "Enterprise" tier is $25000+ per year. I'm guessing they won't allow the latter to transfer to this deal, so it's hard to see who they actually think would even buy this.
$38,000 seemed like a bit much, but that works out to $31.66 a month. Still more than a typical hosting plan, but I guess the assumption is that hosting won’t be so cheap in 50 years.
I’d be curious to know what actual inflation is on hosting plans. Feels to me like inflation on budget-tier hosting is zero to negative, but that’s very subjective.
In any case, I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation. Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable.
To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.
> $31.66 a month for a wordpress hosting plan is an absolute rip-off.
Today, maybe. For the human costs of hosting support in 2123, given the cost of inflation, it might not be, and these plans include technical support.
(Although you could also that the technical support work on most of these 100-year plans should be dropping over time too - especially if the human being involved passes away. You could even argue that AI might be doing the technical support in 2123.)
Today for sure. But if someone twenty years ago said I could have 100 years of Starbucks lattes for $2/each, it would have turned out to be a great deal. It depends if hosting is affected by inflation or not.
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Wordpress is only 20 years old, and whilst it’s currently a viable company there’s no guarantee that they will be so in another 20 years.
As for 100 years? Sorry, not buying it (both figuratively and literally): we’ve already seen a huge change in technology that has already deprecated many a tech stack, and that change is only increasing in velocity.
$38K is a huge sum to put down when there’s zero actual proof they’ll even be able to sustain this for 25 years, let alone 100.
This approximates to a pyramid scheme; or maybe, the US Social Security system is another great correlate. The only way it keeps going after even only ten years is raising prices for new customers subsidizing existing customers.
That’s not going to happen, but such a small percentage of customers would sign up for this it’s effectively a non issue for the viability of the company.
Honestly, I think some regulations requiring some kind of independent trust should be required for any ‘lifetime’ subscriptions. Sorry we uhh renamed the product, your subscription is no longer valid. Sure, then refund my money.
It’s worth exactly as much as it states.
Investing this money now might be beaten by inflation, competition or happenstance. But it could also grow the business and turn into orders of magnitude more value.
I agree however that Wordpress does not have such a long term prospect.
As of now, it’s both falling behind and moving into wrong directions at the same time from a technical perspective:
It’s increasingly more complex and unstable for non-technical users.
It’s bloated, full of gotchas, very hard/finicky to integrate with standard PHP tooling and has comically bad performance. So it deters developers.
It won’t go away anytime soon. But I very much doubt that it will be as relatively popular in even 10y as it is now.
And I would not bet against http, html and fundamental E/R databases. Http and html evolution can be managed by Wordpress inc. The database migrated.
I am worried that a cobol/VB style like decline of PHP is too much for the company. Because maintaining PHP is most likely very costly. But I might overrate this.
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This is a really weird offering from Automattic and IMO the price is pretty insane. I would love for Automattic to actually focus on Gutenberg/Wordpress and get it in a decent state for development. They're at major version 16 and continue to push breaking changes to peoples page layouts. They've made countless decisions that just plan don't make sense. Until the past year I'd consider Gutenberg an abject failure; now, it is at least usable. There's a good reason its had a 1 star rating on the Plugin marketplace until a few months ago. It still doesn't have 5% of the feature set of something like Divi, Elementor, Avada, Salient or any of the other big names in WP themes/website builders. Elementor is so massive people sell themes built for it! I think it is incredible what Matt has accomplished with WP and his vision is admirable but I think its time for him to step aside and let Automattic find someone else to lead and refocus on their core product.
Just a curious party without much knowledge. I hosted WP on a VPS maybe a decade ago. I wasn’t very skilled with it but my friends needed a site. I forgot about it for a while and I guess it wasn’t at the time evergreen/self-updating and eventually it was used to send a lot of spam emails somehow. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of WP. I tried building a simple static site generator once on that same VPS where you could have HTML page headers and footers and page content templates, and it worked fine for me, but I tried to get a non-tech user to use it and they could not, and were ecstatic after I finally suggested that they try WP.com - they loved it.
Vanilla WP is excellent for beginners who aren't trying to do anything fancy, in fact I think its one of the best things to ever happen to the web. Yes there are exploits etc but that comes with all software. But most other software doesn't run something like 30-40% of the web though so their bugs are really magnified. Same goes for the WP plugin theme builders I mentioned above.
What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"?
> Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.
Certainly true. But some things are very, very much worth preserving and we don't necessarily know what those things are in the present.
I don’t exactly disagree. But this sounds a lot like hoarding.
It already seems intuitive to me that people are far too obsessed about storing anything and everything, from photos to notes to random thoughts and more. To me it seems pathological. I saw one estimate that is around 500 exabytes already... it looks a lot like those people whose basements are full of unused junk, only in virtual form. I also noticed for sure that people keep way too much stuff they never use...I've rarely met anyone who doesn't. That certainly carries over to their virtual life too.
Think about it in terms of art. Social media has exploded with various digital artists of all kinds. With the tools available to us these days, I'd also posit at least some of that art in a few hundred years would be considered beyond even the renaissance masters.
However, the sheer amount of it available today compared to the past likely means most of it will be lost to history.
Taking the same logic in reverse, how many masterpieces in history were lost because they weren't important to store, or their creator went undiscovered for their entire lives?
The same can be said to all sorts of knowledge and insights. Given that digital media is largely some kind of knowledge storage, we'll likely lose a ton of those too.
Now, the problem is that LLMs are polluting our digital record. It will become harder and harder to distinguish human text from bots.
When we except that both what we create and ourselves are transient, life become better. Concentrate on the now.
--
Edit: not sure which reply to reply to, so commenting here.
My badly made point was that trying ourselves to insure the longevity of something we create is not the best use of our time and resources.
If we create something of value, and it means something to other people, it will spread, and it will be saved for the future and future generations.
Society saving things for the future is essential, and we generally do a good job of it.
For example, the public Norwegian broadcaster NRK lost its recordings of the moon landing (which was also the first night sending) [1], which I would consider quite valuable. Indeed, there is a long list of lost TV recordings from the early days of television [2].
[1] https://www.nrk.no/urix/jakten-pa-den-historiske-apollo-send...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast
Tell that to the 70% of silent films that are permanently lost.
History is made by people who want to make it. Shelley's Ozymandias is a paradox, not an admonition.
This is easy to say if you're not involved in the work it takes to keep something alive.
Ever heard of the library of Alexandria?
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What would you say?
What would any historian say?
It seems like the best way to guarantee that something runs for 100 years, actually; build an investment fund whose mandate is to keep some basic websites up on a couple cheap servers.
Edit: Even if technology changes, that's just a maintenance job every year - keeping the underlying infrastructure updated. Some years it will be cheap, some years it'll be a bit more costly, but ultimately it's not impossible at all, especially if they've got a big number of clients (and thus a big fund to draw from).
I'm sorry, I don't understand your point.
If you invest that $38K then you will have $33M after 100 years time.
If you paid that $38K to Wordpress then you won't see a cent of that money back.
I don't see how it makes financial sense to give $38K to Wordpress rather than investing it yourself and paying monthly hosting fees.
You're paying for the security / peace of mind, and I'm sure you can picture some people preferring to do that than to self-manage hosting content (and updating technology over time) for 100 years.
Edit: Having said that, I don't think Wordpress is the right fit for this. I think it should've been a separate company, with a separate brand and a separate legal structure that enforced keeping things up for 100 years and enforced using the investment profits to keep the content up and maintain the infrastructure even as technology changed.
WordPress 100 years plan sounds like FM radio 100 years plan. Nice to read. But can that be useful?
Point being that in 100 years, the webternets of today could indeed be comparable to the FM radio, but that doesn't mean there won't be people who want it.
EDIT: Grammar
One small example: TLS. Years ago someone may have very reasonably asserted “my website doesn’t really matter, I don’t need encryption, it’ll run forever without SSL”. Then, the browser vendors universally made SSL practically required. Then; it became TLS, not SSL. Encryption algorithms change every few years. But; ok; maybe you can get some high mileage by automating integration with LetsEncrypt and praying they survive (and remain free).
A three line HTML Hello World is quite likely, I’d argue, to survive and still render in 2120, discounting nuclear winter and such. But to keep a three line HTML hello world WEBSITE hosted and running until 2120 with minimal human intervention would require many magnitudes more executing code automating interface compatibility with the changing world around it; and every line of code you add and expect to execute is a liability.
It's easy to imagine how a service like that could have started in the 60's and how it could have moved (or copied itself) online when the internet came along.
We're already seeing a sharp decline in computer ownership, most people only have a phone these days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957573
I think it's a clever offering by WordPress. I wouldn't pay for it, but it's an interesting technical challenge to think about!
"A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared."
I guess the first obvious takeaway is that Wordpress themselves are likely to not exist long enough to honour this deal. There's also the issue that companies that offer lifetime deals typically only do it when they are extremely cash strapped and it's basically a gamble that the initial influx of money can tide them over until a more stable revenue stream can be found, at which point all those lifetime deals are liabilities that will forever suck the company's profits.
But from the other side, no personal blog is worth preserving longer than your expected lifetime, so this is presumably aimed at companies, especially given the price point. Very few companies will survive for 100 years, so they'll probably never see the benefit of this as the probability of both them AND Wordpress both surviving 100 years is even lower.
Then there's the pricing. Assuming the money could just be invested to break-even against inflation, and so you can consider this as $380 a year, that sounds excessive for a blog hosting platform. It's also more than their "Business" tier. That said, it's actually less than their "Commerce" tier and their "Enterprise" tier is $25000+ per year. I'm guessing they won't allow the latter to transfer to this deal, so it's hard to see who they actually think would even buy this.
In any case, I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation. Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable.
To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.
Wordpress is asking you to make a one-time payment of $38k NOW. Not in the future.
Inflation means $38k right now is worth a lot more than it will be worth in the future.
So I don't understand how you came to the conclusion that the plan is cheaper after taking inflation into account.
Today, maybe. For the human costs of hosting support in 2123, given the cost of inflation, it might not be, and these plans include technical support.
(Although you could also that the technical support work on most of these 100-year plans should be dropping over time too - especially if the human being involved passes away. You could even argue that AI might be doing the technical support in 2123.)
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