> Closing this as I expect many of the remaining problems described in this issues comments to be fixed by #51208.
>
> Once that PR makes it to stable (expected March 25th 2026), please create new issues if you are still experiencing problems.
The fact that ads are one of two types of content for which people regularly install blockers (with porn coming second) speaks volumes about how useful they really are.
You're both right. Some people hate ads. Some people find ads (usually well-targeted ads) helpful for discovering new things that could help them. Different people find different things helpful / intolerable.
Ads are universally bad, even for the people who like them. They don’t actually like ads, they like consumerism and the act of spending money when they don’t need to. Which isn’t surprising, it feels good.
So, why isn’t “discovering new things” a real defense? Because ads are not ranked by quality or usefulness. The “new thing” you see has no bearing on how good it actually is.
If you wanted to discover a new thing you need for a purpose, you’d look up products around that purpose. Then, you’d choose based off of quality, price, and typical consumer decision making.
Seeing an ad destroys that decision making. It’s just served to you. So, you typically buy worse products, at a worse price, that serve you less. So, even if you wanted to find new things, ads are the worst way to do that.
That’s because the key purpose of ads is to manipulate people to spend money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. That’s their singular purpose. Well, if the product was good and useful, then you would’ve spent the money anyway. What does that leave? Only products you don’t want very much, but can be manipulated into buying anyway. That serves no consumers.
This is, with respect, a naive and ideological take.
Imagine you create a highly niche board game. Or a new kind of fabric scissor. Or you are a new bike shop, just opened up on the edge of town.
Let’s assume what you’re providing is great. It’s not enough. You need to find customers. You can’t just rely on everyone doing methodical research. People are busy and you’re not well known yet anyway, so how are they supposed to find out about you?
Ads can obviously be deceptive and a vehicle for getting junk goods to market. But it’s silly to just insist that’s all they are. Sometimes they connect customers and companies in mutually beneficial ways. If you don’t like them, fine! But don’t insist nobody benefits at all.
You’re writing this from a business perspective, I’m going from a consumer perspective.
If I’m a consumer and I want to find a niche/quality/cheaper or whatever product, then I should research.
And ad IS NOT going to optimize for those, ever, because that’s just not its purpose. So sure, I might get an ad. But is it the highest quality product, or the cheapest, or the most niche? No, not generally, and if it is that’s pure coincidence. So as a consumer, the ad DID NOT fulfill my needs.
Had I down research, I wouldn’t have bought that product, right? So therefore I must have spent money I wouldn’t otherwise have spent, right? Which makes sense, as that is the singular purpose of advertising.
If I would have spent the money anyway, then the ad is useless. Okay, that’s established. So what that means is that the ad is designed to grab money consumers wouldn’t otherwise give you. That’s why they exist, that’s their sole purpose.
And you’re correct: it is unreasonable for consumers to research all products they buy. But even a big wheel you spin is better than an ad, because at least that’s uniformly distributed. Ads are completely orthogonal to quality or whatever metric you’re measuring, so they’re not useful at all to consumers. They serve literally no purpose.
And yes, there are situations where consumers see an ad, buy it, and then both parties are happy. But that has nothing to do with the ad: it’s just random chance and coincidence. The consumer, again, could’ve just as easily spun a big wheel and ended up very happy.
And for targeted ads: these also don’t serve consumers better. Because the ads are not targeted based on which product would best fit the consumer’s needs, but rather which businesses are paying for targeted advertising and what THEY believe the consumers needs are, and how THEY believe their product will fit that. Naturally all businesses believe their product is highest quality, or the most niche, or the coolest, or the most hip, or whatever. Targets ads optimize for that, NOT what consumers think is the most hip. Because they can’t: the products are advertised based off of what the business says their market is, not what their theoretical pure market is. How can we tell? Because if a product really did fit the theoretical pure market exactly, then ads would have no purpose!
Think about it this way. Suppose you walk down a street and see an ad for coca-cola, and you buy one and it’s delicious. Now suppose an alternative, where you walk down a different street and see an ad for Dr. Pepper. You buy it, and you find out you hate Dr Pepper.
What is the value of ads in the long term? Nothing. The value of a product has nothing to do with its advertising, and good luck is just good luck. But amortized over enough time, you end up in the negative, just due to the distribution of quality in products.
Best products are subjective. Apple arguably had best products in their category at some times and they've advertise heavily. There are some exceptions but those are mostly unicorns or monopolies.
I wasn't saying people who receive ads find them useful, although that can sometimes be true. I was saying they are useful for the people that are paying to run them
Not everyone hates them. A lot of people do, it can be a tough job because of that but it's just a form of marketing/sales. So is cold emailing. You can get customers that love your work or your product that way, some people will be annoyed along the way but if you're providing real value to the people who become your customers I think it's usually reasonable to be using those channels.
Anyway I was being facetious i hate ads as much as the next guy when I'm using a service like YouTube where they force ads on you and fight against my ad blocker. But having run ads myself i have some sympathy for the advertisers now.
"Ads are useful, they help you lie to and manipulate customers"
Information is useful, but that's not what ads are for. No one is interested in giving consumers honest and accurate information about their products without lies and attempts at manipulation. Forcing an unsolicited ad on someone is itself an act of manipulation.
Reminds me of the mouse utopia studies i read about where the mice didn't have to work and there was plenty of food and water, no diseases etc and eventually everything got all messed up and the mice lost the ability to reproduce
The mouse utopia experiment is nothing like having a pet mouse. Its more like exploring the way mice react to being institutuionalized. Its been a while since i read about it so i dont recall how much excersize or enrichment the mice had access to.
But from what i recall id call it more like a prison where all their needs are met and they have absolutely zero responsibilities, thus their current choices have zero impact on their future quality of life.
In people id expect that to lead to depression and mental illness which is basically what we saw in the mice. Im not convinced this experiment could be considered a utopia any more than a coed prison which also provides, food water and shelter but not entertainment or enrichment/stimulus.
Without entertainment/enrichment/stimulus even humans develop all sorts of problems like dementia, just look at nursing homes/classical assylums for the human equivalent/example.
The nuance is it wasn't a utopia because eventually the population of mice were extremely overcrowded: that's when things circled the drain. If you trapped a bunch of humans where they had no personal space ever they would all also go insane.
I was thinking the same thing... paid access for high volume users or scrapers could actually help fund the non-profit. Maybe let website owners decide which scrapers are allowed to use their content, or allow them to get paid for use of it. If news and other sites were getting paid, maybe they could go back to optimizing for good content instead of clicks.
I think that would get into murky water really quickly with the rights holders (/content creators) not exactly being thrilled the Wayback Machine is essentially monetizing their IP behind their back.
It wouldn't be behind their back, like I said, "Maybe let website owners decide which scrapers are allowed to use their content, or allow them to get paid for use of it."
Interesting, in all the years I have never noticed that IP has 2 meanings (well probably more...) Yeah, I am an engineer and usually try to avoid the legal BS. Although I hate that AI has made stealing legal if you are big enough.
But anyway, no, I wouldn't keep finding reasons. I donate to them every year already. Somebody asked if I would be willing to pay and my answer was "yes, but".
It would need to be improved because certain aspects of it suck right now, not only the error this post is about. They only need go as far as their forums and github repos to see the community feedback.
Not at all. I donate to Internet Archive, but we're talking here about paying for unobstructed access to but one part of their service: Wayback Machine. Two different things.
100% of the people who write "I would pay, if..." or "I would pay, but..." are people who are never going to pay even a dime. You might be the exception, and sorry for bunching you up with them. You have paid already by donation.
I think that we should all pay when asked for things which we find useful, even if they aren't perfect. If nobody else is offering anything, then we have to take what's being offered. When there's a market, more providers will begin offering their versions.
I mean we already paid for the article from the source itself. I guess I'd expect a better "diff" source from them, but if they dont even update the article itself, i guess i wouldn't expect a paid service to have those updates either?
ah, i think i misunderstood your original post. if you mean the wayback-machine/arkive, then I suspect it'd be hard to justify? You are essentially paying a third-party source to validate that diffs didn't go through on the source material.
with llms, at some point it probably becomes easier to use your paid api connection to manage your own cached version yourself?
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).
I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.
But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
You’re from the Matt “WordPress is 45% of websites” school of statistics. WooCommerce is nothing compared to Shopify, barely a blip, inconsequential. WooCommerce is “installed” on millions of websites but it processes perhaps 1% of the volume of Shopify.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.
edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.
edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.
I did write a mangled sentence late at night and you are correct to object to it.
But you seem kind of angry and have decided something about me, and are now cherrypicking things off the woocommerce site to try to make me look foolish (as if that site’s gallery is necessarily authoritative?)
Did I explicitly say “shopify is more expensive”, for one thing? You are putting those words in my mouth.
However. I just looked at the numbers. Shopify starts at £19 per month. I could set up a speculative woocommerce store on good hosting for about £40 per year.
Several of the people I have set up stores for over the years have had no certainty that they would make a sale for months and yet needed customisations in their setup that no hosted e-commerce company could offer in their cheap plans.
I have written dynamic product functionality, installed weird extensions, even used Wordpress as the prototype storefront in a multi-vendor, multi-supplier fulfilment network demo.
Woocommerce exists. It functions. It can be rolled out for tiny, tiny money on hosting you control and can customise. It is OK. Not that fun to administer but it’s a complete open source store with a huge ecosystem. It’s exceptionally widely deployed. For people who want to run shoestring customised store experiments or sell on tiny margins or for charities, it’s clearly an option.
> Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
You said that WooCommerce is more widely deployed than Shopify. Yes, it is installed as a WordPress plugin on more websites than Shopify but that is completely meaningless when discussing whether WooCommerce is an "also-ran" compared to Shopify.
So, if your comment was intended only to explain that WooCommerce is a widely installed Shopify plugin, I apologize for suggesting you have something in common with Matt, but your comment read to me (and I guess everyone else) like you were saying WooCommerce isn't an also-ran and is an important product for online commerce. It isn't, in the context of business, it doesn't belong in the same conversation as Shopify or any other serious commerce business.
(e.g. just this afternoon: Godin guitars. One of the longer-established multi-brand companies in the guitar world.)
And embedded in really odd stuff, like behind member walls — companies selling spare parts for washing machines and hoovers, all of that stuff. It's absolutely the long tail of ecommerce.
I will grant you that in the last year or two some pretty big stores (particularly in the media and music world) have migrated to Shopify (they have a tool for that).
I don't blame them for migrating away and it's not hard to see purely strategic reasons why they would that are tied into all of this nonsense with Matt's very obvious implosion. Like I said in my comment, I'd prefer not to be running WP at all.
But a lot of the work I do is at the very small, very speculative or very custom end of things. I'm looking for various ways out that still let me help individual people.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
I think any interpretation of this that would measure "a third of... shopping" by number of individual sites rather than dollar volume is disingenuous at best.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
SimpleNote is outstanding. I've gone through countless note apps over the years and this was the only one that stuck long term. Every other option was either too complex for what I needed, got enshittified, or needless UX churn broke my workflow to an unacceptable degree.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
Curious to see what happens when the fashion cycle runs its course and skinny jeans are in again and these big phones don't fit in our pockets anymore. Will phones get smaller or will we stop carrying them around and instead use wearables and retinal implants?
I don’t think that’s going to happen. Fashion, like all other segments of society and the economy, bends around the smartphone, not vice versa. The market decided a long time ago it wants big phones and to get handbags or other accessories if their clothes don’t cooperate.
> Fashion, like all other segments of society and the economy, bends around the smartphone, not vice versa.
Man, I hate my Hanes pajama shorts right now. The pockets are way too shallow. Probably even for the iPhone Mini. My phone falls out all the time. And I’m too lazy/cheap to buy new shorts, because they’re good shorts otherwise.
Whoever designed them definitely did not get this memo.
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