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Businesses IT

Wix and Their Dirty Tricks (ma.tt) 60

Posted by msmash from the right-back-at-you dept.
Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the open-source blogging platform WordPress, writes: Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can't even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple's Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session.

I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that's like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you're in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom. So if we're comparing website builders to abusive relationships, Wix is one that locks you in the basement and doesn't let you leave. I'm surprised consumer protection agencies haven't gone after them.

Wix is a for-profit company with a valuation that peaked at around 20 billion dollars, and whose business model is getting customers to pay more and more every year and making it difficult to leave or get a refund. (Don't take my word for it, look at their investor presentations.) They are so insecure that they are also the only website creator I'm aware of that doesn't allow you to export your content, so they're like a roach motel where you can check in but never check out. Once you buy into their proprietary stack you're locked in, which even their support documentation admits.
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Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

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  • You've let your (understandable) personal pique drive your decisions. Almost no one has heard of Wix, but everyone has heard of Wordpress. You should have just ignored it - all you're managing to do is drive some attention their way.

    Unless you're the upstart, it's pretty much never a good idea to mention the competition.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 )

      Almost no one has heard of Wix, but everyone has heard of Wordpress.

      Which is ironic since one of them has bought multiple Super Bowl ads over the last several years.

    • I'm pretty sure that lots of people have heard of WiX [wikipedia.org].

    • You've let your (understandable) personal pique drive your decisions. Almost no one has heard of Wix, but everyone has heard of Wordpress. .

      Wix spammed their TV Ads in Australia a while back. That's the only reason I have heard of them.

      Unless your into websites/technology etc, I would say there is a bigger chance a regular person has heard of Wix in Australia over Wordpress and this was obviously the demographic they were aiming for by using mainstream media for the advertising.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Almost no one has heard of Wix, but everyone has heard of Wordpress.

      Well I have heard of Wix [wixtoolset.org], but I think we may be talking about a different product.

    • Almost no one has heard of Wix, but everyone has heard of Wordpress.

      I'm guessing you haven't used the Internet in the last few years. Fuckin' Wix ads are everywhere and I fuckin' hate them. I never trust any "build websites easily" bullshit because that's guaranteed platform lock-in.

  • WordPress is antiquated garbage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @05:13PM (#61252730)

    Only a monumental idiot tries to pass off the prime example of how to write PHP badly as their own. It was a lousy blog script in 2004 and hasn't improved (nor actually become a CMS) since.

    • It was definitely better than Drupal back then :) Drupal was... I don't have words for it, and that's despite being 2 or 3 years older.

      • Re:WordPress is antiquated garbage (Score:4, Informative)

        by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @06:00PM (#61252908)

        Only if your criteria for "better" is entirely based on shortness of learning curve. Drupal has always been more of a framework than a CMS, long before the likes of Cake, CodeIgniter, and Laravel.

        WP's only advantage is letting designers pass themselves off as developers. It has a terrible database schema, the code is insecure spaghetti, and it's all held together with bad practices.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 )

          Drupal has always been more of a framework than a CMS, long before the likes of Cake, CodeIgniter, and Laravel.

          WP's only advantage is letting designers pass themselves off as developers. It has a terrible database schema, the code is insecure spaghetti, and it's all held together with bad practices.

          Again, I couldn't disagree more. Having used both for years, it's Drupal that's the insecure mess these days (Drupalgeddon I and II, anyone?), and it's just plain dwindling. It was hard enough to find useful modules for it, and every new version sees fewer. I used to push for it as a CMS of choice for clients, but not for about five years now. It's just too much of a pain, and all too often can't do what needs to be done anyway (without doing it all from scratch).

    • Only a monumental idiot tries to pass off the prime example of how to write PHP badly as their own. It was a lousy blog script in 2004 and hasn't improved (nor actually become a CMS) since.

      WordPress has continually improved, and is now quite nice. It is indeed a full featured CMS, can even be run headless if you like (has an API), and is very nice to write custom plugins for.

      I've used it off and on since it started out, programmed plugins for it quite a bit in the last few years, and watched it improve a hundred-fold. Anyone who tries to say that it's no better than it was in 2004 isn't a serious commenter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Oh yes, and 2001 will be year of the Linux Desktop because Windows is antiquated garbage! Wordpress has a dominating market share and a practical monopoly on the ecosystem of templates, plugins, etc. Whether or not it's a prime example of bad PHP is completely irrelevant.

      A ton of dominating software is poorly written, ask people working at Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc. It just comes to show that people that vote with their wallets don't care about programmer pet priorities such as code quality.

    • I would argue PHP hate has become antiquated garbage. No offense, but who would mod this comment "interesting?" PHP is not my first choice for a programming language, and it is never been the latest greatest fad, but maybe that's a good thing. People use it to build websites, and those websites work. And as I said in another comment, git clone WordPress's core sometime. Read the code. I think you might change your mind.

  • Wix also owns DeviantArt (Score:3)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @05:30PM (#61252792) Journal
    Not a huge thing, but DeviantArt is/used to be one of the big places for beginning artists to post and share their stuff.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by alexo ( 9335 )

      Deviantart went from usable to a dumpster fire with their "refresh". 99% of their users complained to no avail.

    • Re:Wix also owns DeviantArt (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PinkyGigglebrain ( 730753 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @10:29PM (#61253614)

      Not a huge thing, but DeviantArt is/used to be one of the big places for beginning artists to post and share their stuff.

      It was pretty big for those who loved the site.

      I was a member there for so long I don't remember when I signed up, so it was probably over 10 years. It was a great site. Great artists and a fun community.. I had several commission works done by my favorite artists. And had a bunch of artists I followed. Used to log in several times a day to check for new stuff.

      Then Wix bought the site.

      They changed an easy on the eyes functional web site into a headache inducing* UI nightmare that was "Eclipse". Their high intensity white on black, "new and improved" UI. With everything moved around so much that it was effectively a new site, without many of the features that made the original site so good. And despite a huge number of complaints and petitions literally begging Wix to not use the their new Eclipse UI they ignored the DA user base and removed the old UI completely.

      I canceled my membership about 15 minutes after Wix removed the "use classic interface" option. It took me that long to find the "Cancel my membership" option in the disaster of a UI the site had become.

      To be fair there was also a vocal group that loved the new UI and defended it every chance they could.

      Really miss the old DA.

      * I mean literally. The dark theme that Wix changed to was literally causing eye strain head aches in people, myself included. I couldn't look at the initial new site for more than 5 minutes before the pain started. Wix toned it down a bit in later updates but the UI was still horrible.

  • Never a customer, Wix is trash (Score:5, Interesting)

    by andymadigan ( 792996 ) <amadigan@gmNETBSDail.com minus bsd> on Thursday April 08, 2021 @06:12PM (#61252956)
    I've never been a customer of Wix, but this explains the interactions I have had with them. In one case, I reported a site that was created on their platform solely to bully a friend of mine (one who has enough mental health issues as is). A plain reading of their ToS indicated that cyberbullying wasn't a permitted use of their platform, but after going several rounds with their CS team it was clear they didn't care.

    More recently I've gotten spammed by two of their customers. I made the mistake of funding some projects on Kickstarter/Indiegogo a few years ago so now I'm on some data brokers list. Shady projects buy that list, and use Wix's e-mail service to spam everyone on it. I told Wix to block my e-mail address on their system globally. This is usually a basic capability of any mass e-mail service provider, but they can't do it. They also take no responsibility for what their customers do on their platform, which explains the trash they host.

  • Never feel bad (Score:3)

    by Oligonicella ( 659917 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @07:48PM (#61253238)
    for someone helping produce known bullshit for cash. Their choice, their consequences.

  • Wix has it's place. There are clients who, believe it or not, find WordPress too complex for them.

    That said, this campaign is beyond stupid. They are tools for two different problem spaces, and Wix is not even a very good one for it's own, since (as many have pointed out) it has no export function for when you outgrow it.

  • This isn't news, it's an opinion and a heavily biased one at that even if it is based in reality.

    • All human communication is biased. It is physically ompossible for a brain to not bias its input.

      You mean they have an evil agenda. (Evil to you.) I agree. (Evil to me too.)

  • The Author is too ignorant to use analogies. He can't even understand That the name of the company is "Encyclopaedia Britannica". He must have been educated on Wikipedia. I'm sure Britannica know how to spell its own name...

    • The author is too ignorant to use analogies. He can't even understand that the name of the company is "Encyclopaedia Britannica". He must have been educated on Wikipedia. I'm sure Britannica knows how to spell its own name...

      If you want to critical about it, the company's name is neither "Encyclopaedia Britannica" nor "Encyclopedia Britannica", it is "Encyclopædia Britannica".

      Because most people (like you) have a hard time reproducing the ae ligature, the slightly more common alternative is "Encyclopaedia Britannica".

      Ironically, if you want to learn more about the ae ligature [wikipedia.org], Wikipedia has an entry about it, but Encyclopædia Britannica does not. Perhaps you should consult Wikipedia more often.

      --

  • It's literally German for "fap" as in jacking off.

  • Squarespace is in the same market as Wix, and seems bigger. Honestly I think both services are great for tiny 5-page webpages for non-technical, non designer business owners etc. And often limitations then get them interested in paying real money for a more custom / serious website down the road. They don't have to worry about security patches etc - the backend just sort of works. The CMS is easy for non-technical people to update content on the fly as well.
  • I just helped a client move their website and domain name away from wix. When transferring a domain name away from them they shut down the website (and email!) immediately. There is nothing in the process that requires touching the website, as you are only moving the registration no changes to the name servers or the MX records but they shut down the site and removed all DNS records immediately...meaning that the client’s site and email went away. i then had to go back in and ‘associate a websit

  • Why would an encyclopaedia bother attacking a load of steaming shit like Wikipedia?

  • Yes, I said it, bring in the pitchforks. But PHP works well for what is is designed. And once it works well, it is difficult to replace even when people try. (Yes I too have legacy projects in PHP that still work).

    If you look at web sites with over hundred million users, many like Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo and of course Wordpress use PHP just fine. They work fast, easy to maintain, and gets the job done.

    No need to wrap everything in a enterprise java bean, with dependency injection and twenty layers of abs

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