WordPress Is a Lie  🔗 **Source:** [WordPress Is a Lie](https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [WordPress, open source, business-model] > author: Marcin Dudek > source: Twitter > reference: [https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True] > date created: 2026-04-15 00:00 > > # 🏷️ Title: WordPress is a lie > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - Include links cited in or relevant to the article. ## 📝 Summary - A veteran WordPress developer calls out what he sees as myths and marketing spin around WordPress: usage stats, code quality, costs, licensing, and “community”. - It matters because agencies, clients, and contributors base real decisions on these narratives. - Stakeholders: WordPress core and ecosystem companies, agencies, freelancers, clients, contributors. - Risks: misplaced trust, under-budgeted projects, burnout, disillusioned contributors. - Bottom line: WordPress works, but its public story is rosier than many insiders’ lived reality. ## 📖 Main Content - The author frames the piece as “from the inside” after 15 years in the WordPress ecosystem. - He challenges “40% of the web” as a comforting but misleading vanity metric that masks how many installs are low-value or legacy. - He argues core is technically fragile or outdated in important ways, making serious work harder than marketing implies. - “Free” is described as a trap: serious use quickly requires paid themes, plugins, hosting, and expert labor. - The GPL is portrayed as a legal and business minefield that powerful actors use to their advantage while preaching freedom. - The “community” is criticized as a narrative that downplays power imbalances between volunteer labor and commercial beneficiaries. - Overall, it’s a manifesto-like critique, not a neutral benchmark study. ### 🗒️ Notes - 15 years of hands-on WordPress work set the author up as both loyal and frustrated. - The “40% of the web” line is treated as cope: technically true in some counts, but used to dodge hard questions about quality, suitability, and technical debt. - “Core is broken” reflects pain with backwards compatibility, legacy decisions, and complexity that clients never see in marketing decks. - The author stresses that while WordPress itself is zero-cost, real-world deployments incur recurring plugin, theme, hosting, and developer costs; “free CMS” frames these as incidental instead of central. - GPL is depicted as simultaneously empowering (forking, reuse) and weaponized (license policing, gray markets, and business-model conflicts). - “Community fiction” targets the way conferences, slogans, and branding present a flat, friendly commons while economic power and decision rights remain concentrated. - The emotional subtext is accumulated fatigue: loving the tool but feeling gaslit by its official narratives. ## 📚 References - WordPress manifesto article (sections on “40% of the web”, “Core is broken”, “Free isn’t free”, “The GPL racket”, “The community fiction”) – linked from the tweet. - Official WordPress.org “About” page (for usage stats and project positioning). - GPL v2 license text and WordPress.org licensing FAQ. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - The author says: I’ve spent most of my career in WordPress, and I’m exhausted not by the software itself, but by the polished stories told about it. - He argues: WordPress’s status, openness, low price, and community are real in some ways but oversold in others, and that gap harms both professionals and users. ## 📰 Newsletter In this issue, we spotlight “WordPress is a lie,” a candid look from a 15-year veteran at the gap between the WordPress story and day‑to‑day reality. It’s a great prompt to audit your own stack: are you relying on “40% of the web” as a safety blanket, underestimating total cost of ownership, or assuming “community” equals genuine governance? Pair this read with: - WordPress.org’s official stats and about pages. - Your own project budgets: plugins, themes, hosting, and maintenance. - A review of your GPL compliance posture and contributor agreements. Use it as a conversation starter with clients and teams about when WordPress is the right tool—and when it isn’t. ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Clarify messaging for developers around what WordPress is good at vs. where it struggles; avoid vanity metrics as the main proof point. - Create educational content on real-world WordPress TCO, plugin ecosystem risks, and performance tradeoffs. - Improve developer onboarding with honest patterns for scaling, security, and maintainability in WordPress. - Run campaigns that highlight realistic case studies instead of solely success stories. - Facilitate community discussions (AMAs, office hours) where tough questions about governance, licensing, and economics are welcome. #### OSPO - Document clear guidance on using, contributing to, and commercializing GPL-licensed WordPress components. - Establish scanning and review workflows focused on GPL compatibility for themes, plugins, and bundles. - Define security intake and disclosure processes when WordPress is part of your product surface. - Maintain an inventory of WordPress dependencies, versions, and plugins across the org. - Provide legal guardrails and consultation hours for teams building on or redistributing WordPress. #### Community - Support maintainers with explicit funding, time, and recognition; don’t rely solely on unpaid enthusiasm. - Design contributor onboarding paths that explain economics and license realities, not just “how to submit a patch.” - Offer sponsors transparent budgets and impact reports for community events and initiatives. - Coordinate cross‑project forums to compare governance and funding models with other CMS communities. #### WordPress - Core: prioritize reducing technical debt, hardening critical APIs, and documenting tradeoffs; be candid about where the architecture creaks. - Core Performance: publish baseline performance budgets and common anti‑patterns; invest in automated performance regression catching. - Core AI: ensure AI integrations respect GPL, privacy, and transparency; document boundaries for model training on WP‑powered sites. - **Core Program Team:** run structured retrospectives on how marketing narratives align (or misalign) with contributor reality. - Mobile: align app UX with modern expectations while acknowledging WordPress’s backend constraints. - Playground: surface realistic example stacks that show actual plugin/theme complexity. - Community: balance feel‑good messaging with clear explanation of who decides what and how money flows. - Training: build curricula on WordPress economics, governance, and licensing alongside technical skills. - Marketing: retire or contextualize simplistic brag metrics; favor case studies with tradeoffs disclosed. - Support: update docs and KBs to highlight when WordPress might not be the right fit. - Design: audit core UX for hidden complexity that generates agency billing overhead. - Documentation: add “reality check” sections on scaling, security, and plugin bloat. - Photos / TV: highlight talks and media on governance, contributor health, and funding, not just success stories. - Polyglots: ensure translated materials also include honest sections on cost and governance. - Accessibility: invest in regular, public audits and share both results and remediation plans. - Meta: make .org infrastructure and decision‑making processes more transparent. - CLI: promote tooling that makes managing complex, multi‑plugin sites safer and more reproducible. - Hosting: collaborate on sane defaults, security baselines, and telemetry to track real reliability. - Tide: refine plugin scoring and communicate what scores do and don’t mean for production use. - Openverse: maintain clear licensing metadata and education for reusers. - Themes: streamline review while enforcing security and performance criteria. - Plugins: enforce security, provenance, and maintenance expectations; surface them clearly to users. #### The WPOCC - Design fellowships and microgrants specifically for long‑term WordPress maintainers and documentation writers. - Run governance clinics to help projects clarify decision rights and funding models. - Pilot public, transparent matched‑funding schemes for critical WP infrastructure components. ### FAIR - Encourage local, verifiable metadata (provenance, signatures) for WordPress distributions and bundles. - Publish funding transparency reports for major WordPress ecosystem sponsors. - Share reusable governance documents—charters, contribution policies, operator agreements—that projects can adapt. ## 🧪 Hypotheses - H1: Heavy reliance on “40% of the web” messaging leads organizations to underestimate WordPress’s long‑term maintenance costs. - H2: Projects built on large plugin stacks have significantly higher incident rates than leaner WordPress builds of similar scale. - H3: Clear, upfront education about GPL obligations reduces later licensing conflicts in WordPress agencies. - H4: Contributors who perceive governance as opaque are more likely to churn from the WordPress community. ### 📊 Methodology - Compare TCO and incident histories across a sample of WordPress vs non‑WordPress projects of similar traffic and complexity. - Analyze incident logs and plugin inventories to test correlations between plugin count and outages/security issues. - Survey agencies and clients before and after GPL education interventions about confidence and conflict rates. - Run contributor surveys on perceived governance clarity and track contribution longevity over time. ### ❓ Questions - When is “WordPress by default” actually harmful to a project? - How could WordPress governance be made more transparent without paralyzing decision‑making? - What sustainable funding models could reduce over‑reliance on unpaid volunteer labor? - How can agencies communicate WordPress’s tradeoffs honestly while still winning good‑fit work? ### 🔮 Future Research - Longitudinal studies on WordPress site lifecycle costs compared to other CMSs. - Mapping real decision power in WordPress (individuals, companies, foundations). - Experiments with alternative plugin/theme marketplaces emphasizing security, provenance, and maintenance. - Studies on contributor burnout and retention in large, commercially entangled open source projects. ### 💡 Implications - Practice: Agencies should present WordPress as one option with clear pros/cons, not the universal answer. - Policy: Organizations should adopt explicit open source and GPL usage policies if they depend on WordPress. - Security: Plugin governance and automated checks become critical controls in a WordPress‑heavy environment. - Education: Training should blend technical skills with licensing, economics, and governance literacy. - Funding: Ecosystem players benefiting financially from WordPress should invest back into core and community health. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - Reading level estimate: roughly upper‑secondary/early‑college; no formula computed, but tone is conversational with technical and economic jargon. #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: basic structure via headings and lists. - Improve: diagrams showing WordPress ecosystem (core, plugins, hosts, agencies, users) and money flows; before/after site architectures. #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: none. - Improve: 3–5 minute audio reading of the manifesto and a podcast‑style discussion with a critical friend. #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: strong narrative voice, metaphors (“lie”, “fiction”, “racket”). - Improve: short glossary for licensing terms, business models, and technical jargon. #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: limited. - Improve: hands‑on exercises comparing the build/maintenance of a simple site in WordPress vs alternatives; plugin‑audit checklists. #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: argument chains about metrics, cost, and governance, but light on data. - Improve: tables comparing costs, incident rates, and governance models across CMSs. #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: implicit invitation to community debate. - Improve: guided discussion prompts for meetups, plus structured debate formats on “When not to choose WordPress”. #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: manifesto suitable for reflective reading. - Improve: journaling prompts about personal experiences with WordPress projects. #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: none. - Improve: analogies to ecosystems (invasive plugins, monocultures) and sustainability thinking around digital infrastructure. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: headings and lists help. - Improve: ensure the blog version uses semantic HTML, landmarks, and descriptive link text (not only “read more”). #### Keyboard navigation - Present: likely acceptable on a simple blog layout. - Improve: guarantee visible focus states, skip links, and logical tab order. #### Contrast and readability - Present: depends on site theme; text‑heavy content is likely OK. - Improve: verify 4.5:1 contrast, generous line‑height, and font size. #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: modern themes usually responsive. - Improve: test at 200%+ zoom; avoid content overlap; support reduced‑motion preferences. #### Media and captions - Present: text only, so no captions needed. - Improve: provide an audio version with transcript for aural learners and some disabilities. #### Forms and interactions - Present: minimal (if only comments). - Improve: labeled inputs, clear error feedback, and accessible controls for any interactive elements. #### Standards reference - Map identified gaps to WCAG 2.2 AA (e.g., 1.4.x contrast/resize, 2.1.x keyboard, 2.4.x navigation). ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: euro/US‑centric professional WordPress perspective. - Improve: include experiences from non‑Western markets, low‑bandwidth contexts, and diverse economic environments. #### Inclusive language - Present: strong but not overtly exclusionary language. - Improve: reduce violent or dismissive metaphors, clarify jargon for non‑insiders. #### Neurodiversity support - Present: chunked headings help. - Improve: more consistent structure, summaries at the top of each section, and predictable patterns. #### Representation - Present: single‑author viewpoint. - Improve: incorporate quotes or case studies from a range of practitioners (agency, freelancer, product, non‑profit). #### Psychological safety - Present: confrontational tone; may feel validating to some, dismissive to others. - Improve: add explicit invitations to disagree, plus norms for constructive debate. ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - The critique of “40% of the web” is a strong challenge to argument from popularity: usage ≠ suitability or quality. - The cost argument reasonably distinguishes license price from real TCO (plugins, hosting, labor). #### Fallacies - Potential overgeneralization from the author’s 15‑year experience to “how it is” for everyone. - Occasional straw‑manning of “community” as purely fictional rather than mixed: can be softened by acknowledging genuine positives. #### Tone of voice - Tone is exasperated, polemical, and insider‑critical: “I love it and I’m tired of it at the same time.” - Language like “lie”, “racket”, “fiction” is intentionally provocative to spur re‑evaluation. ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - Deny: the piece does not deny harm; it asserts it. - Attack: it attacks narratives and institutions (metrics, core, GPL practices, “community”) rather than specific individuals. - Reverse victim/offender: hints that users and contributors, not just companies, are the ones bearing costs despite optimistic messaging. - Overall, it is not a classic DARVO pattern; it’s a whistleblower‑style critique of a system. ## 🎯 Conclusion The author argues that WordPress works but is wrapped in marketing myths about scale, freedom, and community that don’t match many practitioners’ realities. Readers should treat this as a prompt to audit their own WordPress usage, costs, governance, and communication—keeping the benefits, but dropping the comforting illusions. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix (append after 🎯 Conclusion) ### 📚 Literature Split Pad - Purpose: Stage Konik CEE units that become per-source Literature notes. - Split level: **H3**. - Include verbatim quotes under 25 words and a [view highlight] link. ### [H1] 5–10-word present-tense claim > [!quote] [WordPress is a lie](https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True) by [[Marcin Dudek]] via [[Twitter]]. Published 2026. Accessed 2026-04-15. > “I’ve been doing WordPress for 15 years.” Two lines: context and use. Cite data if relevant. [view highlight](https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True#H1) #xref #articleseed ID:rw_[MISSING] ### [H2] 5–10-word present-tense claim > [!quote] [WordPress is a lie](https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True) > “The ‘free CMS’… ‘open source community’… ‘40% of the web’ brag.” Two lines: context and use. [view highlight](https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True#H2) #xref ID:rw_[MISSING] --- ### 🔖 Atomic Split Pad (Zettel Candidates) - Purpose: Promote reusable claims into Atomic notes. - Split level: **H4**. - Each item: one idea, present tense, specific, testable. #### [Z1] WordPress marketing oversimplifies real costs - Scope/condition in one line. - Pointer to page/time or dataset. - Links: [[WordPress]] [[Total-Cost-of-Ownership]] #### [Z2] Community narratives can hide power imbalances - Scope/condition in one line. - Pointer to page/time or dataset. - Links: [[Open-Source-Governance]] [[WordPress-Community]] --- ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue (Extract by Selection) - Purpose: Capture quick actions or sparks for Fleeting notes. - Extraction: **Select one line** → “Refactor: Extract selection to new note (content only).” - Keep each line short and self-contained. - [F1] Audit our WordPress projects for hidden costs/risks—https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True #fleeting #inbox - [F2] Draft internal guide on when *not* to choose WordPress—https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True #fleeting #inbox - [F3] Map who actually decides what in our WordPress stack—https://twitter.com/MythThrazz/status/2044065971061571637/?rw_tt_thread=True #fleeting #inbox --- <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** ![[Full Document Contents/Tweets/WordPress Is a Lie.md|WordPress Is a Lie by Marcin Dudek]] ## Highlights - WordPress has Recovery Mode for when a plugin fatals your site. Nice feature - except the recovery link only goes to one admin email. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kp8jvr3afcg6mz6z4rpkmt5h)) - I tried contributing. There's a "good first bugs" list, so I picked one - an underperforming function, open for 8 years, with a couple of stale PRs sitting on it. I posted mine. Silence. If that's the on-ramp for new contributors, no wonder core moves like it does ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kp8jw6h0j3x8z1kpr0g46fd9)) - And the market knows it. Core is free. Hosting is cheap because WordPress runs on ancient PHP and weak shared boxes. Themes are free. Plugins are free. So everyone expects everything around WordPress to cost nothing too - designing, implementing, cleaning up hacked installs, performance, SEO. All of it. Treated like it should cost nothing. That's a bad deal for everyone doing the actual work. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kp8jwswq23dsmhnmstmecnpj)) - try to actually sell a plugin and you hit a wall. People don't want to pay. And the GPL crowd will tell you that you can't sell the code anyway - you can only sell "support" or "updates". That's bullshit. If your plugin is good and stable, you shouldn't be forced to sell babysitting on top of it. You're selling a license to use software, like every other commercial software on earth. Meanwhile entire scammer networks buy one license, strip it, and resell the same plugin on hundreds of "GPL sites" for a few bucks. Basically nothing you can do about it, because it's PHP and anyone with a text editor can edit a plugin. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kp8jx4dn7443z7b3e1s52fcr)) - **Revolution.** The community wakes up, pushes back on the Automattic-owned "open source" theater, forces core to become genuinely lean, fast, secure and SEO-aware, draws a clean line between core/plugins/themes, and opens the contributor pipeline to people who actually want to fix things. WordPress earns its 40% by being good, not by being entrenched. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kp8jxv1r07cnm8crwpf5jbb6))