In three words -- too much code.

Well, yes. That's what I find. That and FAR too many cooks. For instance, one of the things I wanted was a site menu that gave some sort of hover-over help/explanation for what each choice would do. Was it possible within the default theme? Of course not. But you can have hover-over sub-choices so I ended up building a proper kludge of a menu which at least did what I wanted. Now I see that the latest updates to Wordpress, or Buddypress, or possibly bbPress, have broken the way it works for mobile users. It shouldn't because I haven't contravened any of the rules. But where do you even start when there are a thousand places the problem could be?

As a user I think it's decent. It provides a word-processory interface, which people are comfortable with (word processors were another wrong-turn imo) so they can easily post their posts and get comments and be perfectly happy. It's massively over-engineered for that, but from the user perspective it does it well.

But as a 'dev' working with a client it's horrible. First off, trying to find a theme that does *most* of what they want and they like the general look of. Sending them test-site links, explaining thoroughly that it's just a theme's test-site, and getting "yeah that looks okay but I'll want my name up the top and the text to be purple" back. Finding a theme is a tedious process and it's never perfect, so it'll need customising, which is where it gets *really* bad.

Some themes come with a (non-standardised, of course) widget to change colours and turn features off and on, which is *good*, except that these ones always end up even harder to customise if what you want to change *isn't* covered by the widget.

So to alter the look of the site it's CSS overrides. Which are always a pain. But WP's HTML and CSS are *nasty*, so it's kludges on kludges on kludges. I hate dealing with software where every single fucking goddamn element on the page has its own (unmemorably named) class. The cascading part of CSS really doesn't work in practise except for the most trivial stuff.

But that's all fine compared to altering functionality. In which case you're doing PHP overrides. Which the themes (if I remember correctly) are already overriding, so if you ever want to change themes you're starting from scratch. And Wordpress is made of one million PHP files and finding which ones (often multiple, to do one thing) you need to override to get the functionality you want is literally the worst experience I've ever had working with software.

And of course, all of these alterations are incredibly fragile. When Wordpress *or* the theme updates, any of them could break. So your best option as a 'dev' is to never update, which is a great thing to encourage.

I ended up refusing to deal with CMSes. I did a few sites, towards the end of when I was doing web stuff, with static site generators, usually Jekyll, which was much more pleasant. But only suitable for people who can get their heads around markdown (again, word processors were a fucking mistake). 

But even Jekyll is overly complex now. I ended up, for my own stuff, writing my own static site generator in bash. It's clunky cos I don't know what I'm doing, but it works great for me (and a handful of other people use it, which is gratifying).

I fucking hate wordpress. I wouldn't mind if the end result was amazing but, ultimately, unless you're using it to run an actually dynamic site, what it's doing is pointless. Databasing text so that you can pull it out of the database every time someone visits and dynamically recreate the exact same page for every visitor (yeah, caching will mitigate some of that but still).

As to word processing being a mistake...

The vast majority of what word processing is used for (internal memos, letters and the like) would be better as plaintext. It'd be quicker to write and easier to read.

For most of the rest, where rich formatting is actually required, a (consumer-level) 'DTP'/page setting application would be better. It's telling that most of my friends, when needing to make a flyer or leaflet or whatever, will use Powerpoint/similar rather than a word processor.

For anything that's to be professionally typeset, I'm 100% certain the typesetter would rather work with plaintext documents than word processor output.

And now we've got markdown which does what basic word processing does way better than any word processor, in cases where you want some basic typography.

A world where we'd normalised around plaintext and had nice tools (and things like markdown much earlier) is a nicer world. Hopefully PDFs would never have become a thing.

Yes, that's the kind of thing I thought. I've never (really) been a dev working for a client. To a degree I was one of the clients, plus being the dev trying to get things as wanted. In short, it was a bit of a bugger. Working out what has to be done to get close is a learning curve, but also something of a waste of time, because it will all be different next time, when the theme or the plugins are updated or whatever.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot. All the shit that doesn't work properly in 2024. My site is set up as a site for members using groups, forums, chat etc. So Buddypress/bbPress/Wordpress. All fairly standard. But the handling of posts is infinitely better in Beehive. The pure embarrassment of explaining (again) to somebody who posts from a Word document or Libre Office that their post is full of tags in this part of the site , but not in that part. That their careful paragraph creation is fine here, but missing there... That sometimes their posts vanish altogether because the space-saving hide posts feature is broken sometimes and doesn't display the 'show all posts' option... 

When I was working, I always told clients ip front I could code them a better, more functional, performant, customizable, easily updated, and transferable to different hosting, web site with HTML5 (I used JQuery heavily for bells and whistles, but this would have not meant anything to the client). Clients liked the idea of being to make their own site edits but in truth they would hand it off to developers anyway, after they fucked it up good.

An occurrence that's made extremely likely by the ways that Wordpress with its themes and plugins can be modified. The official ways that is: odd, cumbersome, and varied ways, from mysterious editing functions to directly injecting HTML into a theme (additional CSS). 

These things can usually be patched up, at 10X the time (and cost) of properly formatted, hand-coded source.

This is maybe worth posting

https://indieweb.org/

I miss the Internet without massive Silos too.

That's cool!

Interesting. Is it mainly discussion groups with a charter, a hosting platform, blogging thingy, or roll your own?

Roll your own but with standards that allow for intersection. I think.

Webrings basically ????

Or a diagram. Even a photo will do. If I do decide a video is useful then if you don't STFU and stop prattling on in your annoying whiny voice about nothing at all to do with the technique I'm researching I will put you on mute as well as play your video at double speed to get it over with as quickly as possible.

I've been looking for a new sewing machine. Not your typical £120 from Argos or even £400 from John Lewis sewing machine. None of the 4 physical shops within an hour's drive of me have all of the models I was potentially interested in in store to look at so I have had to rely on videos. Some have been excellent calm demonstrations one even a series of 10 minute demos of the different things a particular machine can do with the sound of the machine, rather than annoying music (yes, some have that so you can't hear the machine in action turns out it's a rather noisy machine). One video was a whole hour of 3 people talking over each other and occasionally pointing at the machine, which wasn't even plugged in. Just blatant, pointless "content" rather than anything useful.

Another one was when I was sewing a cardi. Not a complicated garment to out together but there was a tricky curve with a bit of easing required to make the pieces fit together then sit in a particular way so it didn't gape. I was curious abut how various bloggers (it's a popular pattern so there were a lot of them) executed this bit neatly. Short answer, they didn't. Video after video of young women throwing together something crumpled and lumpy, with wobbly seams, that ended up making primark look like haute couture. Just for the sake of bloody "content" again.

been having exactly the same thoughts recently. I haven't been able to untangle how much the earlier 'fun' Internet was a) uncommercialised, b) exclusively used by weirdos, and c) was in my teenage years. And I know there's some kind of irony that I work at Meta, who simultaneously has built something that's captivating enough for half the world to use, yet is so creatively bland/uninspiring/homogenous. 

It also might be that some of the things I miss most still exist, like chatting shit with semi-strangers on message boards or in chat rooms, and I've just not put the effort in to find them again. Although I've lurked on various Reddits and Hacker News for a decade or so, but never felt the need to join in (the latter coincidentally had a post with similar sentiment to yours today).

Dunno if this is just me but there's also some kind of negative pressure to participate in recent years - can't figure out if that's anxiety about saying something stupid (it's easy to perceive everyone on the Internet as an expert at everything these days), or not enjoying the feeling of waiting/checking for replies, or worrying about putting someone else through that feeling if I take too long to reply to replies ????

Anyway, in summary, you're right. I miss it too. I think we were very lucky to have Teh community and all the associated fun stuff in the 90s/00s, so maybe it's better to have loved and lost. But I really hope there's some kind of way to rekindle it.

podcasts! Can't figure out if I love or hate them. I feel like I'm being unproductive if I walk for 10 minutes without listening to one. But recently I decided to try and write a blog post which occupied my mind for a month or two, and realised I hardly ever am alone with my own thoughts anymore. But then there are a lot of fun/interesting people out there who are more interesting than my own thoughts ????

Great example: I'm pretty late to the party but have been listening to The Rest Is Politics a lot the last few months, and Alistair and Rory both have fascinating minds and talk about super interesting stuff. But why am I listening to it? Totally unactionable, largely stressful, somewhat depressing how fucked so many politicians/political systems are...

I feel this.

Nae guru intended, but take a 40 minute walk without phone / watch / earphones (preferably when it's not fucking it down) and see how you feel.

Yeah it's very hard to untangle how much of it was the technology, the people, the time and place and whatnot. I do think a big part of it is, as you say, it was alllll weirdos back then.

Not to harp on, but it sounds like you might enjoy fediverse ("mastodon"). It's somewhat like Twitter, except people are nice. And it's more about the small things. There's no algorithm so it definitely takes some effort to find stuff you like but it recaptures a lot of what I liked about places like this. People just chatting shit, sharing what they love, all in good faith.

Also, yup, know what you mean about not being alone with one's own thoughts any more. With the anxiety it's something I've conditioned myself to avoid cos, left to its own devices, my brain likes to spiral me into terror. But it's something I miss a lot (recently started proper therapy and they're helping with that).

Love me some podcasts though. If you like the politics then Novara Media's "Downstream" can be very interesting. And personally I like Chapo Trap House but they're full-on leftist and take the piss a lot so personal taste.

As for working for meta: Man's gotta eat!

I've never been into Twitter (or Threads) but will check out fediverse/mastodon - "good faith" is definitely a strong selling point. Maybe there's even an argument that "bad faith" is what's wrong with <gestures broadly in all directions>

Very good to hear that therapy is doing something good - terror spiral doesn't sound like much of a laugh. I get most of my alone-with-my-thoughts time in bed these days - got into having a teeeeny bit of weed (thank god for vapes) before spacing out and thinking about infinity or other such nonsense. Which maybe does run the risk of one day taking a wrong turn down a terror vortex, but so far is mostly fun.

I tried Novara Media for a while (not the podcast just their general social media) and found them to be a bit too perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good, so will skip that, tho the Chapo Trap House looks a laugh - thanks, will check!

...or maybe I should skip the podcast recommendations and do more walking, as you recommend.

Have been doing a bit in the middle on my walks, listening to *music*! Although I haven't followed music other than the radio for yonks so am now bamboozled by what to search for, and I kinda resent the various 'discovery' playlists because I know they're technically trying to help connect me with new stuff, but also the music platforms get to pay artists waayyyy less for plays-on-playlists (something to do with 'radio' vs 'record' licensing or some-such).

<old man yells at cloud meme>