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The whole community and ecosystem is full of shady dishonest businesses and practices it seems. Besides all the recent drama as an end user and plugin buyer I have had to ask for 2 separate refunds from major plugins for shady dark pattern re-bills or secret upsells. I used to not consider myself a mark but maybe I am 42 now so I am starting to miss the real opt out buttons (4 pages deep below the fold). Anyways I don't like being in any ecosystem that is full of this stuff and not worth my time to manage all of it.



A very large part of WordPress ecosystem is just incessant upsells for plugins and borderline scams.


If you really want to see the shady, dishonest side, try to have a discussion about nulling plugins. You'll get called every name in the book for adhering to the GPL.


What does nulling plugins mean?


It's the removal of "paywalls" (e.g., license checks, product keys, etc.) in plugins. A lot of developers see this as "stealing" and unethical.




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