>MSNBC just cancelled Andrea Mitchells TV show, today, because she brought in no younger audiences. So yes, shows do get cancelled by not being watched.

Did anyone, young or old, want to watch an 80 year old stumble over her words, lose her train of thought, and speak so painfully slow? She had built up connections over her long career but was basically unwatchable. The worst part of a Kamala presidency would have been her on the news and not in retirement.

I'm celebrating it today. No idea who is replacing her but I am ecstatic.

You're arguing for media as a service. I think many people are tired of the SASS everything model. It's generally user hostile, you need multiple different services, there are dark patterns and you still have to endure ads. Privacy issues too. Piracy is definitely superior.

I don't know how you went from "don't pay for overpriced digital goods, just pirate them instead" to "hurr durr start using blurays and vinyls".

Reading comprehension is a lost art nowadays.

He just wantrd to express how superior to the young kids he is .. while all the points about ethics, freedom, and privacy went over his head.

I deleted my facebook account about 10 years ago. Downloaded data, deleted. Not deactivated.

Nothing in my life made me ever want to go back except for when I got back into playing hockey, and all the hockey leagues use facebook to communicate a few months ago.

I made a new account, had to literally upload a picture of my face to pass verification.. and then a few days later I was immediately banned and couldn't use my account. I assume because they searched previous data and compared my face to find out I have a "deleted" (lol) account and matched me. I've assumed they'll only let me log in if i use my original 10 years ago deleted account.

Fuck meta. Fuck zuck.

You should never look up potential domain names at the big registrars. Or most registrars. Or any registrars. They'll buy it out from under you if it generates enough attention. They know exactly how many people looked up $coolnewthang.xyz and they know the bidding offers. THEY have to register it for you.

Somebody at Godaddy probably did this before you thought of the domain in the past, which is why its in their network and rejecting bids. It knows the incoming bids. It's sitting on it until someone like you came along.

I use porkbun, no idea if they've stayed course in honesty but I believe so.

Also if you're looking at GoDaddy era webhosts, they all own most of the market. Bluehost, Hostgator (EIG), etc are all grouped with a ton of other webhosts for that low end $10 market.

So, stay away from those.

Registrars are a scam, too. And stupid tlds.

I look up potential domains from ICANN for fear of getting the domain sniped: https://lookup.icann.org/en

I'm not actually sure that they are not involved in sniping, or even that others are involved. But it's my best bet on it.

> They'll buy it out from under you if it generates enough attention.

Is there actually evidence of this happening? I always thought this was an urban legend.

Steps to verify

1. go to GoDaddy

2. search for a bunch of domain names that are loosely plausible but also so niche no one really wants them. Make sure you find a bunch of ".com" that are not registered

3. come back a week later. I can guarantee you one is now registered.

Happened to me with a registrar whose name I can no longer remember. And yep, dropped them like a hot potato.

Waited the cancellation period (I think it was 5 or 7 days for a registrar to cancel a registration back in those days) and the domain became available (from a different registrar).

There a comment or tweet by the Namecheap CEO saying that something like this would be so obvious and a breach of trust that this would cause more damage to any registrar than making some money on a domain sell. Not worth it.

Webhosting is one of the most scammy shitty industries. I worked in it for 15 years. Do not give that industry any sort of benefit of the doubt. There are good companies but there are a lot of not.

Not that it doesn't happen but I've worked in datacenters, including our favorite clouds, and cdn/video architecture for 15 years and have never seen servers replaced on any cadence that wasn't us losing a customer and me sticking a quad core xeon under my desk.

These are $10k-100k+ servers. My multitenant/offload capable NICs are usually $10k-25k themselves.

I've assumed he thought it would damage the FBI/CIA/someone he's dismantling. I'm a millennial so I didn't grow up with it but I can't explain how little I care. JFK was born in 1917.

Seeing people line up at the curve in the road where he was shot in Dallas was wild. It's literally just a curve in the road going downtown. Nothing remarkable. Too bad he didn't return a few years ago, I guess.

And WordPress can thank CPanel and the tens of thousands of customer support and sysadmins that supported millions of WordPress users at $9/mo for a decade and have never once interacted or known who Mullenweg is.

And they can thank mysql.. and apache.. and php..

Take your money and be happy.

I met some of the worst people (CEOs) working in webhosting. Some truly awful people became very rich.

edit; I thought this was referencing old drama. This is brand new. www.reddit.com/r/wpdrama. I don't know anything about Mullenweg, I don't mean to sound like I'm calling him awful specifically.

Could anyone summarize the drama? I’ve been poking around the subreddit, and it’s clear something is going on (https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7931urG9ho) but it’s not clear what he actually did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7eoTXQnwhh is as close to an explanation as I’ve found, but it seems tangential to whatever kickstarted the drama in the first place.

I don't know the minutia and I'm thankfully nowhere near the webhosting industry any longer but Wordpress dominated my life for almost 20 years- I'm pretty sure it can be summed up with "WPEngine is taking all of our enterprise/etc business and I'm mad.." And he's trying to get rid of the opensource (he dropped their monthly dedicated hours from I think 2k-4k to 45, just 45 hours) to funnel people to wordpress.com.

Which, honestly I really do get from his end money wise, because I have friends in that industry who are worth hundreds of millions today from lucky breaks, timing, etc. and I'm still a wee-engineer.

But he made those choices, he was always the CEO. I didn't start with the funding my rich friends had.

Its hard to get the full picture of Mullenweg's behaviour in a summary, but I guess the TL;RD from my point of view goes something like:

Matt decides WPEngine are making "too much money" and "not contributing enough" buy selling hosting for WordPress, an open source (GPLv2 or later) project. He tries to blackmail them (using legally questionable trademark claims) to the tune of something like 8 million bucks a year or he'll"go nuclear" on them. WPEngine pushes back, and Mullenweg does his best to destroy WPEngine's reputation and business starting with his WordCamp conference keynote, and following on by blocking access to the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo/website for WPEngine and all their hosting customers sites, meaning millions oi WP sites could not install new plugins or get critical security updates. WPEngine lawyers up to get that access back, and to seek damages. During the drama, it come to light that contrary to most people's understanding, wordpress.org is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is personally owned and operated by Mullenweg, and there is zero accountability for Mullenweg who owns Automattic (a WP hosting company and direct competitor tp W|PEngine), owns the wordpress.org website (a critical piece of infrastructure hard coded into WordPress core), and the WP Foundation board consists of a guy who sold his WordPress related company to Mullenweg a decade or so ago, a finance person with no visible track record of ever having anything to do with software or open source or WordPress, and Mullenweg himself.

There's way more, but my TL;DR is likely already TL.

This covers it in detail (scroll down and start from the first September 20th, 2024 entry for the "current drama)

https://www.joeyoungblood.com/technology/timeline-of-wordpre...

And a long list of what happened and when, backed up with links: https://github.com/bullenweg/bullenweg.github.io

That used to exist at bullenweg.com until Mullenweg sicced his lawyer on it.

Thanks so much! This was exactly what I was hoping for. I really appreciate all the detail you went into, and the followup links.

know exactly you feeling on bullenweg, had to tread really carefully writing this: https://weareqed.com/wp-engine-matt-mullenweg-the-wp-drama/ Been asked to make it skip straight to the latest, will insert a button later

Just a comment from the first couple of paras there:

> Wordpress.org (WP.org) – Open source software, partially created & owned by Mullenweg

I feel that's wrong?

WordPress is an open source software project and the most popular CMS on the web.

(and it's probably worth mentioning that Mullenweg (and others) originally forked it from b2/cafepress, especially in the context of Mullenweg claiming WPEngine should be "giving back to the Word>Press community" in exactly the way he didn't do for the b2/cafepress community.)

wordpress.org is the main repository of the WordPress code and the home for a huge portion all the community contributed themes and plugins. It is hard coded into the WordPress core source code making it difficult to avoind or replace for most users. The website itself is exclusively and personally owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation.

(And it might be worth explaining that he can and has banned people from logging in based on his personal drama, which removes the ability for theme/plugin authors to provide update and security fixes. Mullenweg has also "stolen" plugin urls, for example replacing WPEngine's wildly popular Advance Custom Fields plugin with his own "Secure Custom Fields".)

I appreciate everything you've said, but here's the problem with most of what you've said. Yes, I could write an entire post on what wp is, I only need a brief synopsis initially for the reader, because everything else becomes apparent as you read on. like: " it's probably worth mentioning that Mullenweg (and others) originally forked it from b2/cafepress" - In the intro for the 2 others for the wp foundation:"Mark Ghosh – Has known Mullenweg from his days of forking B2 (pre- Wordpress, around 2003-4"

"The website itself is exclusively and personally owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation." See post on timeline Oct22nd, although most wouldn't have known this prior to Bulleweg actually announcing it

" Mullenweg has also "stolen" plugin URLs" - See timeline posts Oct 15th-22nd regarding ACF and other plugins

Lots of the info you've flagged is actually there, and I get that most wont read into all the info. Hope this helps

This brand new drama (well, August/Sept vintage drama) reveals a _lot_ about Mullenweg.

I, for one, am happy to specifically call him awful.

Bytedance created all internal tools by themselves. Personally I'd definitely love to join such a company if I'm in that tooling team. Whether they are being used by outsiders is irrelevant because I already bagged the skills.

Eh, I make tooling for a living. It sucks to have nobody using your tools even if they were fun to make. You spend months/years putting something out there that you think will really benefit a company/team/foss and it goes nowhere. It's like painting a painting you love and it getting thrown in an attic.

I get what you said, but I'm not in a tooling team so I have a different perspective :)

I feel bad that I feel this way but I really dislike them, but I can't believe those gamer chairs became the mainstream chair to see over the last few years. A few years ago they would get clowned, then it was less, and less, but it is cool that we're being more inclusive about chair themes.

I know it was twitch and them giving free chairs away to get more people to buy them. Great marketing.

Writing this from my aeron tower.

I'm in my 30s, and somehow people think it's a miracle I don't have bad back problems after sitting at least 6 hours a day in front of the computer, while the only miracle performed is me going to a store to get a personalized recommendation based on how I like to sit, and invest hard in getting a proper chair.

First thing I ask when people complain about bad backs, is what chair they use. Often they've just grabbed some chair after going window shopping, instead of aiming for personalized recommendations from a professional. Often, they're using these shitty "gaming" chairs. Sometimes though, they've just read a bunch of the internet about how good Aeron chairs are, so they bought those, not understanding not every chair fits every sitting style...

Written from my Humanscale Freedom.

I was a kid in Virginia in the 80-90s and never got to do any of this stuff, but I was on irc and I saw people all over california and in college doing lan parties. Made me so jealous. My friends didn't have the internet until the 2000s and they used it for research and AIM.

It's crazy how regionally the internet spread across the USA absolutely massed from California.

I also grew up in VA (southeast) in that time period and there were lots of LAN parties! What part of Virginia were you in?

I was 6-teens in hampton /vabeach (84), i didn't have friends IRL doing anything with computers ever as a kid. Computer stuff was considered super nerdy. Dad was army so he'd be gone for 2-4 years at a time and all I had to do was hockey and computer stuff (linux/games). IO had tons of car friends because of the bases.

They might have a family PC in the living room for research and papers but everyone used consoles.

In 2024 some of my genz friends have grown up doing their research/papers on their iphones. I could never. I get mad typing on mine, I need a keyboard and an ultrawide.

Paywalled but from the comments here it sounds like this is moving near your HS friends? Absolutely not. Nothing in common with them.

If this is more about living in a more dense area where you have friends closeby, absolutely. I live in a very dense area and I have friends all over the neighborhood. Some across the street, some down the road. We can meet up and see a show or do friendsgiving or whatever or just grab a beer.

It's not cheap and I don't live in a big place but I am astronomically happier here than I was when I owned a house in the suburbs 2016-2019 and had to drive 25 minutes minimum to meet up with people.

I see a lot of internet commenters (here and Reddit) that act like they’ve outgrown all their friends from childhood/highschool and it always rubs me the wrong way. I’m sure there are folks with actual trauma they are running from, but it generally comes across as incredibly arrogant.