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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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.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1129047877135691776?s=20 …
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I’ve seen the twitter-REPL analogy made several times now, including by me. Remember the original line by Om Malik that it is the messaging bus of the internet? Wrong end of the stack. https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1129050965557092352?s=20 …
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This is a subtly different way of putting it. It isn’t just the REPL or deeper/longer/more persistent text layers. It’s the REPL of society. Search “twitter REPL” for more flavors.https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/930861196923748352?s=20 …
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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
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Collective unconscious
CthulhuShow this thread
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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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I'm not sure I understand it any better. I think there's a lot going on. I can see the what and how somewhat fuzzily but the why is pretty murky.
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