I’ve been doing a lot of coding lately.
I’ve built a small suite of plugins for WordPress. This site and a small list of other writing projects that I’ve been working on, from small essays to my running journal to short fiction, are all living on a small collection of little interconnected WordPress websites.
The problem with modern WordPress tho is that the plugin culture has enshittified it. WordPress itself is a free product, the result of a huge effort to develop an open platform for anyone to use. They have a hosted product you can pay for, but anyone can download a copy of the software for free and just start making a website.
For years there was a huge collection of free plugins. Plugins are little bits of community code that do niche things, add new features. Like, for example, I made a plugin last year that enables WordPress to store and organize PDF copies of our sheet music because that’s how we are licensed to distribute it to members of our orchesta. It’s all password protected and organized by instrument and has links to Youtube to show how the song sounds. Almost literally no one else in the world needs that exact functionality so obviously it is not built into the base system. Anyone can write some code and make new features: plugins.
In the last five years or so almost every plugin on WordPress’s official directory has become “freemium” though. You know, just like every app on the app store now gives you a limited trial or ten percent functionality until you pay some annual subscription. WordPress has gone the same way. Here’s the list of twenty things this plugin does, but it only does three of them unless you pay and if you don’t pay our branding is going to be on your homepage and we’re going to pop up messages nagging you to pay eighty dollars a year for it.
Some of these plugins might genuinely be worth it. They are honed and tuned over years of work. Most are cash grabs.
And legit, this pisses me off. You took a free system built by a generous community and you’ve put a paywall on your contribution. Late stage capitalism. Gross. And it’s never a small amount. It’s never I’ll sell you the full version for five bucks to support my hobby and hosting. It’s always sliding annual subscription costs.
If I paid for every plugin I would like to have I’d be paying literally thousands of bucks a year to use a “free” community-built product.
Thing is, paying developers who want outrageous prices is only necessary if you don’t know how to make these things yourself… and I know how to make my own toys. I’ve been doing a lot of this over the past few months, and building into my sites some pretty interesting functionality: glossaries, social media auto-posters, versioning systems, and secruity tweaks.
It’s inspired me to write more stuff, having these robust and interesting tools to do it with. And that’s kind of the point of a platform like WordPress… to inspire creativity, not become a cash cow for greed and shit.