I was initially shocked by how few of them had personal websites, but they're able to get by with the tools that the platform provides them. They didn't see much ROI in maintaining a personal site, and were more concerned with diversifying their audience across platforms.

Even where you might once have thought "I'll add my own site, for the true fans, and take in orders of magnitude more money" - Now you can just add patreon (or an onlyfans) that handles that for you far more efficiently.

Then there are more niche providers like Floatplane (the Linus Tech Tips side-hustle/life-boat), who'll give you more autonomy and a CDN.

LinkTree was when the penny really dropped for me. Pretty much just an API landing page to point you to the other platforms.

Maybe the only next step left, is stuff like https://nametag.org/ - using an NFT to be your presence.

It's all very odd, and as I said above, makes me feel very old.

I don't think I'm alone in this regard.

The only ones I've seen for Youtubers are cooking channels, where the description format is very poor for recipes.

Shame since I often want to view their menu, and IG is really aggressive about not showing you profiles & images unless you login. Viewing their menu on a 3rd party site (Google Maps, Yelp, delivery services, etc) is subpar and often out of date.

Note: I also loathe Instagram menus

And work in anything international and this is essentially it. Want to find a smoothie shop in a beach town in Mexico? Instagram/FB + WhatsApp...thats it.

I'd be interested in a dual sim phone that had an instant "private mode" user account switch to the second sim. But even that would be a pita and it would severely limit the choice of hardware as well.

Initial registration would happen every time you want to do anything. (And you'd need a new phone... every time...)

Fewer people are opening web pages on their phones. I was wondering why someone would pay so much for a website, and then realized accessing twitter through a web browser on a laptop is not the way. We won't talk about relinquishment of rights, privacy and freedom. I am a curmudgeon doing it all wrong. The way into the walled garden is through the ease of use of popular Apps on the most popular platform: the phone.

But other newer crop of CMSes - Craft, Ghost, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav... they don't have the legacy baggage and are just so much better for fully custom made sites. You basically get light web framework with super customisable admin.

On the other hand for the "quick marketing site builder" - WP is getting eaten by Webflow and also Wix and their new new builder.

Last nail to the coffin is that WP has become big target of hackers and its just hustle to keep it going compared to most other self hosted solutions.

I don't think its websites going away so much as it's WP loosing to alternatives.

I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.

Unfortunately, websites cannot compete with aggregators. It's not about tech, it is about people.

Aggregators have the only thing a business need to thrive: people. If you have a "private website", you need to drive people to it, but if you have an account on a platform, people are already there.

This is why more and more businesses rely on aggregator instead of having a "private website".

It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more).

Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.

Intentionally. If your users know they're manipulating files with your software and not "songs," "pictures," or "documents," they're less likely to subscribe to your cloud service that copies them between machines and more likely to find another application that can consume those files.

The fact that Wix and Squarespace have been advertising hard for a time, is a sign that they see the market approaching saturation, or shrinking, or both, and they are fighting the market (trying to drum up more interest) and each other (to get the bigger share of what is left).

> WP, … Who-tf is the target market?

People who don't like (or have available) an industry specific preferred solution nor the time to DIY, who have not yet hit the point of realising that growing with WP can be as time consuming as DIY.

My favourite restaurant has a website.

It's broken because "php couldn't find the necessary mysql extension to use Wordpress".

Some of these will be built on Wordpress, others custom, but once you notice one for an industry you’ll see it everywhere.

An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5.

  [1] https://business.adobe.com/cy_en/products/experience-manager/headless-cms.html