> He funded a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that destroyed the media company Gawker—a company that had, among other things, published unflattering reports about Thiel.
Gawker-apologism to frame Thiel as the monster destroying the truth-seeking independent journalists? What a truth-seeker the author is!
Doesn’t read like a defense of Gawker to me, rather a demonstration of power. Thiel didn’t sue the company directly over what got published about him, but instead funded a different lawsuit with the intent of destroying the company.
I see no apologia in that quote. Thiel's successful vendetta against Gawker has no bearing on whether it had any journalistic integrity or independence.
It can both be true that Gawker's individual bankruptcy was no big loss but that the way in which an ultra-wealthy person was able to crush a news outlet for reporting things he didn't like set a dangerous precedent for all journalism outlets.
Of course, the whole thing seems rather quaint now that nearly all media is owned by a handful of billionaires who are actively and increasingly controlling what gets released to the public.
Gawker had a lot of issues; they were not exactly the AP. But whether they are allowed to exist as a business should not be up the whim of one billionaire with a fragile ego.
Wouldn't the argument be that you'd build separate copies of those services as well?
Granted, for banking or government-interactions that isn't feasible, but wouldn't it for many other things? It would likely be more expensive given that the work to build something still needs to be done and the cost is distributed among fewer shoulders and the lower complexity since you don't need to build ad-tech doesn't make up for that, but I suppose that's a bit like quality food.
> Wouldn't the argument be that you'd build separate copies of those services as well?
you can't if the service requires the network effect to function well, if at all. Look at blusky and all that alternatives, look at the pitiful attempts at making a youtube alternative, etc.
Funny! I'm autistic enough that I went to do it and got 51% German and 27% autistic. In reality am portuguese and never diagnosed (outside of internet comment sections).
Where is that race to the bottom visible? Surely not in the pricing -- bluehost's intro offers are already expensive (10gb space shared hosting for $3.99 a month -- in 2026?). After a year, it jumps to $11.99 with 12 months terms. That's more than $1 per gb storage. In 2026.
The $10/month gets you storage, but also bandwidth and hosting and a bunch of tooling. Worth it? Probably so if you want something that mostly just works.
Me, individually, providing it to one customer? no.
At scale, providing it to tens of thousands? yes.
It's a perfectly fine price for a customer to pay and not worry about it, but it's not squeezed to extract every fraction of a cent because competition is so fierce. In a race to the bottom you'd expect the bottom to be approached, but it isn't.
Bluehost, Kinsta, WPEngine, GoDaddy etc, are marketing companies that sell webhosting, and they have very healthy margins. They compete on ads, not on price.
I am very happy. The speed is insane. I always thought and was told that WP is the reason for a slow website. No, it was my host. I pay around 10 USD per month but I think the smaller plans starts lower.
For what it's worth, I am very happy with them. But I only host a few WP and FreshRSS. I think they support python too but for Django I use: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ I pay 5 USD a month there but I think this plan is not sold anymore.
My experience is that that plainly does not work. I work with developers of both types, and the junior ones who are part of the first group are limited in their ability by experience, but they have an inquisitive mind and don't give up quickly when they encounter something they don't understand.
Much more experienced developers of the second type just throw their hands up and give up (or now: turn to AI). I've worked closely with them to try and reform them. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong, but it has never succeeded.
With the ones from the first group it can work that way: you can show them how you approach problems and they will ask questions and pick up patterns and you'll see them improve.
> Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free?
Businesses would need a high likelihood that they can reap the rewards of upskilling employees. Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit? At the same time, I'll happily pay three times as much for a truly skilled senior developer. I think the employee's incentives are much more aligned: it will increase their market value, it's an investment into their wealth, not the business'.
>My experience is that that plainly does not work.
The apprenticeship model isn't in practice at any scale in software, I don't see how you could believe that. Practically every career start is self-taught or university to junior positions which is not the high-attention, one-on-one focus you'd get.
>Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit?
What happens if you don't and they stick around? You might say 'well, I'd just fire them' but then you are going to have a culture of people always having one foot out the door. And a high amount of position switching in the industry has led us to what we have today where people don't really stay and build for the long-term, and shoddy code bases also drive people to quit.
An apprenticeship model also helps if you can do 3-5 year agreements for training where you see the most benefit from the person in the last 1-2 years.
As good as it has been for my career, switching often probably needs to slow down (while raises go up) and apprenticeships go into effect for better quality training.
All this assuming there isn't another major leap in AI competency though.
I'm not saying we shouldn't improve the skill of our team members -- that's an obvious yes. But about transforming someone from "I don't want to think" into "I like a challenge and want to figure it out" doesn't work in my experience.
> An apprenticeship model also helps if you can do 3-5 year agreements for training where you see the most benefit from the person in the last 1-2 years.
That's illegal in a lot of countries. If you have to invest with no assurance, you're taking on a lot of risk. Money is part of it, attention from other developers is the much bigger part in my experience.
I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.
His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.
Fair point, although I'd also add that preferential treatment for first-party products is sadly not that surprising when it comes to open source from for-profit companies. It's something that would be disappointing but probably not enough to make me able to recognize this guy's name if he hadn't already been going even further in trying to directly control the ecosystem than this (and causing a bunch of employees to leave in the process)
This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
Were you aware of it and its relevance to this decision at the time you wrote the comment? My interpretation of your defence of it as just the CEO making a product decision was that you did not know. If you did know it seems to miss the point which is that he made a decision that was better for his company but worse for Wordpress.
It would be fine if Wordpress was developed by Automattic, but its not.
I was aware of it, but as an outsider, this actually seemed like a reasonable decision. Wordpress sites that allow external comments need some kind of comment moderation, lest they become instant spam cesspits. The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum, that looks fine to me. I'd rather see them emphasizing comment moderation than talking up a commercial add-on. Sure, this is a subscription they sell to businesses, so it's not a charitable work. It's one of the more defensible subscriptions I can think of, though.
And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.
To be super clear, I am far, far from a Matt/Automattic (same thing) fanboy. I think this was a good decision in spite of my opinion of him, not because of it.
> The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum
The lead developer of a not for profit project said lets favour the anti-spam plugin that is provided by the company I am CEO of. Is that an entirely impartial decision?
> And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.
All the Wordpress core committers apart from the two that work for Automattic disagree with you as far as I can tell.
Some people have a view of open source contributors as some sort of amorphous mass of strangers, and that leads to unrealistic suppositions. The contributors aren't really amorphous, they exist, they're knowable, they have personalities and jobs.
A project such as wordpress(.org) depends very strongly on those who do the work. And in the case of Wordpress, that's some spare-time volunteers, some employees of other companies, but the biggest group is Automattic employees. If you do most of the work, as Automattic does, the project depends on you and you get to call the shots.
I understand that point, but I disagree. Automattic controls the process, which keeps a lot of initiatives out because there's no reasonable expectation of improvement unless it aligns with Automattic.
I don't believe the project would fold were Automattic to quit -- there's a lot activity outside of the core that is alienated by Matt's behavior. Might well be an improvement if the focus of .org isn't about what .com needs, but about what .org wants to offer to users.
figma has figma make to do these things, and it's much worse. It can only generate react code, even if you ask it not to. claude design worked great on the first attempt for me, miles ahead of what figma make does.
Gawker-apologism to frame Thiel as the monster destroying the truth-seeking independent journalists? What a truth-seeker the author is!
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