Matt Mullenweg Asks What Drama to Create in 2025, Community Reacts
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This is a ridiculous way to address the community. There are at least five better Shakespeare quotes he could’ve gone with. From Hamlet alone:
- Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.
- I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on
- I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is / southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.
- Doubt thou the stars are fire; / Doubt that the sun doth move; / Doubt truth to be a liar; / But never doubt I love.
- Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go
But it's probably wishful thinking, I know.
I think we've basically eliminated plugin security vulnerabilities with Al agents scanning and updating plugins.
— Actual comment by Matt Mullenweg in a Reddit thread about how terrible WPEngine is for profiting off of WordPress.
The scary thing is... I'm genuinely convinced he doesn't see any of his own hypocricy. Like, at all.
Open source easy to manage software that can have you blogging in minutes?
It's used for ecommerce, employee management systems, LMS/education platforms, membership/login sites (affinity groups, etc).
Whether it should be used for those use cases - building on top of something that wasn't really designed to be explicitly supportive of any of those use cases - that's another question.
There will be - and are - dozens of 'wp killers' - ecommerce systems, blogging platforms, etc - that will cover specific use cases. But there won't likely be anything generic/flexible enough like wordpress any time soon. And that's probably an overall good thing, but that's also a different argument to make.
The code quality for many of those themes and plugins is also what a FAANG engineer would describe as “abysmal,” an “affront to the industry,” a “I can’t believe people use this,” a “this should be illegal,” whatever epithet you want. Huge surprise, no backwards compatibility coming to anywhere else, anytime soon.
90% of computer code in this world is crap. Crap that seniors would berate or fire people for. We don’t all live in the FAANG bubble; WordPress sadly is the biggest sign of that. The world runs on crap code built on crap architectures, outside of a few niche companies in a few niche geographies who congregate on a few niche forums (like this one). If you’re in one of them, count your blessings. If you’re not, don’t despair, you’ll be a senior-equivalent on a global level in no time.
The Apple engineers even here on HN who work at Apple, and criticize the mistakes of junior devs or other senior devs, have no clue about the trash that exists in the less important parts of the organization. For many of them, just doing some research on how even Apple accepts atrocities would be quite humbling.
The reason WP was so successful is that, for a significant amount of time. it had VERY BASIC php requirements to run, but first and foremost, its API was very STABLE, allowing the creation of a gigantic plugin ecosystem that were still compatible after a decade, when JOOMLA, Drupal and co kept breaking API all the time, or decided to bump their minimum requirements way too often.
so there can't really be a wordpress killer, if you have specific need, use a more specialized CMS.
API stability is one of the most under-rated feature when it comes to open source projects.
I'd be very happy to hear from folks more familiar with these tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal
WordPress is $5 in a VPS, click a theme, add a few plugins, it’s an insecure mess but it was cheap. Need a designer? A few thousand bucks is cheaper than a programmer.
It’s not the network effects. It’s about doing things cheap and fast, for which WordPress has no parallel.
And no, this is not a problem with capitalism. Every social structure ever devised has done this. Even if you’re McDonalds and you want new marketing pages in 2 weeks for a 1 week campaign, WordPress is fine. What else are you going to do? Build a CI/CD pipeline for a 1 week website?
WordPress is for people who don’t work at FAANG. If this is the best they can do so far, there is no reason to believe they’ll do better next time. And that’s okay - we can’t all be FAANG. FAANG standards would be considered delusional compared to most code out there.
Remember that WordPress is the way it is, and it still has a multi-billion dollar company behind it. This is the best a normal, non-FAANG, billionaire organization could do. Which shows, in my opinion, how much of a bubble the code quality purists actually live in.
Whatever you find inside yourself to motivate yourself to do the current task at hand, please teach me how to reach it. I admire you.
It reads like a satirical take on his behaviour.
Its similar to (not quite covered by?) Poe's law. It honestly read to be like a parody of Matt.
I would be surprised, it seems like such a dumpster fire to get into and who knows what insanity Matt will be up to next week
People are hacker news are not a representation of society at large.
"Hold my beer."
He's a loose cannon for sure, but I'd still bet on him rather than the rabble that will explain why a Real Business would never do what he's doing and then, in their next comment, complain on /r/antiwork about why they can't find a job.
Mullenweg might be nuts, but most of his critics are even crazier. WPE isn't a competitor, it's a parasite. Wordpress doesn't owe anybody anything, it already gave everybody something.
If WPE wants to be a competitor, it should fork and do so. Please do it, I hate plenty of things about Wordpress, and the schema is horrific. But if the alternative is Drupal, Wordpress all day.
My employer indirectly profits from me using Python resources (eg python.org and PyPI). Yet, Guido is not coming out and saying I am a parasite leeching off of the system. Pony up 8% of company revenue or else.