There are 3 very important things that have to be respected when using someone's work. Consent, credit, and compensation. The data is being taken without the consent of users, they're not being credited for anything, and they don't receive so much as a cent in exchange.
I always thought it was scummy as fuck that WordPress.org, a 501c3 nonprofit, is allowed to funnel business to WordPress.com which is a completely separate for-profit entity.
They are even allowed to trick people into thinking they are the same by using the name and trademarks, which they explicitly state you cannot do. But wp.com gets a free pass for some reason? Scummy as fuck.
Yeah I’ve never liked Wordpress. But it’s pretty much the defacto CMS for noobs. I always have used my own self-built CMS’s on frameworks like Laravel but it’s not really practical for non-tech people or even businesses to self develop their own CMS unless they have really specific needs.
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t even realize that Wordpress.org existed and was a non-profit; I just thought making the source available was something they did because you can’t really not do that as PHP framework.
With Linux you pay for support if you ever need it. Most end users will never need support, but businesses running Linux servers pay Red Hat a shit load to support them in case shit ever hits the fan. Like giving away a free car, but only certain people know how to do maintenance on it, and they all work for the manufacturer.
Funny how all of these social media platforms that were so happy to describe themselves as "the public town square of the internet" or whatever are now claiming that they own everything that everyone ever posted. So, which is it? Because it obviously cannot be both.
Remember when Xitter started selling the checkmark and now every platform is rolling out something identical? What about Netflix cracking down on sharing and adding ads to their lowest tier? Yeah this is that.
All of this is predicated on having some company that can afford to pay and wants this data. Or, the next tech bubble will just be VCs throwing money at AI companies training their models on the old internet.
I'm assuming this just relates to WordPress.com rather than the open-source WordPress.org but it's still a bummer. I've worked with the open source platform for over a dozen years and have started to kinda loathe what it's turned into but I'm not sure I'm yet at the point where I'm ready to migrate a bunch of sites to something else. This could be that push if they keep going down this road.
God, am I getting too old for this shit? I'm a pretty technical person but this AI nonsense is just relentless. I'm not philosophically against the idea of AI as like any tool it has the potential to better the world, but every tech company and their dog are going all in on using it for commercial bullshit that seems to provide very little value to society. Even fucking Mozilla is going in that direction.
True, and I get that realistically they do need to diversify away from Firefox ... but it still feels bandwagoney to me given that seemingly every tech company (and Wendy's) are piling into the AI train all at once. Like I said, though, I think I'm just getting too old for this.
Google gives Mozilla its money to appear that they aren't trying to corner the browser space with Chrome. If they win the argument in court they aren't monopolizing, they don't have to give Mozilla shit anymore.
I don‘t really know what to say to cheer you up. Industrial revolutions are as important and exciting as they are painful, even dreadful to many. I’ve seen no signs of this one being different. There will be a lot of losers before we can expect wide spread benefits for society from it. The current working class will suffer great losses and will have to fight so another can reap the benefits later.
There's already several WordPress plugins to block out Generative AI. I expect the community to have a less than chipper attitude about this over Automattic.
I work in marketing, and every client I work with who has a WordPress website is using AI to write a lot of their content. This is going to lead to circularly trained AI for sure.
My misunderstanding. But it looks like you need a .org to self-host WP, and like 99% of WP-built sites are .com as far as I've seen. I definitely do not know the technicals about different ways to host/build on the same platform, so I certainly defer to you there, but in any case, my bet is that any site/platform that gets scraped indiscriminately will lead to a lot of circular AI training.
There are A LOT of self hosted Wordpress sites out there. Many of them you wouldn’t know unless told they were Wordpress (I believe both The Verge and TechCrunch use self hosted Wordpress). I myself have two self hosted Wordpress sites. Though I’ve been considering moving away from Wordpress for awhile now.
Yeah there are def more self hosted than not. Wordpress.org is just the site for the open source project. Most hosting sites come with 1 click WordPress installs. I’ve built so many sites with it.
