I made a tough choice and I’m disabling Jetpack from this site and any other of my WordPress sites (mainly yurikissaten.com). WordPress developers loathe it and any plugins that make you rely heavily on them, and I totally get it now, because Jetpack has been really important to my sites for stats, widgets, code blocks, cache loading, and more for 15 years of blogging. It’s got a lot of unnecessary bloat, but it helped me create and maintain many websites.
But I’m still disabling Jetpack because Automattic has gotten greedy past the point of no return. It used its WordPress.org/Wordpress.com brand confusion to gain dominance in the industry, and then locked many of its free features behind a paywall, one prohibitively expensive for a site like mine that generates zero revenue. I could live with them for the most part. For a company that allegedly cares about contributing to the open source WordPress and Fediverse projects, Automattic sure loves to milk us all like any other tech company in the enshittification era.
Recently, they identified my site as a “commerical site” and locked all stats behind a paywall as well. Very nice timing, as this site has skyrocked in views lately–good SEO is surprisingly paying off I guess? Hundreds of views a day sometimes. And I can no longer see which posts are doing well, traffic sources, etc. because they want me to pay over $10 a month for a commerical license. And keep a permanent (1) notification bubble in its area in the sidebar, too, begging me to pay… I am too poor to afford $120 for something as stupid as site stats.
I’ll definitely trim down the site by disabling Jetpack, because there were a lot of features I rarely or never used. But for the features I did use, I’ll have to find replacements. So there may be some site problems for a while; if you see anything broken, let me know.
When Jetpack told me to pay on short notice a few months back, I frowned and offered up $120 but vowed to reanalyze the situation come next year. I don’t really get anything out of the stats… For me and my blogging needs, they’re just fun, but they’re not $120 worth of fun. Especially not with the news about them you have here that I had no idea about.