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I’m moving the breaking smart list to substack this week. There will be broken links galore, which I may or may not ever get around to fixing. Main immediate reason: substack is free while mailchimp is now costing me $90/mo.
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There is also future optionality for a thread of paid content. Like maybe a podcast or more researchy posts. But in general I decided to take the leap because it feels like content infrastructure is poised for a paradigm shift.
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Substack, static sites, paid content, encrypted messaging, slack are on the right side. Mailchimp, wordpress, ad-supported or affiliate-links supported content, public media, are on the wrong side. Lot of affection for stuff in the second bucket, but not a lot of hope.
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One sign I take seriously: surface web tech is increasingly getting anti-text. It is getting *heavily* optimized for images. Aka packaging. The wordpresss ecosystem should be called imagepress now. Text must now flow in subterranean rivers.
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When I started in 2007, most Wordpress themes were text oriented and it was a Wild West. Now a couple of big theme frameworks dominate. Genesis, the top one, features many excellent image-first themes. The theme I use, appropriately called “Prose”, isn’t supported anymore.
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Ironic huh? “Word”press no longer supports “prose”. The drift towards packaging I think reflects the rise of Instagram in particular. Presaged by Pinterest winning out over bookmarking sites. You’re either pretty in public, or prosey in pipes.
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It’s not just ribbonfarm (as a prose-heavy blog in both content and presentation) that’s become a compile target. Textual language itself is now a compile target past strings of ~280 characters.
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Shit, ribbonfarm has now turned into a compile-target under my other front-end writing activities (twitter and mailing lists...). It’s become the personal JavaScript/CSS of my brain. Harder to write raw. Or even like C perhaps.
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The ultimate compile target is the collective unconscious, with code that persists across generations of course 😎 Instagram, Wordpress frontend, static sites Twitter Mailing lists Headless CMSes AWS lambda ... ... ... Collective unconscious Cthulhu
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Isn’t it the consumerization of business? CMS innovation has sucked for 10 years. The market is weak because it’s based on web design shops. Even those guys are using stuff like HubSpot.
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Not sure what you mean. I do think a growing fraction of wordpress market (which is 60% with Joomla, Drupal languishing in the 2-3%) is business CMS usage rather than blog. But the themes seem mostly for businesses that are already consumer facing (restaurants, studios...)
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I like this thesis, but not sure I understand the Why. Is the argument that smaller players must fight Big Tech aggregation (which is becoming image heavy) by moving text/thought-based content down the stack (where it can be owned, access restricted, and payments introduced)?
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