Perspectives With John Gruber  ## Metadata - Author: [[Crossword]] - Full Title: Perspectives With John Gruber - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1ec09527-8d79-4c75-b6fc-2bc24b8dcfc3 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Substack Reveals WordPress Missed Chance** - Substack highlights a desire for readable, non-annoying media consumed via email instead of browsers. - Its rise signaled a missed opportunity for WordPress to own this space and better serve independent media creators. Transcript: John Gruber Or so. And that since then, and again, part of it is the phones, part of it is the ads, Part of it's everything else. I don't know that it's natural. And I'm glad for Substack. And even though I would discourage anyone from actually using Substack itself, I really would. And we can get into that. Well, go on. Get into it. Yeah. Why is that i i think sub stack is a trap i really do and because uh at one level and again there are exceptions but i think they make those exceptions at the very edges. But for the most part, don't you guys agree that you can tell if I sent you a link, if I said, hey, here's a good article about something. And I pasted the article into a group chat with the three of us. And you went there. For the most part, you'd tell right away, oh, that's a Substack site. Because a lot of them, you know, they use that one weird font. Jonathan And they're all going to ask me to give me my email address again. John Gruber Especially once you scroll two paragraphs down. Yeah. And it's like, you know, most Substack sites are whatever the name is,.substack It's right there. They put the Substack part first. And I don't think that's in the interest of anybody in independent media. And I think if you look at anybody who has succeeded independently in this online media racket for more than 10 years, which I hold up as a number. It's rather arbitrary, but just as a number that says you've withstanded multiple trends, right? 10 years is sort of across a couple of trends. The ones who are standing from more than 10 years ago tend to be fiercely independent, including in their technical stack. You know, there's me, there's Kotki. I love this site, Tegan Goddard's politicalwire.com, which I think runs on WordPress with Memberful as the sort of gating thing. But anybody who's done it for more than 10 years has a technical stack, and there's no correlation between what we're using in terms of which CMS or which gating interface, but that it's Something that whatever we are using, it allows us to be fiercely independent technically. Jonathan So I see a chicken and egg problem here, John, because part of the allure of something like Substack is it lowers the barrier of entry to jump in and get started, right? But I agree strongly. Like there's this, I always question like, okay, what are the incentives behind the scenes? I'm like, what are the private equity incentives or whatever the case may be, whether Substack has that or not? But for me, I can see someone, I just, they're like, I just want to write. They don't want to go and figure out the stack, right? They don't want to have to figure those things out. So in my mind, at least, then it's like, well, maybe the ideal here is say, hey, start on Substack. That's great. But like, let's change the conversation to be more of a, be aware of your options and recognize that there's a point of graduation. And then what does that look like? Luke It doesn't have to be sub stack though. Jonathan No, right. You know, there are other options. Ghost, actually ghost is a great one. Open versus closed is I think the, the topic here. John Gruber And well, and again, I, you know, and I've written about open versus closed in so many different ways about platforms and stuff. And at the same time that I am fiercely independent about sticking to openness in terms of what I do, Daring Fireball itself, RSS as my distribution at Daring Fireball, and podcasting With the talk show and even with Dithering where Dithering is a paid podcast, right? And you have to pay $5 a month or be a subscriber to the whole strategy package. But what you get when you pay is an RSS feed of podcast episodes that you can do whatever you want. You can subscribe to that feed in any podcast player. And if you want to write your own thing ([Time 0:18:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7f12417-5883-4682-b63f-73bb17e2b21b)) - **Use Platforms Then Graduate** - Start on easy-to-use platforms like Substack to begin publishing quickly. - Plan to graduate to independent CMS solutions for technical independence and long-term control. Transcript: Jonathan Has that or not? But for me, I can see someone, I just, they're like, I just want to write. They don't want to go and figure out the stack, right? They don't want to have to figure those things out. So in my mind, at least, then it's like, well, maybe the ideal here is say, hey, start on Substack. That's great. But like, let's change the conversation to be more of a, be aware of your options and recognize that there's a point of graduation. And then what does that look like? Luke It doesn't have to be sub stack though. Jonathan No, right. You know, there are other options. Ghost, actually ghost is a great one. Open versus closed is I think the, the topic here. John Gruber And well, and again, I, you know, and I've written about open versus closed in so many different ways about platforms and stuff. ([Time 0:22:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c4bb4b64-4c4f-484f-b18c-02d081c30c08)) - **Open Web Shifted by Closed Apps** - The early web enabled anyone to publish openly with a simple URL and plain text content. - Today, much media is consumed via closed proprietary apps, marking a shift from original web openness. Transcript: Luke But sometimes on my bad days, you know, what do you think? John Gruber Huh. You'd think I'd think about this more often. I think that practicality has reached a middle ground that when you examine it on particular issues, zigs and zags, right? So instead of being entirely red, let's just assign red to closed and blue to open. The world is very purple. But when you look at individual, well, this or that, there are parts that are very blue and parts that are very red. And the overall situation, though, is kind of purple. Overall internet media landscape is more closed than I wish it were, and certainly more closed than I thought it would be 20 years ago because of platforms. All of these successful platforms, Instagram, everything Meta does, they're all a bit more closed than I thought the world would be. And, you know, and then there's Mastodon, which is very open in the whole Fediverse and isn't as popular as usable and I think has some fundamental design flaws. But overall, openness seems to be holding its own at like the core levels, right? Jonathan Sometimes it just takes a moment as well. Because like if I think back to where WordPress sort of got its kickoff, there was, what was six? Six apart? It was movable type, right? Like there was this, you'd know the history better than I would, but there was a big exodus from it with everyone except John Gruber, uh, leaving movable type. Cocky's still there. A few, just a couple of folks. But when I think about proprietary for a moment, something like Substack, I can just look to the future and see a moment where there's a revolt, right? Like Etsy, for instance, had was just really just gobbling up all the market of the indie publishers. And now when I go to like farmers markets and other places, there's a bit of a revolt because the fees have gone way up. People are like looking for alternatives. John Gruber Well, and I would even say that looking back at the six apart slash movable type versus WordPress and the way that WordPress just sort of took over the CMS world as quaint because whatever You wanted to argue about how closed six apart was approaching the licensing of movable type. Yeah. It was still a thing that you installed on your own server and you ran your own database. And once you installed it, you had a perpetual license, at least to the version you were running and you could keep running it on your server, which is way more open. Compared to publishing everything you do and the way that there are entire influencer brands that run entirely on YouTube or entirely on Instagram or whatever you want to say, way more Open, right? Like from their perspective. So it's all relative. But I do think, I think it was not, not, I think a wise enough person would have said, somebody is going to figure this out. And I didn't, I thought, man, I just remember thinking in the early days of the web, this is so great because we had this, we meaning anybody, meaning any freaking kid, anybody who could Just freaking get to a keyboard on a device that was connected to the internet. We, like the freaking world. Luke I think at the time it was called the blogosphere. John Gruber Yeah, but it was even bigger than that, though, where you could just write, you know, even a little bit before that where people had finger files, right? John Carmack used to write these crazy updates on his finger. And there was just this idea that anybody who could get to a device connected to the Internet and get an account in some way on a server that was connected to the internet could have a presence That anybody else could reach. And you could just sort of put your shit out there in any format you want. Meaning like, you know, just down to the character levels where it's like, is it RSS? Is it HTML? Is it just plain text? You know, are you just putting text files out there? But that you could just put stuff out there and people would find it if they wanted to and read it. It was like, yeah, but at the same time, but the thing that was amazing at the time and that made it seem like it was sustainable and would be the future was we weren't asking, we meaning Not anybody who was doing this, we weren't asking to run software on your device. What we were saying is we're going to put this thing out here in a publicly accessible URL. A string of text that you could access from any device anywhere in the world. But if you knew the URL and you did a get on that URL, you would literally get, which is a great verb, the text of that content on your device. So we weren't asking to run software on your device, which is a huge ask and a huge security risk. But it was this idea that you could distribute your content digitally without asking or requiring to run software on the devices asking it. It was, here's my stuff. It's in this format. You get it in that content format and do what you want with it. And I thought that was the future of media. And it still is the present of media to some way, but it's not the only present. And the majority of media consumed today is ([Time 0:32:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0861867e-baff-45c9-876e-a9bbf0cae04b)) - **Why WordPress Thrives Technically** - WordPress's success comes from its approachable PHP code and extensive hooks for customization. - Its openness allows developers to easily understand and extend the platform, fueling its wide adoption. Transcript: Jonathan Like it's grown like crazy and there's pros and cons of that. But like, what's your perspective on the ecosystem itself? John Gruber My perspective has always been, I've always been a fan. It's just never been for me. And it's because the whole thing is so complex. And I have to admit that movable type itself, it's internals. Even though Perl is my natural programming language, and I know that dates me and isolates me off the mainstream today. You can be best mates with John Syracuse. Yeah, well, you know, I kind of am best mates with John Syracuse. I find that movable type is written in a flavor of Perl that is very odd to me. It is, to me, non-idiomatic, but the APIs they published are very idiomatic to me. So in terms of actually modifying parts of the CMS or the CMS files i've i've looked at them for various reasons at various times and i'm like this is literally looks like greek to me i mean What do they call it when when you obfuscate code um like a javascript you know like when you yeah obvious schedule code yeah yeah i know what you mean minified but it's not it's not it's Not written to be purposefully obfuscated but uh ben trott who wrote most of it i wrote his pearl in a way that to me is obfuscated but they they had these api hooks for things like they call Text filters which is, hey, the body of a blog post could go through a text filter before it gets emitted to the static file. And that's where Markdown hits. And the API for that was super easy. You know, like, oh, this is exactly what I think it should be. I think WordPress overall, I think the reason for its decades-long success is that overall, it's way more friendly to, hey, if you want to look at the source code and you want to hook into This at a certain level and you want to see the way it works is way more open and friendly to that um i you know and and it's not for me but i've always i've never been surprised by the success And continuing success of wordpress for for that reason that it's like, oh, you can kind of see how it works. And yes, it has a bunch of historical cruft in some ways, but it's like, man, it does kind of everything you want. And when you hear seemingly preposterous numbers about what percentage of the web runs through WordPress, it doesn't seem preposterous to me because it seems to me like, yeah, but Basically it offers so many things you want in what you want to do to create a custom website. And in a language that is approachable and understood by so many people, PHP, and with these hooks for things like themes. And it's like, oh, here's the definition of a theme and how you package it and stuff like that, that have always been very developer friendly and very just the nature of the open web. ([Time 0:57:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/70bf0221-9536-4be2-ad5c-97f97190f27b)) - **Markdown's Personal Genesis** - John developed Markdown by iterating on existing text formats and with feedback from Aaron Swartz. - It started as a personal solution to simplify blogging and eventually gained slow but steady adoption. Transcript: John Gruber Don't know that that's going to happen. I honestly think that a hundred years from now, it might be forgotten who created Markdown and I'm not complaining, but it seems like, and it's a tiny little thing, and it annoys me. It probably annoys nobody else. But in the last, I would say, three or four years, I've noticed more and more that a lot of places where they're like, it's a brand new thing and you can use Markdown. They don't uppercase it. It's lowercase m Markdown. Like the way you would say, you can just enter plain text. It wouldn't capitalize plain text. They say you can just type it in markdown and they write the word in lowercase m. Jonathan What's the, it's changing its way in the vernacular. John Gruber Yeah. It's like a generic thing and people think it's always been there. I am very proud of it. And I did create it and invent it. And, you know. I'm curious about the Genesis. Luke You know, like, is this like a weekend project that you're like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if, or is it a long term? John Gruber So basically the timeline and, and again, I don't want to be a downer. And there's this whole sort of sidetrack thing where it's like, oh, that actually Aaron Swartz was the co-creator of Markdown, which is not true. But he was the one beta tester of Markdown who got it right from the start and was the one who gave me the best and most feedback. He was effectively, you know, it boiled down to me making it thinking I've got something here. And Aaron being the beta tester who is like, Oh yeah, you've got something here. Keep going. You know, you're almost done. And, you know, and then it's this whole tragedy unrelated to Markdown where, you know, he got caught up in this whole thing with the federal government about blah, blah, blah, and he Killed himself. He's fucking dead. And it's a tragedy. And I love the guy. And I think the world is such a worse place. And what am I going to say when there's people who are like, hey, it was actually, Markdown was a co-creation of Gruber and Aaron Swartz. Jonathan You're like, what? Wait a minute. John Gruber Yeah, and I'm like, yeah, it it was actually me, but it was me. And if he were still around, he would, I swear to God, I know that he would be like, yeah, it was him. And he just wanted to sing the praises of it when it came out. Which is a sort of complicating factor. And I've got all the emails, but I don't want to look at them. Even all these years later, because I don't like looking at emails from a friend who's dead. But one of these days I have to do it because it's like, geez, enough years have gone by. But the basic idea was the first year or so that I wrote Daring Fireball, 2002 to 2003, movable type had two built-in options for what they called text filtering. You put in in terms of character per character would be exactly what got filled in for the body tag in a post you know and i think whatever cms you use you understand what i mean yeah that There's there's like a tag you put in your template for the body of a post and here it goes and if you typed uh an open angle bracket and blah blah blah and a closed angle bracket that's exactly What it would be escaped in that output no there would be no escaping right there was that was you know it was a you were responsible for all the escaping That was one of the options. And then they had another one called, it's probably still there. Yeah, I'm sure it's still there. But it was like, basically, it just was like added paragraph tags, P tags to blank lines. Oh, interesting. That was it. WordPress had an option like that early on, yeah those were your two options there was there were and there were no others and so i used the raw html version and i would write my posts in Uh text editor bb edit and the longer they were the more wait longer I'd wait to mark them up in HTML. But then before publishing would put all the HTML tags in for including paragraph tags, everything, and then paste it into movable type. And it was more or less using movable type as a way to just paste in the article part in an HTML document. And I don't know, it didn't take too long before I got the shits of that. And I was like, this is a pain in the ass. And, and where it really became a pain in the ass was when I realized how much of blogging was fixing typos, adding things, you know, like the initial writing, I wouldn't have to have it In fully marked up HTML. I would have it in something that looked a lot like Markdown. But then once it was fully marked up, then it became more and more of a pain in the ass to go back and figure out how to fix a spelling mistake or, yeah, the italics runs too long here or whatever. And Dean Allen, who at the time wrote, again, who sadly is dead now, but wrote the great website Textism and was the creator of rival to wordpress textile uh or no what was the what was the Name of the cms wasn't text textile was the rival to markdown um well whatever it was but um text pattern text pattern right yep yeah text pattern um uh but he had textile which was sort Of a proto markdown but a little bit more now anybody listening can just go google textile text formatting syntax and you'll see what i mean but it was a little bit more like writing a man Page where you'd have like equal H1 before a header ([Time 1:02:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4bb78845-37e1-4ee7-bcf9-8c1b34be92b2)) - **Embrace Markdown's Flexibility** - Accept that Markdown is an evolving idea with multiple flavors suited to different needs. - Use the flavor that works best; flexibility is a Markdown strength, not a failure. Transcript: John Gruber Like typical users shouldn't be exposed to this you should give them a WYSIWYG interface, not this. Jonathan You don't think, John, we should be teaching people how to make tables in Markdown? No, I do not. John Gruber I really don't. I think it's become too popular, which I guess is a good problem to have. But I really do think that it's more popular than it is. Jonathan That was where it crossed the line for me. I was editing some GitHub documentation, and I'm like, creating a table in Markdown is not my favorite thing. John Gruber It's doable, but it felt like too much. Well, and that's my official 1.0 markdown doesn't have tables. And I worked with Michelle Favreau. Fortin, the creator of PHP Markdown, where the original spec for tables in Markdown. So I had a hand in it. It was like, and one of these days, you know, again, it's sort of like the mobile optimized version of Daring Fireball. One of these days, there will be a Markdown 1.1 that I released that includes the table syntax. But part of the reason that I didn't include tables was, ah, it all falls apart so easily, you know, with table complexity, you know? Like, and I kind of, like, the things that are in my markdown, the official 1.0 markdown on Daring Fireball, everything is like, if this is all you need it's perfect yeah and that that Was the thing with tables it's like tables are a real thing i include tables in articles all the time i get it but it's like ah if they're not perfect and if they fall apart easily i don't Know if they should be it and that was the sort of, if I'm very, very selfish about what goes into official markdown and only put in the few things that can be expressed perfectly, it's A very, it's not a spec. And I know that's what so many technical nerds, you know, that there's no specification and that there's all sorts of ambiguities based on the definition of it. But if you just look at the human readable version of it, it's like, well, there's headers, there's italics, there's bold, there's links, there's images, and that's basically it. And you can kind of do all that and all of that works perfectly. Luke I do like GitHub's checklists. That's a nice one too. John Gruber Oh yeah, I do. And again, it's been a source of, I don't think of it as controversial at all. I actually think of Markdown less as a spec or a single thing and more of an idea. And GitHub flavored Markdown is to me, my second favorite Markdown in existence after mine. I, and the fact that there are flavors of Markdown, I think is a success story, not a failure. Like there's a technical nerd who imagines that there could be one true Markdown spec that makes ([Time 1:14:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ede957dd-6c7e-4dfa-9278-b2dab670bd9f)) - **WordPress's Spirit Persists Amid Challenges** - WordPress has a unique spirit of open, free website building despite challenges and controversies. - Some recent issues give a "bad smell," but the core community and openness remain intact. Transcript: John Gruber I'm not an unbiased observer. And so I've observed this and I've been more than anything though, confused by it. And it just seems, this doesn't seem right. It just sort of sets off like I can't tell you exactly why. And I think probably most people listening to your podcast, listening to us talk will sort of feel the same way where it's like, I don't even know exactly what it is about this whole conflict That rubs me the wrong way. But it rubs me the wrong way in terms of it should never have existed. And I'm not even absolving Matt from it. Like, I do think that he's responsible for at least part of it, you know, that it could have been avoidable. But there's something about it that it's like this whole thing just isn't right. You know, I don't know how to say that. You know and again and i'm not i'm a little biased because i'm his friend but i i would love to take him aside and be like what the fuck is really going on you know a lot of us would yeah i i think Luke That uh default position of uh grace and saying oh something's not quite right and not immediately making matt out to be the villain is a good one. John Gruber Yeah, but there's something, but there is the spirit of WordPress is still there. And again, I'm not just saying it because I'm on your guys' podcast, but it's still there where it is, hey, you don't have to give us money, you know, to build a great website using our technology, Right? Like that's the whole idea and that we can thrive and build a great business, a great big thriving business based on our technology while still letting people use our code in a truly open Source way in a, you know, with no relation to us financially whatsoever. I think that's still there but it's it it has like a bad smell to it that it never had before like a little bit of a bad smell like some of the stuff in your fridge needs to be thrown out yeah Not that the whole you know you need a new refrigerator but i don't know there's a couple of items in there that got to go. That's a good take, John. Jonathan And I think that there's something about that too. And you got me thinking more about Substack as well. So it's going to be interesting to look back and reflect on this because there, to me, like there's a momentum to WordPress that you just can't count out. And the question is like, how do we, how do we, how do we guide that in a way that's helpful to the bigger term? John Gruber I honestly think that the whole WP engine thing, though, is a distraction. I'm not saying it's not real and people shouldn't be concerned, but I think it's a distraction from the fact that the whole Substack thing kind of creeped up on the WordPress community In a way that if WordPress were really killing it, not just automatic as a company, but the whole community, Substack shouldn't have existed. I really do believe that. That's got me thinking. Jonathan That's going to be worth some additional thought and follow-up. John Gruber And I do think there's a thing in there where, again, I don't think we should let this go, Substack launching as a newsletter platform really did kind of creep up on people in terms of, Hey, shit that you read in your web browser is annoying as hell because it's popping up things like, hey, subscribe to this, subscribe to that. Why don't you, you know, and when you get an email, you just space bar, space bar, space bar, read to the bottom and you're done. And Substack kind of creeped up on that in terms of, hey, we're not going to go through your browser. We're going to go through your email client. And when we go through your email client, we're not going to annoy you at all. Because once the email hits your inbox, you just space bar, space bar, space bar to the bottom and you read the whole thing and you're done. And people really like that because you just read and you're not annoyed. And it's not WordPress's fault that people build WordPress sites that have annoying features, but it's not their fault. But it's true that a lot of WordPress sites are much more annoying to read than sub-stack sites. ([Time 1:21:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ba7bfb2d-aee0-4cdc-b714-b27e779eac4b))