MT 3.0

Wow, so, I didn’t really expect so many people to be so negative about MT 3.0. I agree it’s not a good move by any means, but the unity in which people don’t like it is somewhat shocking.

I said this on metafilter, so I’ll just post it again here.

I am not upset with MT, or sixapart, and I understand people’s feelings like Matt when he tries to bring out the positives of the changes. He is friends with them after all. Ever since Where’s the Beef though I, and I think a lot of the community has been a little wary of the direction this thing is taking.

That entry is not Mena anymore, it is Corp-speak-Mena. And that’s fine, she is probably making good money now and I’m sure she is happy with her decision. But it does sort of make people sad, I think.

It seems, also, with typepad and this new MT that Sixapart now would prefer individual users to use typepad and businesses to use MT. They are not hurting people like my dad, who uses typepad on the basic setting, or companies that want some cheap app to run an intranet blog, $150 is chump change to them. Who they hurt are the power users; the weblog community

I think feelings are hurt because people feel like they’ve been used. The weblogging community is what made MT well known after all, and those donations, including mine, helped fund it’s development. I know Sixapart doesn’t owe anyone anything but I think those are some of the feelings driving the current uneasiness.

I have recently switched to WordPress, not because I think MT should be free, I donated to them and I donated to WordPress. I changed because I want to be in the demographic that the product is being developed for. MT 3.0: no new features except extensive comment registration. Well, that’s great for businesses, and making weblogging for businesses seems to be where MT is moving. That’s fine, and I’m sure it’s a thousand times more profitable than for individuals, but I am not a business.

WordPress is Free, as in GPL free, and PHP, and it has a kickass plug-in system in 1.2, and versions come out fast. Also it’s super nice to upgrade.

I dunno, I liked MT, and I think I had a good run with them, but they seem to be moving to business customers, and that doesn’t reflect how I use the product, so switching seemed appropriate.

The people on the MT side say that this is a good package and that we should expect to pay for it, like we shouldn’t expect something for free. As someone on mefi said, that’s fine if they want to charge but charging for something that used to be free isn’t cool. Maybe add features, and charge for that version or something, charging for what used to be free, especially charging the people who helped you beta test it, and make it well-known in the marketplace isn’t a nice thing to do.