I’m beginning to get very fed up with the modern web. Stuff that has worked for years just breaks.
So I’ve spent some time changing my footnotes plugin. Why? Because WordPress has decided that the old one isn’t allowed any more. It won’t work with the current version. Thank you WordPress.
I’ve just uploaded an image of a monument to my Mithras page. I allowed the feature to make comments, using disqus, although few people do. Today I scroll to the bottom of the page and find… massive adverts. I don’t profit from them. I knew nothing about them. But apparently disqus are doing this to their remaining users. A classic case of enshitiffication.
Rather than endure that rubbish, I will remove disqus from the Mithras pages. Which means… additional work. Thank you disqus.
Somewhere out there, people are working on “improving” PHP. Morally I agree that the language is poor. But I don’t want my website broken because, effectively, they’ve changed the language. And something is now stopping me uploading images of more than a certain size to my website. It’s bound to be something connected to that. Sheesh guys, leave me alone!
All these changes wear heaviest on the long-term small website. Like my own. They push us all in the direction of corporate control.
Which is hardly a very good idea.
Your comments about the problems generated by WordPress and the other entity, and your accurate neologism, made me want to write more than I will impose without permission, on the DAMAGE done by monetization and mindless “improvements” by shallow decision-makers seeking more pennies by the millions
Horrible neologism but a very perceptive article. The whole online culture is rotting.
Years ago, when I was younger and more strident (read: kind of a jerk), I would have said something to the effect that—as I know you’ve been around long enough by far to already know—that “You can just put HTML online! And host your own comments!” Which is, in one sense, true, but also misses the point. It’s absurd to me that after 30 years of being online, our choices for making things available are essentially a binary between “be a sysadmin” and “put up with ongoing decline.” (Or “give up,” I suppose.)
Well that’s what we all did, of course. I only ever used disqus because I didn’t want to write a comment system. But the incessant hammer of spam makes a huge difference to writing your own comment system. It is curious how spam has never been sorted out.