Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.
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.
Except they almost NEVER are, in fact, the most common trait shown by executives is dishonesty.
wp engine has also bought out multiple competing hosts, so they're a direct competitor with deep pockets
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.
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.
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.
Automattic previously spent ~4k hours a week maintaining wordpress, so I'm not sure what you're on about
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.
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?
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
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).
To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any adults left?
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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'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).
Reddit destroying its user communities causes real damage. Those users don't magically congregate somewhere else.
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.
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).
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...
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.
It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.