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Comment by anf0 | Hacker News Reader

Probably due in large part to WordPress

WordPress is the Excel of Web Development. Especially when people keep building complicated flows with it, for which it was not designed for. OTOH, the UI is known by everyone and is intuitive, so from a users perspective "it just works", and "you can do these advanced stuff if you learn scripting a bit".

Many projects explicitly look for freelance WordPress developers, it's a huge market and I respect it deeply, but I'm glad my career put me in a position where I can totally ignore it.

Exactly. But Wordpress has been a resounding success because there is such a demand to own your data, brand and relationships. To have CONTROL over your own site and choice in hosting.

There has to be something like Wordpress for Web 2.0, so we can break the oligopoly of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al. and move the world from digital Feudalism to a Free Market:

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

I think it's because many websites are incrementally built on. It's a case of tacking on this extra bit of complicated functionality vs rebuilding the entire site from scratch and migrating existing content to it in a new tool.

Most businesses care about getting stuff done and making money, not about the merits of the tools being used. In one financial firm where I worked, they were using Excel for running financial models (I am not making this up). It will often crash, users constantly complained - but when I offered to rewrite their models using databases and a programming language, I was instantly shot down. They didn't want to touch a system that has been working for a while, even with all of its problems.

So they stuck with Excel, even when they had access to a programmer.

Programmers can laugh all they want at Excel, Wordpress, PHP etc - but these are tools that get stuff done quickly and make businesses a ton of money. So businesses will continue to use them, even if there are much superior tools around.

> Programmers can laugh all they want at Excel, Wordpress, PHP

I don't laugh at them. I see many people more clever than me working with tech I don't like, and making more money than I make. It's completely OK. I even wrote some PHP lately, and while my humble opinion generally hasn't changed (that I'm too dumb to use PHP), it's clearly VERY fast and easy to get started, while there are many people throwing money at you when you are good at it. If you are competitive and can work with weird setups (which is a given for many customers seeking freelancers), and under stress, then why leave money on the table.

Some may take what I'm saying like a snipe disguised as humility, but I'm completely honest. No sarcasm at all.

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