The killer app of WordPress is comments. No SSG, almost by definition, allows comments; WordPress blogs almost always come with them built in.
If you want something like Hugo to really take off in the blogging sphere, all you need to do is create some good looking themes with comments. Figure that out at scale - maybe by using per-blog sharded SQLite, which you can host as a third party for pennies on the dollar - and you have a tiny golden goose on your hands.
I think that was true during the age of the blog, but far less so now.
Comments and discussion of a post are to be found on third-party communities like Reddit, HN, or even Facebook. How many of us scan the list of comments under, say, a Substack post vs. will scroll through a page or two of HN comments for the same post?
IMO it's a foregone conclusion that a discussion on HN will be higher quality for a tech-related post than a comment chain on a specific post, since HN has already attracted a wider set of readers than 99.9% of all blogs.
The main advantage of commenting directly on a blog post is that the author is far more likely to see it vs. the ephemeral state of the post being on the HN front-page.
The more people join a social media site the worse the conversation gets.
This is already happening to HN as tech people flee Reddit.
Most of the new comments on any given post are people that didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff addressed in the second paragraph.
This is an evolutionary process where the commenters that get the most engagement are those that are first to respond or react. First-mover advantage entrenches itself as those posts are boosted higher due to the engagement they receive.
Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of first impressions.
This reward cycle is amplified by more people, because engagement is very unequal on platforms that share a top comment or front page for everyone. You either make it to the first few comments or get nothing at all.
Sites like Discord or Facebook try to counteract the monopolization of engagement by an impulsive few by splitting users into smaller groups. Less competition for social interaction creates more diversity in winning strategies. Evolutionary pressures still exist, but you don't need to perfect a "winning strategy" solely to interact with other people on the platform.
Contrast Reddit or YouTube videos. The concentration of attention means it has monetary value due to SEO, product reviews, or advertising. The value of a large audience makes a platform more competitive. Competitiveness means many YouTubers and Redditors professionalize attention-seeking behaviour. This comes at the cost of quality.
Most of the new comments on any given post are people that didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff addressed in the second paragraph.
Almost everyone does that since I’m here and that is at least for 10 years. We even have a thread about it from time to time. HN is absolutely fine and didn’t change that much cause it disincentivizes attention seeking, at least cheap one. They may slip in from time to time but mostly get a cold shower from users and mods. Also this forum is much more tricky than it seems, from a technical standpoint.
Yes but that's okay at a smaller scale where all the users are more aligned and there's less karma to get. HN now is big enough that gaming the karma system by commenting quickly with rage or nostalgia bait is a winning strategy and for most general appeal topics on the site these days that's exactly what happens.
Part of that may be you learned to detect these behaviors and not always correctly. Another part may be old commenters getting nostalgic and/or angry (a thing in life).
Did my homework though and checked top ten threads and their first comments where all these karma people should be. All top comments are pretty HN spirited. One of these may be called nostalgic but has a specific request in it and doesn’t look like a bait.
Yeah these things are all pretty relative of the reader's perspective. FWIW I mean this specifically for the less technical threads. Technical threads still seem to rank contributions appropriately. But the moment you touch on something more cultural, like the long term computer thread, or the Mr Beast thread from the other day, you get a lot of pretty low signal comments that get a lot of karma. I do find that the very top of the comments page stays okay but the moment you get past the very top you get lots of low effort comments.
> Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of first impressions.
A specific capability oh HN, that I take advantage of often, is being able to skip thread branches. It’s not uncommon for me to go a few messages, think “Nah”, tap “root”, then “next”, and, boom, a 100 first impressions vanish in a click of disinterest.
It’s a really great feature and can act as a crude filter for first impressions.
Exactly. Sometimes you see that a subthread goes sideways and just parent/root [-] it, and you’re back in the thread without parsing through non-interesting parts.
So Hacker News and "real programmers" continually underestimate the foundational concept of a CMS. They consider it to be unsexy tech and therefore all problems around it must be solved and boring problems, and therefore they aren't actually aware of what any of those problems are.
The WordPress ecosystem is of course the polar opposite of this, it's populated by billions of dollars worth of businesses that understand intimately what the people operating CMSes and websites in their little niche of that market need, the size of this market is 500 million websites or so.
I'm sure the guy who wrote this article is a smart guy. But he is obviously not smart about the practical uses of a CMS if his worldview is "static HTML sites are better but aren't popular because of evil corporations." You really only need to get paid to build a website once or twice to realize that a static HTML site generator is almost never going to do everything that your customer wants it to do. WordPress realized how vast and varied this market is many years ago and that's why they implemented support for plugins.
You're 100% right comments is like the original use case for having something more like a CMS on the web instead of a static site generator. But there are also a million others.
You just don't get that far with static HTML documents. As soon as you move beyond some minimalist developer's blog you need programmatic logic, and lots of it, to do everything the actual users and customers want you to do. So you use a CMS, whatever CMS fits your needs. And you cache aggressively if you want that site to stand up under a lot of traffic, that's part of the job.
For the life of me, I will never understand why all these devs who think they're so shit-hot want to reinvent the wheel instead of just learn a bit about how caching works, and employ it! Is it another one of those solved problems that's too boring for them?
100% of small businesses who currently use WordPress are better served by an embedded iframe when they need something more advanced than static.
Have a restaurant and want to offer take-away online? That's going to be an embedded iframe.
Have a small hotel and want to let guests book their rooms online? That's going to be an iframe from Sirvoy, or a horribly bad Wordpress plugin.
Have a dentist office, or you're some kind of freelance consultant and want to let people book and pay times? That's going to be an iframe.
Have an actual blog that is popular and want to make a paywall so that only paying subscribers can read? This is where WordPress will shine right? Go and buy such a plugin for $200-$300 and later tell me how your experience was. Even for this basic blog functionality WordPress is a horrible mess.
The killer app for Wordpress isn’t comments, it’s their plugin ecosystem. Everything you’d spend a weekend configuring in Hugo has a plugin in Wordpress that your mom could enable in two clicks.
I use Hugo myself, but the user experience is much friendlier in Wordpress even if the footprint is unnecessary from an engineering perspective.
Not every business site wants comments, but they'll probably want a contact form. Putting an email address out is an alternative, but handling the input pipeline is better.
On a static site that requires finding a service they trust to handle the submission and correctly plug it in their site. It becomes another moving part, potentially another bill that needs to be paid separately, another bit to deal with when the industry consolidates etc.
More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor:
Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields and re-submit the form. Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com. Please waste your time repeatedly solving annoying puzzles, until our CAPTCHA provider can sufficiently fingerprint you and your browser. Please re-type the text you already entered, because we reset some or all of the form fields due to one of the above complaints.
No thanks. If I'm at a contact page, it is most likely because I have something of value to the site owner, such as potential business or knowledge of something broken on their site. If they expect me to jump through hoops, I won't bother.
In principle, contact forms could be nice enough, just as many web sites could be clear, simple, quick-loading, static pages. In practice, they're generally a burden.
Given that they don't offer much to the visitor even in the best case,
I would rather just see an email address.
Yes! It's a plague that's hurting most generic content submissions services.
Most Saas in that area can't see the difference between a freelance portfolio site where you can send work offers and the support form of your local telecom where people will send death threats.
At the end of the day, for the lambda user it's just better to have the forms handled on the same platform as the site (wix, squarespace etc.) than dealing with a generic solution elsewhere.
> email address
On the receiving end, the advantage of the contact form is to map it to something else that email (Google Sheets etc.). Of course you can set an automated email box that will process the incoming mail into something else, but that's just an additional burden.
I gave eight examples (which themselves are an incomplete list). Nitpicking at two of them while ignoring the rest, and projecting fault onto people who experience them, doesn't refute the overall point.
For instance it means leaving the browser and have the default email client handling it. For some people it becomes a distraction, for other they didn't even setup the default client so it's a setup screen and hey have to copy/paste the email to their gmail tab.
Other people actually don't want to give their email but will give a phone number, or their Twitter handle, a chat ID, or their address, or anything else really.
A form is more maintenance, but can be pretty beneficial to address a general public.
People who contact your business by e-mail or contact form are immensely much better customers than people who contact through a chat message or such. As a business you want to deal with e-mail customers and not WhatsApp/Messenger people, because 9 times out of 10, the chat people want an answer to a question and won't even say thanks after getting the answer and of course will never become actual customers.
This may blow your mind but you can have static pages AND a dynamic endpoint for form submission. You could even put such endpoints under a common directory, /cgi-bin/ perhaps.
I'm also seeing a moderate number use javascript to pull activitypub replies, as those APIs are (generally) public and GET-friendly. And don't have the various spam-rolls that other free options add.
Grate post! Hey, check my websight about "WordPress blogs" at https://www.sevarg.net/ I think youll like it! ;)
Are you sure comments are still desirable? Isn't step 1 of the internet anymore "Never read the comments"?
That said, I did actually work out a solution for "static site with dynamic comments" on my blog that could easily be done for a lot of people if they're willing to use a hosted service. Discourse (the modern forum software that a lot of places moved to after PHPBB) has a way to integrate with pages for comments, and so I've been using that for at least three years now with no real trouble. I host my own Discourse install (I'm weird, I still have a server racked up in a datacenter), but there's no reason you couldn't pay someone else to do that and provide comments.
Interestingly, the amount of spam I've gotten with my Discourse comments is a tiny fraction the amount I got even with Blogger back when I was hosting there. It's just not a big problem anymore for me, and it was a constant annoyance with PHPBB forums and Blogger.
The rest of the site is just Jekyll, based around a template I bought (because I can't make a decent looking website). I've then hacked on it a lot over the years to make it do things I want (responsive images, mostly - I'm still sensitive to people on low bandwidth connections), but it's not bad at all in terms of maintenance. Just launch a render job and some scripts upload the new files.
>Are you sure comments are still desirable? Isn't step 1 of the internet anymore "Never read the comments"?
It very much depends on who you ask. As a reader, I always check the comments on an article. It's easily 75% of the fun of the Internet to me, more so if it's a shitshow. I can understand not everyone feels the same. I've been hearing for years from many different people how Twitter is a garbage dump, but to me it's no worse or better than any other place where people can respond to each other.
I'm looking at going static and this is literally the problem I have. Is there any out-of-the-box way (e.g. something in Javascript) to bolt comments onto a static site?
Honestly, the last thing I want is to allow randos unfettered access to deface my personal site. Maybe it brings value to somebody somewhere, but my mental health got better when I finally turned them off for good.
If you want something like Hugo to really take off in the blogging sphere, all you need to do is create some good looking themes with comments. Figure that out at scale - maybe by using per-blog sharded SQLite, which you can host as a third party for pennies on the dollar - and you have a tiny golden goose on your hands.