I would be upset. Wordpress is such a terrible platform to develop on, footguns and limitations in every implemented magic function. why would you even open the door to Wordpress with so many better options?
I'd imagine this is a different scenario. The content created by users will be put through some AI transformation and it will be completely and utterly unmaintainable slop (and a significant portion of it would have already been that anyway before they started since it's user submitted). They aren't going to care that much if some edge cases break. Users can go fix that themselves. It seems much different to me than trying to delicately move something you care about.
If you want anything that isn't built in you have to either link to some third party SaaS or run another entire server program for it.
It's not a radical idea; you can write your own thing that does only what you need it to, and that is an entirely appropriate way forward.
You will end up solving a bunch of problems quite like WordPress does.
All CMSes are at some level like WordPress, and yet there is nothing like WordPress. Because it's not about the application, it's about the tradition and ecosystem around the application.
What do you imagine this move involves, infrastructurewise? Why is it boneheaded?
Realising something is a bad idea technically isn't really in their bag of tricks.
Wordpress.com, the hosted platform, has about 70-80 million new posts per month, in a massive, social-media-giant-type database, supporting a tightly locked-down, customised WP infrastructure (which even has a different admin UI AFAIK).
They aren't going to migrate tumblr to 600 million separate WP instances, are they? They are just going to migrate the posts backend into that infrastructure.
There are some challenges, sure, but it's churlish to suggest that Automattic don't know the intrinsic value of Tumblr and will just let it break. They rescued Tumblr from certain doom, and did so for love; they know what they are doing.
Lots of people here don't seem to understand what wordpress.com is, and the scale at which it operates.
> Given the blogging site’s continued financial woes, Mullenweg shifted the majority of Tumblr’s workforce to other areas at Automattic late last year and laid off others. At the time, he suggested that moving Tumblr to WordPress would be “tricky” but added that new technology like AI would make it easier.
It certainly seems possible it is more than a stack shift. It is definitely going to be a change for end users no matter how much AI he applies.