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Comment by beshrkayali | Hacker News Reader

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpress) because of some valuation drop or being short on money. I think the dude needs help, and people close to him should try and talk sense into him.

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I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.

One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.

Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts hate you're fine.

The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.

> The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.

Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/

[2] https://archive.is/OkfOY

What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply commenting in another sub, especially for just one comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme of the sub.

When r/thedonald was around, I would debate misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line regularly.

Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.

If you like British panel shows (or any version of taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal lol.

Tech support for niche issues is pretty good there.

That subreddit could basically not be further from the ones I frequent. There are some ok cycling ones, relatively low traffic, not many people, good content - and especially not only typical computer nerds.

Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims.

There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms.

“You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.”

Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do think it is.

There's no other nationality in the world where commenting in the subreddit devoted to that country results in being automatically banned from other subreddits.

I am not surprised. With the amount of misinformation that is produced and disseminated from the highest levels of israeli society. See my other posts on 1) Zionism = racist / supremacist ideology 2) misinformation 3) links to a documentary demonstrating how people are being awakened to the truth (and how they realise they have been lied to) Israelism film on YouTube 4) psyops campaigns both against their own citizens , and Americans etc.

Russia does all of the things you’re alluding to at arguably a much greater scale.

Also as you’ve outlined, plenty of the misinformation is targeted at Israeli citizens themselves and banning those people from the opportunity to engage outside of their bubble makes no logical or moral sense

I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.

Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content

As someone who has been ingesting a high volume of reddit "content" for the better part of 3 years - the spam/bot problem is _wild_.

I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users)

And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective.

What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild.

It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).

The problem is there communities are hard to build and easy to destroy.

Reddit destroying its user communities causes real damage. Those users don't magically congregate somewhere else.

People keep saying this but I haven't noticed any drops in quality. The default subs have always been bad, and the niche subs continue to be good, in my experience. Do you have any specific examples?

This is making the big assumption that power users add to the quality of the site instead of the quantity.

People care about content, apis less so, unfortunately.

> undiscerning users will stay no matter what

That's one take.

Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.

I've found that the API changes improved the subreddits I was in because it made it harder for spambots to operate. Reddit got away with the changes because ultimately the power users were a tiny fraction of its userbase, and they were using clients that hid the ads so Reddit wasn't making any money from them so Reddit didn't care about their wants.

Reddit is not GPL so while hostile it’s incomparable to WordPress core. The user base of Reddit would have to rewrite from scratch. Wordpress can and will be forked if it comes to it. There are enough businesses relying on it that it would be worth it to re govern it under an alternate name.

You're making it sound like Reddit was unusable without API/client in the past though. I'd never used a Reddit client before I started using it at all on mobile. I bet a good chunk of users (esp casually browsing, or frequenting exactly one niche subreddit) just used the web.

Not saying it wasn't user hostile or sucked, it just doesn't match the experience I had (or when I talked to some people).

Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?

I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…

That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.

Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.

True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger) offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or more sites in.

Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...

There’s value to users in using a service that’s the same as the software. Trust is worth it to consumers. It’s why many still prefer to take their cars to the dealer rather than an Indy shop

I've had 3 cars totaled by dealers and none totaled by indy shops. One was actually messed up by them beyond repair. One was messed up and they wanted more to fix it well beyond the replace cost. The final one just wanted well beyond the replace cost, and I got it fixed for much much less at an indy shop.

Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.

So they throw Cloudflare in front of it and get defaced yearly. I've worked for companies (thankfully not in a position dealing with the website) that did just that. Somehow they're even still around a decade later. To be fair though that was actually Bluehost, not a VPS.

Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.

Late stage capitalism is almost indistinguishable from a mental disorder, though.

How is this unique to "late stage capitalism"? That same sentence can be used mad lib style for any human endevor.

>Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power

Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc

Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation

Don't argue with me about definitions, I'm trying to explain what I think the GP meant and why `the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation` is incorrect.

Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus maintaining demand, sort of.

Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward, so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain in power, while the masses see their quality of life decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had.

> the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed

that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene now.

okay sure, going back and forth on definitions is boring.

I just disagree that late stage capitalism imperialism is where we're at. It's not true for the US, or the west or the globe.

Yes we're in the anthropocene, and while that phrase has a negative implication nowadays, it is not true that anthropocene means "low hanging resources" have been consumed leading to uncontrolled rent seeking. It is no more true than a barracuda lurking in a coral is an out of control rent seeker. That's just the nature of barracudas.

> "late stage capitalism"

The term is 100 years old and was created to refer to everything after WWI. I don't think people using the term would actually subscribe to the idea that human development under capitalism peaked in the 1910s.

Furthermore, the entire concept was developed as a justification for the Nazi party and their economic ideas. Which I think is justification enough that people should stay away from lazy, doomy political tropes.

Do you know an economic system in the real world that doesn't have this problem?

We spent most of the last 70-years doing a pretty good job of aggressively sabotaging and suppressing any efforts to develop alternative economic systems. Even the few successes one might claim for communism are largely dependent on some kind of concession to allow for capitalism in limited areas. This doesn’t necessarily mean that capitalism is inherently superior, it’s just dominant.

The problem as I see it isn’t simply capitalism=bad, it has produced the greatest expansion of wealth in history after all, but rather it’s just not equipped to be the answer for everything. There are problems and opportunities that exist where capitalism does not have a solution for. Things like healthcare, equitable wealth distribution, and environmental sustainability are the obvious examples that come to mind.

These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, I am speaking in broad terms.

> These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering.

The trouble here is that this is a misunderstanding of what free markets are supposed to be.

The idea of a free market is, if you have an oligopoly which is charging high margins and ripping people off, do you a) break up the cartel and restore competition in order to bring down margins, or b) impose price controls or otherwise regulate the oligopoly while leaving it intact. The premise of free markets is that you do the first one and not the second one.

The problem we have is that you often have one party saying "don't do either of them" and the other party saying "do the second one" and then the first one doesn't happen even though it's the thing you want. The premise here is free market competition, not free market monopolization.

You have a different problem with things like pollution. That isn't something markets are expected to solve, in the same way as you don't expect them to prevent theft or homicide. The problem then is, how do you solve the problem? "Have the government do it" is under-specified. The Soviet Union did not have a sterling environmental record. Outcomes and efficiency both matter, so you can't just give it to some unaccountable bureaucrats or they'll simultaneously drive up the cost of everything with red tape, fail to prevent the pollution, and get captured by incumbents who use the red tape to lock out competitors. So how do you apply competitive pressure to politicians? Maybe change the voting system, e.g. use approval/score/STAR instead of first past the post so you can have more than two viable political parties. Or stop trying to do everything federally and hand more back to the states, so we can have back the laboratories of democracy and have 50 chances to find the right balance instead of just one.

WP engine is pretty obviously the “rent seekers” in this situation. hard to be a rent seeker if you actually built the software

No, pretty easy actually. You can sit and seek rent on something you built.

That's not what "rent seeking" means. Rent seeking is the term for manipulating institutions, customs or laws for the purpose of extracting money without creating anything.

I think the distinction is generally about not creating anything that's broadly useful, putting up a tollbooth but then not using any of the collected toll to improve the road, say. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking#Examples

the reason the rent seeking concept isn’t popular in contemporary classical economics (beyond the partisan association) is that it is pretty ill-defined.

but i think you would be hard pressed to find a scenario where Automattic is the rent-seeker and WP engine is not, given that Automattic both contributed to WP and is actively using their revenue to improve WP, whereas WP engine… isn’t.

Didn't WPE release some of the most popular WP plugins of all time? Advanced Form Fields etc? How is that not contributing to the ecosystem?

I'm not sure it's logically consistent to attack the phrase "rent seeeking" as unclear, then apply it anyway (?!) but muddle the word "contributing" in turn, to reach pre-desired conclusions about which party is at fault. You'll have to clarify for me what branch of neo-classical economics is concerned with assigning fault. Seems entirely removed from economics for me.

More broadly, we're not discussing any of this in the context of "contemporary classical economics" (ie right of centre economics), so I have no idea why you think we'd agree on using those definitions, or why those definitions have pride of place over any others.

You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs.

It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.

The only interaction i have with wordpress is sleazy small consultancies selling it to clueless mgmt as the magic solution to all their problems. I really have never had a positive impression of wordpress due to this.

I can't even remember all the times I've been suckerpunched with "hey we hired these people to implement <magic wordpress> and its not going so well. They tell us its because our systems are bad and our employees are not doing things right. Can you get with them and see what the <Insert Manager speak for blames you> seems to be....?

ME: The problem is they are some hack shop that "sold you" and bit off more than they could chew and they also don't have a clue about systems integrations.

MGMT: Nope the problem is our employees that have been working here getting "Exceeds expectations" on reviews that are the problem. We have no explanation for why though... So we are hiring McKinsey to come in and do a department evaluation to find out.

He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.

But there is every possibility that they were always going to do this.

Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.

Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.

What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.

Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.

This feels very "no true scotsman" to me. It's accurate if none of the large places I've worked are "serious".

At best, "serious" businesses (which I take to mean large, successful ones) pretend to take EQ seriously.

Engaging with reality as directly as possible is important in business. Emotions are a part of reality, usually a signal about social dynamics.

At the higher levels of serious companies — by which I mean ones trying to win in the market, regardless of size - managers and executives regularly receive training about this.

I can’t say more because this is my alt, but: “executives are childish”, “executives are psychopaths”, etc. are very common, often incorrect narratives. If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.

To return to topic: something is going seriously sideways with Matt, and I wish him the best.

> If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.

Except they almost NEVER are, in fact, the most common trait shown by executives is dishonesty.

Really? That does not sound like an opinion derived from real data.

sure it’s petty but i still feel that wp engine kinda sucks here

it's somewhat valid though, why continue providing free code for wp engine to resell when wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves?

wp engine has also bought out multiple competing hosts, so they're a direct competitor with deep pockets

> wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves

At minimum they contribute Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most heavily used plugins. I make no judgement on if they contribute enough, but it's not like they give zero back to the ecosystem.

it's not for you to decide, but for Automattic to decide how much contribution is needed for them to allow you to use their services.

the code of WP is free software. free-as-in-freedom.

the services are not, and never were... they were free-as-in-beer.

RMS taught us about this, and it comes in handy again.

I don't recall voicing an opinion either way. In fact I specifically said I don't know if it's enough, but saying they contribute nothing is factually incorrect. And no lack of contribution would justify taking over ACF in what is essentially a supply chain attack like they did.

The contribute to the ecosystem, a little to the WP code, but use for free the services that Automattic provides.

It's the services that they got cut-off from. They are separate things that to the layman are seen as "wordpress".

> I don't recall voicing an opinion

Well, you mention they contribute to the ecosystem. If it is not your supply chain, you cannot dictate how it is run. You call it an attach, they call it a commercial endeavour.

If "free code" being resold is the issue, then Matt's eve worse of a freeloader, since most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt.

> most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt

Automattic previously spent ~4k hours a week maintaining wordpress, so I'm not sure what you're on about

Matt's a known liar, and that 4000/hours a week includes a lot of stuff that doesn't involve working on code. (For example, Matt is including time spent censoring the WP forums, and harassing event sponsors in that time.) Given that the bulk of the WordPress team quit last year, I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now on anything related to code right now.

But if we're going by hours...the WP Community as a whole probably spent several hundred thousand hours on maintaining or improving WP last week.

> I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now.

Even if half the staff quit (they didn't) they'd still have hundreds of employees...

You seriously don't think they had 4 people working on Wordpress full-time?

The staff that quit was the staff that worked on WP. Almost none of the remaining employees worked on it, so yeah I would not be surprised if only 4 people are working on it now and that's the real cause of Matt pulling back on their WP work.

One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog.

If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him.

This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.

Using the GPL is not racketeering. Why would any user expect more rights than a contributor?

I don't understand your point about forking, yes they'd have the GPL but so what? They can control their fork from then on, it doesn't matter if they have to continue open sourcing contributions, in fact it'd be preferable to whatever Matt is doing.

I think you underestimate the work it takes to maintain and more importantly grow such a large open source project. If wp engine can barely contribute today, what are the chances they want to take on the whole thing. Nope they just want to get rich off open source. That's understandable , they are a for profit after all. But at what point does it make sense to give back in terms of either money or time to make improvements to the ecosystem that you depend on.

I agree with Matt's ideals but not the actions. The reality is theres not a whole lot he can do without looking like spoilt kid taking his ball away from the game.

He drives the project long enough that probably no b2 code remains. He could have prepared and take a contributor agreement or some other measures to allow relicensing.

Question however is, whether auch a scheme would have made WordPress successful, or if it thrives from the community, where many assumed that everybody plays on the same field via GPL.

He can also just stop open sourcing his company's work on the product. WordPress is GPL, not AGPL, so they can make any changes you want and use them on Automattic's platforms without ever releasing code to the community again.

I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?

Here is an alternate possibility

1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine"

2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course

3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes.

Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives

That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the same location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How will they be able to distinguish?

You're assuming they actually care to distinguish. But real answer, barring a brief period where some users may get a cached version, they can likely just use the date of change to determine before and after if necessary.

I don't think the purpose of the checkbox was to collect useful data but an any case storing it as a date would probably solve the issue.

No, the server-visible name has changed.

not only would i say this is a possible explanation, i would say it is the obvious explanation - and pretty ridiculous to accuse someone of having a mental breakdown based on this

Lol, this is like every bad stereotype about the general quality of WordPress websites: "Getting rid of a checkbox is too technically complicated, so let's just change the text instead to something completely nonsensical."

I actually find your explanation even less believable than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I don't necessarily believe it is either).

3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes.

To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any adults left?

Maybe the engineer was debating a LLM on the merits of pineapple on pizza and didn't clear the context history before requesting a code change.

No reasonable developer, given the requirement “remove this checkbox as required by a court order”, would respond by changing it to “I love pineapple on pizza”. There are so many other things that could be possibly done instead: just remove it, hide it with CSS, change it to a “<input type=hidden />”, or change the text to “please check the box” if it was really so hard to remove. I can’t imagine any lone developer or product manager being so petty that they would risk their job to spite a court order. The checkbox is only there because someone higher up wants it to be there.

You can easily verify this wasn't the case by checking archive.is and seeing that the checkbox was removed for a day before the new one was added or checking stories and comments on what happened or looking at the commit history since the repository is open source.

If there were no facts in evidence, it your alternate possibility would still not be plausible since there's no reason the person wouldn't hide the checkbox if they didn't want to delete it but there's also no reason not to just delete it since removing it from the client is as much of a code change as changing the text.

The WPEngine checkbox was removed late in the week, and replaced with the pineapple question after the weekend.

Developers on WordPress.org have stated that the value was not stored, and still is not stored. Matt also said he didn't care if you checked it or not.

WordPress isn't as legacy as those platforms for whom "too hard to change the functionality, just change the text" is common.

I'll be honest: I think it's pretty funny, and I think matt probably agrees. Also, as others mention, it's much easier/faster then removing the field and column and validation, yes.

And I wouldn’t want to work with you or Matt. We can behave like adults and I don’t get paid enough to deal with this kind of immaturity.

I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.

There is no “we” here. It’s a man making arbitrary decisions about pineapple on pizza. There is no plan and the watch and drawn out nature is indicative of someone reacting to events rather than implementing a plan.

I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.

If was running a major site that depends on Wordpress , or am an agency that makes use of Wordpress extensively I would be very concerned. Irrespective of who is right/wrong, Matt’s actions come across as rash, irrational , and reactive.

Definitely not the type of leader I would want to be leading an open source project I depend on.

From a risk analysis perspective, this would make me question if wp is fit for my company. If the ceo/leader can behave in this way , what are the risks he pulls similarly self destructive moves that jeopardises my sites?

I am have no bone in this fight, I dropped wp back In 2010, due to the multitude of issues with plugins, themes and security. It was easier(and more secure) to roll an app with django/rails.

Though, I think if you are using Wordpress. Either look for alternatives , or look to a fork with better governance.

If Wordpress no longer receives security updates, tons of sites will have to be migrated. Many are not economically efficient to migrate, and will be lost. Given the scope of that ecosystem, this is an extinction event for the Web.

I think "breakdown" is the wrong word: he's always been this way. I think he may have Borderline Personality Disorder. The behavior Matt is engaging in here is called "emotional dysregulation", which is characteristic of BPD, and he has a long history of doing it whenever he faces even the slightest criticism.

In 2010, he attempted to get Ben Cook fired from his day job for writing an essay criticizing his dual role as head of both Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation. Over the last few years, he has waged a disproportionate war against queer users on Tumblr for lightly criticizing his leadership.

Don't forget the time Matt allegedly attempted to extort the WPEngine CEO into coming to work for him [1]

1: https://www.therepository.email/wp-engine-sues-automattic-an...

He has investors to answer to. He has an over evaluation that unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed. He’s trying to pull in revenue and he’s destroying a competitor to take their customers.

According to crunchbase, Automattic has taken just shy of $1B in funding. Yes, that's a B as in billion.

I wonder where those investors are on returns on that investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.

> unless he grows the value of his company he’s screwed

What are the consequences, exactly?

I suspect they gave him a timeline to IPO and/or sell or he's kicked out as CEO. His recent actions are those of a man with a deadline and nothing to lose.

Assuming that is the case: WordPress the company only needs to stay stable and valuable until everything goes through; if it burns down after that he's still met his obligations (to an extent).

That is narrowly correct and widely incorrect

zen question: what is the "everything" that will "go through"?

That's the core problem: there's no exit in sight. None

If you invest in a company and it’s valued at $1,000,000. And you want to make some money. You sell your investment in the company.

If after 5 years revenue doesn’t grow the value is still $1,000,000. Unless the value increases the investors won’t get a return on their investment. Often investment comes with conditions.

So no it’s not as simple as “just needs to stay stable”

My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at. And this is a critical detail that I'm fuzzy on. If anyone has context (even links with further info) I'd be very much appreciative.

I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and gritty details that led there. All I know are the high level about WP Foundation demanding payment from WP Engine.

As a matter of principle, I believe very strongly that a creator has the right to set the conditions upon which their creations are disposed of, and that no one is entitled to services provided by others free of charge in perpetuity. If it is the case that WP Engine was costing WordPress.org a lot of money and that they were the single largest consumer of WordPress.org's web services, then I don't think it is unreasonable for WordPress.org to say "Hey, this is not financially viable for us, we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal."

I hear a lot of people express the opinion that Matt seems unhinged and is trying to "extort" money from WP Engine. But without knowing more that seems, to me, like looters and moochers demanding that other people pay out of pocket for things they want or need. I want there to be more to the story than that.

And for what it's worth I have little difficulty believing that Matt just went about things in all the wrong ways and could have worked things out without resorts to litigation if he wasn't such a jerk about it.

But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights. WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.

So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using? I've heard accusations that there has been a feud between the two going back years but if those finer details are buried in that story, then why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?

(Before anyone responds, I understand the Promissory Estoppel theory that forms the legal complaint, I'm asking specifically about peoples' understanding, even if speculative, regarding Matt's motivations).

Differentiating IP/copyright/code rights and infrastructure hosting is definitely an important aspect of the feud.

In a perfect world, open source projects would never use private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any particular private infrastructure!).

That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read: have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to the open source project) has always been more difficult (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting a license file.

Well said.

I think Matt Mullenweg has every right to take the action he's taking. It really seems like many companies are perfectly happy to exploit open source products.

In this case, it seems like one company makes a lot of money using the Wordpress codebase and doesn't want to make equal contributions. Then they use the money they're making to turn around and sue Wordpress for standing up for themselves.

If I were Matt Mullenweg, you can bet I would be incensed! I'm honestly very surprised that Matt Mullenweg is facing such criticism when he's simply trying to protect IP that he and the community have spent a lot of time and money building together. It's only natural to want to ban the freeloaders, and in any case, it's a little outrageous to think anyone is entitled to access to the resources and creations of others with or without compensation.

I don't think there's any disagreement about that particular aspect of what kicked this all off (in terms of being incensed about an imbalance of contributions to money being made) - it's the _way_ he went about that, _then_ all the subsequent WPDrama that unfolded (personal attacks, unilateral cancellations, removals, blockages, deletions etc) that has most people concerned.

I've been around WordPress since 2003 (since the fork from B2/Cafelog) and have watched Matt evolve over that time, make a few missteps, act/react with humility, speak conscientiously on a wide range of matters and issues. The actions of the past 12 months seem quite contrary to that established behaviour (speaking from a far perspective & never had met the man in person).

I feel sad whether this is a deliberate or unintentional (mental) path, but am confident that like the drama that created WP's popularity orignally (MoveableType), there will be a path forward for the community - it's the damage that will be done in getting there that's upsetting...

I don't think many people have issue with his original complaints. They're responding to the absurd way he's behaved.

There's a right way and a wrong way to handle a conflict, and he's taken a direct route down the wrong way with his foot on the gas.

He would've been wise to read Sun Tzu, 48 laws, all those books on the basics of manoeuvring in a conflict, and found himself some wise and steady council to guide him through this effectively.

Instead he basically burst into a sustained petulant childish tantrum. He was doing things that basically any adult would know not to do.

He was in here, running his mouth in the comments section after legal proceedings had started. With everyone telling him to shut up. And instead he just kept going. And the comments literally then showed up in the legal proceedings against him, as everyone had warned.

Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Yes he had rights, and yes he could have exercised them to the benefit of the open source community (which was extremely important given WPs role in the internet - effectively carrying the beacon of the original internet vs its consumption by big companies).

But he also had obligations stemming from that. He should have played this diligently and carefully. But he didn't. And thus everyone expresses their disappointment in their own ways.

Tens of thousands of us depend on WP directly for our livelihood, and millions more depend on it for their businesses and connections with the world. We all need confidence in the stability of WP or an alternative to use and recommend it. WP was right to sanction WPE. It's spilling over to all of us now though.

WordPress is an open source project, and part of being an open source project is you don't really have a right to demand that people not mooch off of your work, at least as far as most open source licenses are concerned [1]. If you don't like that, well, then open source isn't for you.

The other major complication here is that Matt has thoroughly mixed his several roles together, so you have to spend time untangling what is Matt-personally, what is Matt-as-his-company, and what is WordPress-via-Matt. When you untangle that, the core demand appears to be that Matt (in who knows what role) demanded that WP Engine compensate Matt-the-company for its use of WordPress-via-Matt resources being provided by Matt-personally (that no one knew was being provided by Matt-personally as opposed to WordPress-via-Matt). Given the thoroughly tangled mess of that stuff, and the fact that--in the past--Matt made several steps to untangle the ownership of everything, I am not particularly persuaded by the logic of "I'm just trying to get them to pay their fair share," as they're not being asked to pay the people they should be paying.

> why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?

Because they're asking someone to pay, not the foundation whose resources they are allegedly using, but their largest competitor (a very distinct legal entity).

[1] There are licenses that do have clauses that let you take action, but generally having such a clause makes it not Open Source-compliant, and frequently the relicensing needed to bring the current licenses to that state involves a lot of drama.

WordPress' GPL license guarantees you access to the code and specific rights. It doesn't guarantee you access to the the WordPress database repository of plugins and themes.

WordPress could, in theory, make the repository free for access to all except larger hosting entities that put more of a strain on things, for which there is a fee or throttling. Possibly even indicating this within the WordPress admin UI which flavor of access the user is getting. "Pro" vs "Free" for example.

Note that I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is based on my understanding of open source licenses like the GPL over my 20 years working on PortableApps.com.

w.org infra was said to be owned by the foundation for the community.

Automattic's lawyer told the community the same thing.

Volunteers built in to WordPress core dependence on W.Org infra on that understanding. there are over 1500 hardcoded references to W.org infra.

Now those volunteers find out it's "Matt's personal website" and he can do what he likes with it. Including banning volunteers who's livelihoods depend on it for nothing more than reacting to a post with a disproving emojji.

> But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights.

The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.

> WordPress.org has to pay for their servers

Wordpress.org was sold to volunteers as a community asset owned by the foundation not Matt and even Matt's lawyer made public statements to that effect.

Volunteers spent their time building it up, developing in to WordPress core reliance on w.org infra, etc..

Matt has a long history of un-ethical behaviour, and the current WPDrama is extensive. For me alone, the one screenshot of his threats to go to the press with confidential information about someone unless they did what he wants was enough.

Now volunteers find out from court documents that w.org is "Matt's personal website" as he puts it.

Additionally, now many volunteers are banned from the thing they helped build simply for voicing disagreement with his actions which are almost universally accepted as unethical. Many have been banned for reacting to one of his post with with disapproving emojji!!

Matt has built up the foundation through deception and then weaponised it.

> > But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights.

> The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.

If we're going to get that pedantic, and ignore the "spirit" in which that statement of mine was intended, then it's equally fair for me to point out that no, the legal case is not anything to do with a "crime." It is a civil dispute.

> WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.

WPEngine allege

> > "As part of the WordPress community, WPE has contributed tens of millions of dollars in ongoing support "

> going to get that pedantic

I didn't think i was being pedantic, sorry.

I don't understand the US Court system but from what i gather, at least Attempted Extortion and breaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are crimes.

COMPLAINT FOR:

(1) Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations;

(2) Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations;

(3) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq.;

(4) Attempted Extortion;

(5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code § 17200, et seq.;

(6) Promissory Estoppel;

(7) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement;

(8) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Dilution;

(9) Libel;

(10) Trade Libel; and

(11) Slander.

>My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at.

Matt would be allowed to charge for access to Wordpress.org. It's his property. What you can't do is:

make a service publicly available and then threaten a company that it needs exclusive terms

In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an estimate.

>we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal.

In the lawsuit Automattic asked the judge to force WPengine to shut down their mirrors. They want control over the system. Which is also legit, but legally you can't offer public terms for all and then threaten a company with "the nuclear option" unless they agree to a separate set of terms for 8% of revenue.

Wordpress.org could have terms that allow companies to setup mirrors, but they explicitly don't want this, and wordpress.org is hardcoded into Wordpress Core.

> In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an estimate.

Automattic and Mullenweg argued that WP Engine should be required file a bond of $1.6 million to ensure that they are compensated for potential costs and damages if it’s later found that the preliminary injunction was granted without sufficient basis.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/judge-sides-with-wp-engi...

That's a separate heading, which the judge rejected completely. From the same article:

>WPEngine’s arguments are persuasive. …the Court finds that any harm to Defendants resulting from the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief is unlikely, as it merely requires them to revert to business as usual as of September 20, 2024. Accordingly, the Court declines to require WPEngine to post a bond.”

Isn't he within legal rights in fact to take away certain public services whenever he does want? Assuming that's the case (and that is an assumption), the fact that WPEngine went all in on a half billion dollar business model dependent on Matt is a big risk they took; I would think it would be absolutely top priority on their part to understand the nuts and bolts of the ecosystem they depend on.

It's very complicated and beyond my ability to analyze accurately.

The court filing is here if you'd like to have a look. Some california law around anticompetitive behaviour applies.

I thought of trying to summarize but don't wish to be inaccurate. Obviously this is under litigation so it remains to be seen which headings they win on if any.

But it definitely isn't as simple as being able to selectively withdraw a public service at any point for any reason. If it were the case would have been dismissed already.

https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP...

I've read some of it and it's actually compelling reading but it bogs down pretty quick in spin, for example wpe claims they invested hundreds of millions "to serve the community". But the community they are referencing is their own customers. They did not invest millions in core maintenance to my knowledge.

I'm more interested in the colloquial understanding than the legalese. The dev community will probably have a more relevant opinion than the judge imho. As I see it, WP core is free and the "public utility" you mention. But the infrastructure running the plugins has very little precedent it seems, and that's the important part. That's what Matt's pissed about. I don't think there is a good analogy in the Linux ecosystem or anywhere else as to such a massive undertaking as WP that is simultaneously non profit and for profit. And that's where I think it's kind of foolhardy to go head to head with the guy who's managed to staple it all together while they're still standing on it.

The thing he withdrew is their plugin repo access which is not a public service afaik. I can see why Matt is going crazy running servers for hundreds of millions of downloads and people treat it like he's legally obligated to do that. It's an ambitious enterprise and people should be sensitive to the fact that they probably work extremely hard keeping that going.

Thanks! Your reply added some missing context. Particularly the part about Automatic not wanting WP Engine to host their own mirrors. That definitely casts doubt and suspicion on Matt and Automatic's motivations and helps put into perspective all of the Matt/Automatic "haters" who are siding with WP Engine. Without context like that, it sounds like people are asking others to float the bill for them. But if they are being denied the option to "self-serve" then yeah, there's obviously way more to it.

> So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using?

That isn't what happened. The for-profit company Automatic asked for money, and then used their CEO's exclusive control of the non-profit foundation to punish their direct competitor.

It would be an entirely different thing if this was part an initiative to charge commercial users of WordPress.org for the costs they incur the non-profit foundation to stabilize it's funding. Such a thing could have been handled professionally without threats of "nuclear" retaliation.

> But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights

Being a jerk isn't a crime, but it does broadcast a lack of professionalism and mental stability. Those aren't great traits to see in and individual who has unilateral control over infrastructure that you depend on. Those are extremely concerning traits when that individual has demonstrated a willingness to use that control to pursue personal vendettas in childish ways.

The problem the community is facing is that Matt is a weak, single point of failure. To re-establish trust given Matt's actions here, the non-profit needs to no longer be under his control, but under that of an independent board of directors.

20 years at the helm and one major conflict over a half billion dollar business doesnt strike me as particularly weak. Personally I would be much happier if he just keeps on keepin on. The BDFL model has a strong precedent for jerk-ness a la Linus Torvalds

> because of some valuation drop or being short on money.

Why is that hard to believe? People have done much worse for much less money.

People would rather believe their leaders broke their brain than to accept that their power is wielded over us for selfish personal gain

I don't think it's a symptom of a mental breakdown. I think it's a symptom of highly successful tech people who, over time, get more enclosed by a "yes-men" bubble and start to think their shit don't stink so much that they then actually start to lose touch with what most of us call "reality". You might call that "a mental breakdown", I call that being an asshole.

Over the past 5 years or so, I've start becoming numb to all of the tech leaders who I used to hold in high regard who I now think are just the boring epitome of self-involved douchebags, e.g. Musk and Andreesen, for example. It just looks like garden-variety power intoxication to me.

Not a mental breakdown, but, a memento mori for all of us:

The problem with success is even when success is a reality, it's effects are temporary.

You get hungry even though you have just eaten.

The most telling moment for understanding what's going was Matt responding to successful critics by saying they weren't successful enough

I can't remember exactly what he said, & too much has happened for me to find it with 5 minutes of Googling. Something like "oh yeah well you only got to $2B valuation and it took 1000 engineers, what do you know"

If there is a breakdown here, it's one I've seen before, but wasn't cognizant of until I saw it 100x over at Google, sometimes tragically: you got everything you thought you wanted, but you're bored enough to need a new challenge, but you're not cognizant enough of it to effectively make that choice _before_ your actions show you that you need to.

Doesn't help any that it would amount to "backing down" in this scenario, he can't say that now without people thinking he was forced out somehow.

When I think about this, I also remember:

- the somewhat odd acquisitions over the past few years, Tumblr, that one cross-platform messaging app that got a ton of press for insisting they'd do iMessage....another strong indicator of boredom with the day-to-day, IMHO.

- His clear, repeated, focus is on money. It's never in primary focus, but it's always there, in everything lashing out that is publicized. If you're unhappy, and you're not sure why, and you have everything you thought you wanted, one easy thought train to jump on is "the compensation is not commensurate for the work"

This is a very interesting take, and I am going to largely agree with you here. It really looks like this may be what is going on. This is really a symptom of a much larger phenomenon, in that a society that values material wealth , and only acknowledges a material reality without realising or recognising the metaphysical reality.

There is nobody left to disagree with him, he made sure of that. Disagreeing with him at this point means he's gonna come after you [1], your job [2] or your reputation [3].

1. https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/

2. https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/

3. https://ma.tt/2024/12/inc-hit-piece/

Why do you assume that he is suffering from a mental breakdown as opposed to someone who tripped into his position and has always been out of his depth?

As long as money is flowing, nobody gives a damn how shitty you are. Once the money stops, however ...

Or perhaps is suffering from realization that there's no free lunch on this planet and sometimes it is paid for with drama and even very very rare one may get to be the one who calls the shots. Question is whether one is in position to pull it up when one needs to take the credit back.

He seems do be doing fine, though, perhaps also is having the time of his life, nothing wrong from perspective of other for-profit projects. Wonder who promised this and how was it guaranteed it'd not happen at some point?

Besides LLMs be soon spitting 'wordpress retold' with Cursor and all, and he may have just realized it.

Parasocial sympathetic deflection at its finest.

This is a childish emperor tantrum, stressing everybody beneath him for petty cause.

Respectfully, confidently asserting someone else's mental state or their motives is a mistake. Because there's no way for you to know, it backs you and others into an intellectual corner that is entirely unnecessary and lowers the level of discourse, in addition to being unhelpful when people are experiencing actual psychiatric crises.

I feel for him and the people in his wake. Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.

At this point, if he stepped down it would be seen as giving in. So highly unlikely until the legal dust settles a bit.

I also agree with other commenters that it's not a mental breakdown but more of a poorly executed strategy that's been in the works for awhile. To take Wordpress more into a closed source hybrid ecosystem.

And at this point, anything Matt does in favor of Automattic's business plan will blow up on social. My bet is this will continue for another 6 months at least until Automattic's revenue increases or flatlines.

But yeah, I'm curious about the mental toll when founders go through these types of hyper public events. The startup world needs a lot more discussion and guidance for mental health.

> Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.

Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders.

Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders.

The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders.

I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them also makes it unlikely they'll suddenly decide to step away cleanly. Instead, they'll decide that everyone else is wrong, they're the ones that really put in all the work, {insert rationalization here}, and fight change.

> The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders

If we're talking real-life dictatorships and republics, the latter make much better use of brilliant leaders' talents. In part by not having a power struggle at the end that, on a coin flip, decides if the work survives.

In the short or intermediate term?

I'd argue that democracy is almost always a roadblock to a great leader's ability to execute their vision quickly and fully.

On the other hand, it often wins out in the long run by not losing as much when the inevitable terrible leader comes to power. (As well as providing a pressure release mechanism to prevent populist revolution)

> democracy is almost always a roadblock to a great leader's ability to execute their vision quickly and fully

Quickly and fully, sure. In the end, however, good ideas see daylight. (Even if it means the other side co-opts and renames it!) That doesn’t happen in autocracies because the same people remain in power longer; this means by the time the opposition dies everyone who supported or potentially remembered it (or the opportunity it was meant to capitalise on) is gone.

More than that, republics have historically been far superior at integrating other cultures. That process of appropriation means the source for good ideas is wider than the population, something autocracies can only achieve with money and thus not at scale and in limited scope. (Engineers working for the KSA aren’t changing its culture, they’re building a block.)

All good points!

There can be some mal-incentives in democracies when it's in the opposition's interest for things to fail though (read: positioning for the next election).

Imho, that's more a US problem of an overly-visible executive (whoever that currently is), to the detriment of congressional visibility (i.e. 95% of congress supported this, including your congresspeople).

From a US perspective, parliamentary style systems, with checks to prevent German/Italian/Israeli-style deadlock when the party percentages don't line up, seem the superior implementation.

Agreed. I also think that being an autocratic leader makes it worse, because you get used to yes-sayers around you and the power in general.

he's not wrong about the fears, he's just reacting in a terrible way

Stimulants are a heck of a drug.

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