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This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing

• wyclif 2y ago
  I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.
  • Implicated 2y ago
    I've been saying this on twitter for months now. I don't believe this is a mentally healthy individual. His continued defence of his behavior with the whole "if you knew what was happening you would understand" style responses indicates he's lost in the sauce. If he's not having some sort of mental health crisis it really begs to question how we got here with someone like him running those organizations for this long. If he is, and he makes it out of this state, I feel for the emotions he's going to have to deal with when he sees (with a different perspective) what he's done to what is ultimately his life's work. It's sad. All the way around, truly just sad.
    • ookblah 2y ago
      I thought that too until you go down the rabbit hole and realize it's been this way since apparently the beginning. It's also interesting to note just how hard everyone was tearing the author apart in the comments only for it to basically become true a decade later. https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger.com/matt-should-resign.php https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger.... I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.
      • ricardonunez 2y ago
        That guy was right predicting conflicts. The comments on that post are something.
      • graemep 2y ago
        I think the conflict of interest is obvious, but most people did not know about it. I think it is so glaring that I would have assumed it would not have been set up like this. > guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. I think there is an element of seeing himself as the good guy and therefore entitled to things as a reward.
      • bugglebeetle 2y ago
        “If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”
      • whycome 2y ago
        That’s a brilliant snapshot. Thanks for sharing. It also really shows the value of things like archive.org — this context would otherwise be lost if a site disappears. It’s also inspiring to see how Ben handled most of the comments/criticism.
      • JBiserkov 2y ago
        Thank you for the "direct link to the bottom of the rabbit hole". This article makes the point clearly and succinctly.
      • gizzlon 2y ago
        And supposedly Matt tried to get him fired for this post! >TLDR. In May 2010 Ben Cook wrote a post titled Why Matt should resign. [..] The post, a well-balanced, well-argued, and respectful post, was not liked by Mr. Mullenweg, who reached out to Ben Cook’s employer, Network Solutions, and tried to get Ben Cook fired. Network Solutions did not fire Ben Cook. Why? Because THAT POST "borders on hate speech" https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/ https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/
  • edoceo 2y ago
    If you're in leadership it's a good idea to get some outside advisors/mentor/muse. Hard to find but, much cheaper than a lawyer. Many times just rubber-ducking the problem with someone can help build a more complete thought experiment.
  • curiousgal 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • bugglebeetle 2y ago
    Nah, this is just what they call “mask off.” The amount of people like this at the top of orgs is not small, nor is this atypical. One could speculate as to the many reasons why this has become more obvious over or they’ve felt emboldened to make this clear over the past 10 years or so, but I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions.
  • robocat 2y ago
    Presuming he has a problem. What makes your think you think he would welcome intervention, or seek professional help, or respond to help? He's clearly ignoring blunt feedback, and I've yet to see anything that suggests he thinks he's doing anything wrong. Our society has been validating his behaviour with his half-billion dollar business: clearly some of his behaviour has value. Our society seems to reward and encourage similar behaviours in other founders (especially in current zeitgeist). Sadly in my experience we don't have many options to help, and sometimes all we can do is watch someone burn themselves and those around them down. He's losing his game and I can't see Automattic surviving the reshuffle that's coming. Business clients hate this shit and they have agency. Matt has been giving employees non-voting shares (a different class): https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/ https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/ although he owns 84% of the normal shares (although details of control depend on agreement with investors). The saddest thing is that I'd guess he will toxically blame Jason Cohen. I'm sure Jason can deal with it (surely dealt with in past) and Jason seems smart enough to take strong advantage of the opportunity he's been gifted by Matt.
    • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Is Jason still at WPEngine?
    • mthoms 2y ago
      FWIW, Matt has never claimed to own 84%. He's only ever claimed to "control" that percentage. Presumably, some investors have assigned him their voting rights by proxy. Oops.
  • gigatexal 2y ago
    Let him destroy Wordpress with his antics. Something better will emerge and it’ll not have this man-child at the helm.
    • chii 2y ago
      not really - there's a lot of existing investment in wordpress which would be lost if this is the case. I think it's better for wordpress community to push out Mullenweg, and establish a community owned source. It is both a fork, but not just of the source code. I think surviving this sort of disaster makes the whole stronger/resilient in the future. Starting anew will surely just have history repeat.
      • gigatexal 2y ago
        Pushing out a founder is fine and all and I’m here for it to happen.
    • pixxel 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • gigatexal 2y ago
        “Something better will emerge” could be a libre fork of the project without him. He is the problem. But also technically it would be (inertia not withstanding) good if the project were replaced with something else, something better. Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.
        • siquick 2y ago
          > Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet. https://wagtail.org/ https://wagtail.org/ is a solid CMS
          • gigatexal 2y ago
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Doesn't he seem to be following the trend: Embracing contempt for anything but ego and power? That's what Musk does, prioritizing those things over profit and the well-being of his businesses. Zuckerberg is all in, so are many others. It's 'founder mode'. In a way, they are following Trump. Why treat it like a novel case, or like he has a mental health issue - unless all these people do.
  • rurban 2y ago
    Same for Elon. He still runs several companies. See also your presidents (current and next), both not fit for any job.
  • zackees 2y ago
    [dead]
  • justin66 2y ago
    > Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help. The generosity inherent in this sentiment is fundamentally a mistake. Mullenweg will keep dominating his domain if people cannot even recognize that he's an adversary, not a friend in need.
• bachmeier 2y ago
  Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?
  • geuis 2y ago
    Momentum. Heavy objects in motion have inertia. Oddly works in a similar fashion with software projects. 20+ years of OSS contributions and Matt leading the project is a LOT of inertia. You can fork the project right now yourself, but until some significant number of contributors move their efforts to your fork, you get no change of direction.
  • rmccue 2y ago
    The value of WordPress is in the brand, the ecosystem, and the community, and we’re all trying desperately to hold that together.
    • Dalewyn 2y ago
      Maybe stop doing that? There's a reason revolutions usually involve total destruction at some point along the way. Makes me wonder with the apparent lack of strong will just how much of the dissent is actually a (very) loud minority.
      • jjulius 2y ago
        Tangential, but I see the same arguments being made as I discuss completely abandoning social media this week - "But where else can we go to find out about X/Y/Z?". I dunno, but we can figure that out, we always have. Maybe, like you said, we should just start with not desperately holding something like that together. Maybe not everyone in the world needs to be in the same place at the same time, maybe a hodgepodge is okay. But people have the need to inform and be informed, so a solution will eventually crop up.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • 2y ago
• pathartl 2y ago
  Been following your posts since the beginning of this. We met a while ago after a Milwaukee WordCamp and I remember talking about API v2 and how WP was going to be brought into the modern era. Honestly, the project just feels stagnant to me. I get wanting to support plugins/the community for as long as possible, but I fear not having a sensible web framework has done nothing but given credence to the common criticism that WP shouldn't be taken seriously. From my perspective as an owner of a small open source project, Matt's comments have been petty and vindictive. I personally probably will never touch the platform again. There's too many other frameworks out there, whether you want something similar like Statamic, Grav, Drupal.. or if you want to build with an actual app framework with Laravel, ASP.NET Core, etc.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Honestly, my first response to this whole fiasco was "people still use WordPress?" It turns out to still be very popular despite HTML infrastructure subsuming many features that WordPress used to offer (on one side) and competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.
    • acomjean 2y ago
      The plugin system is pretty amazing, and block themes allow really much better styling/ management of sites. It’s not perfect but its easy to use and a lot of people know how to use it. We switched our non profit to using it so we could have more people helping post content. We could teach something else, but this was fairly easy..
      • castillar76 2y ago
        Yep. I’ve tried to avoid it but for groups where less technical people need to be able to edit pages and contribute content, WP continues to be the go-to solution. The last time around I tried to avoid it but after trying everything I could find, I gave up and installed it again. I’d love to see some alternatives spring up, but the plugin and theme ecosystem is so large I think it’d be hard to replace anytime soon.
• inglor_cz 2y ago
  Let us ponder for a moment that this is how autocracies go astray, but instead of the banhammer, it is jail or gallows for the dissidents, and possibly a war against an external enemy. No checks on an individual's power will result in self-defeating madness, at least sometimes. It is also a counterpoint to the "just educate people more" crowd. That doesn't save bad institutions from going haywire. Matt Mullenweg is almost certainly a highly educated, well-traveled individual, and yet he rules his roost like Mao once did.
• moralestapia 2y ago
  >I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API. Harsh lesson to learn. He who builds on the people builds on mud. GG.
• grandpoobah 2y ago
  When I've worked with the REST API I've been quite pleasantly surprised by its flexibility. I thought it was quite cleverly designed. Good job mate.