In reply to Danny Brown.

Blogging started as a form of a personal "online diary", but as it gained more popularity there has been a misuse of the term and the borders started to blur (anything that was built in WordPress would be called a "blog" by many people, no matter the content). Blogging in its initial form (a standalone, online personal diary) has indeed evolved and became less standalone.

On some cases it got "merged" with social networks (you already mentioned Facebook Notes or even simple Facebook status updates, LinkedIn Pulse etc), which I find to be quite fitting: a social network seems to be a more appropriate place for a "personal diary" compared to a website. On other cases, especially on corporate websites, a blog is a part of a broader website and in that sense, a tool among others (unfortunately, very often on those cases a "blog" ends up being just a fancy name for a boring corporate announcements' section).

In my opinion there are two questions here: 1. Is WordPress still the best platform for a blogger - meaning, a person with no coding skills who wants a way to quickly start posting his/her thoughts online? 2. Does WordPress care?

For the first question, wp.com might still be one of the best options, even though tools such as Medium or Facebook Notes might seem more appealing to some people - and for good reason. A self-hosted WordPress, though, in my opinion, definitely isn't.

Ghost's hype back in 2013 was a prominent example revealing bloggers who were tired of WordPress' "clunky UX" (at least for their needs), seeking a better / simpler alternative. They were claiming that WordPress was losing its identity as a blogging platform - and I guess they were right. The most important milestones in WordPress' recent history involved features such as custom post types and the REST API, revealing entirely different priorities. And that seems to answer the second question.

I am not claiming that comments, tags, pingbacks and other blogging-related features should be banished from WordPress, but that perhaps some of them could become optional. It's not just a matter of marketing, but of UX too. If there is a big enough number of developers who, after installing WordPress, go and disable certain features, then perhaps those features should be disabled by default in order to improve user experience. Of course, such decisions should not be taken lightly and would require an in depth study of users' behaviour through statistical data, questionaires etc.