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Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash
- lobochrome 2y agoSo what’s the alternative to Wordpress? I run a few small business sites and I just didn’t care enough. But the guy seems to meltdown in his own juices too much. Can’t be sustainable.
- MattGaiser 2y ago> citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025. When it comes to Mullenweg, I am always impressed that there is often some worse behaviour mentioned in the article...
- Y_Y 2y ago> Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has described Matt Mullenweg’s move to shut down WordPress’s sustainability team as “bizarrely heinous behavior.” Is it bizarrely heinous? Or is it just kind of bad? I enjoy WordPress drama, and run a couple of lazy WordPress services, but I don't think that this is actually worth all the spilt ink and tears, relative to all the other injustices a person might choose to concern themselves with.
- Dalewyn 2y ago[flagged]
- DemocracyFTW2 2y agothe quote in question was not coming from the journalist that "bashed out some text" tho but from a team member. Thanks anyway for lashing out at the profession in general coz who do they think they are, right. Gotta know your limits, right?
- Dalewyn 2y ago[flagged]
- rafram 2y agoHowever you feel about her wording in this case, Kara Swisher is definitely a journalist, not a “journalist.”
- Dalewyn 2y ago[flagged]
- rafram 2y agoShe wrote this in a casual post on Threads [1], not an article. There’s no attempt to “sensationalize for clicks” here. Journalists don’t have to be in journalist mode all the time when they’re communicating casually. You seem to have a rather large chip on your shoulder. [1]: https://www.threads.net/@karaswisher/post/DEniSxyS01i https://www.threads.net/@karaswisher/post/DEniSxyS01i
- safety1st 2y agoIt sounds like you actually work for a living and aim to conduct your business professionally, which is probably why you don't understand all these people who aren't doing either of those things. I don't know man, I feel like the entire planet has gone mad over the course of about 15 years. Who am I supposed to root for? The executives who throw public tantrums and behave like children? Or the activists who try to turn the company into a vehicle for whatever the latest left wing cause is? How about someone in that organization gets back to actually building some good fucking software? Is there a connection between all the horsing around these people do and the fact that after 5+ years of development Gutenberg is still kind of a pile of crap? I feel like not so long ago in history it would have been obvious to everyone that the answer is yes, work is about actually working and producing things. But now everybody's primary job is apparently to wail on Twitter instead of putting butt in seat for 8 hours a day, writing code, and on a good day, maybe figuring out how to get a little better at it. Idk man. Whatever this world is I don't really want any part of it anymore, I want to switch to the sane timeline.
- ericjmorey 2y agoIs this recursive satire?
- DoneWithAllThat 2y agoI was more struck by the fact that the author thinks anyone would or should care what some random tech journalist thinks about something. Person has opinions, news at eleven.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoI don't really think you believe that journalism shouldn't exist or that you don't know journalism includes opinion and commentary, but I don't know why this is controversial enough to trigger that response. What's funny, though, is that the trite "news at 11" catchphrase is very much also invoking traditional journalism.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago[flagged]
- westlifer 2y agoWhy do you say he's a transphobic bigot?
- immibis 2y agoPossibly because he is one. You could Google "mullenweg" and "transphobia" together for more details, dear troll account created 3 minutes before commenting.
- westlifer 2y agoI did Google it. So perhaps you can explain how these three tweets from Matt are evidence of him being a "transphobic bigot", as others are claiming: 1. > When will you be honest with your followers? That the repeated adult content violations were not pictures like this, but likely ones on your other accounts (actual names): irishbigcockgiri, burgerfootjob, furryvore-burps, bredstrogen, cumburp, doggirlballsack, hungqueen, bigtittycockgf, bigcocktittygf, girltaint, muskmommy, girlballsack, showersharts, sapiosexual-breeder, catgirlhairball, catgirlcondom, catgirlcumsock, catgirlballsack, cumspangler. 2. > These photos are fine for Tumblr. Someone else could post them. You can't because you violated the community guidelines and terms of service multiple times and are banned for life. With your new accounts on other services, consider not posting deathwishes against their staff. 3. > Reporting credible threats of violence or terrorism is actually a legal requirement. No one reported your "i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death", however. > There's no problem with your transition photos, or the millions of others that have been posted. That last tweet in particular is evidence against the claim, is it not?
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoThe first tweet is precisely why any honest person would conclude he's transphobic: those were private accounts and he abused his power as CEO to get that information. He publicly outed her out of pure transphobic spite, presumably hoping that Twitter's merry bands of transphobes would dogpile her there and everywhere else they could find her. (I also heard that he repeatedly misgendered her in a now-deleted Tumblr post, but I couldn't find a screenshot.) "You can't proooove that he's transphobic, and you can't prooooove that he outed her because he wanted transphobes to harass her" yeah well we're not in court, this is a social matter. I am an individual human who has to make low-information judgments about other members of my species, and my low-information judgment of Mullenweg is that he's a transphobe. It is impossible for me to see an honest argument to the contrary. I am aware that dishonest arguments come quite easily: - "innocent before proven guilty!" - "what about the tweet where he said 'trans people are okay I guess'" - "that was 8 months ago, when he was a wee 40-year-old lad, he's grown since then" But considering Mullenweg is a horrifically bad person in many other areas of his life, I am quite confident he also sucks when it comes to civil rights.
- mrcwinn 2y agoA "journalist" who won't talk to the principal of the story. Now that's bizarre behavior.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoKara Swisher is an emotional activist type of journalist and not to be taken seriously. It’s not surprising to see manufactured outrage here.
- calmbonsai 2y agoI don't agree with the "manufactured outrage", but I concur on Swisher. Her M.O. is to take a 'hot-button' issue and simply add fuel to the fire with zero nuance or in-depth analysis. Not related, see the entire ReCode fiasco.
- bipson 2y ago> “Today I learned that we have a sustainability team,” Mullenweg said. If this is true: Is there any possible explanation for such a statement where leadership comes out unscathed?
- lapcat 2y ago> If this is true It's not true. It's a blatant lie, as the embedded video in the article proves.
- ulfw 2y agoHe himself clearly showed it's a lie as he admitted on Threads that he started said team. Utterly bizarre.
- bromuro 2y agoIt looks like it was originally just a channel on Slack, that eventually evolved into a “team” without Mullenweg paying much attention to it. The Sustainability agenda , quoted by the article, appears excessive to me as well - and it resonates with me why Mullenweg is asking for a different approach. With the dramas going on, shutting down the channel was a dick move , though.
- bipson 2y agoThis still reflects badly on the leader: - Stuff going on you're not aware of? - Things spiraling out of control/becoming self-directed? - You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years ago, and getting mad on others in consequence? - Your intentions not well understood? All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for resignation. The behavior around it is just childish IMO. I wonder how this affects him being able to do his job.
- matwood 2y ago> All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for resignation. Bingo. If someone wants to be the leader, then they have to deal with leadership. That means that everything going on under your leadership is your responsibility. We've let this slide as a society, letting leaders take credit for successes and then blaming others for failures.
- bovermyer 2y agoMullenweg's behavior is poor, yes, but I wonder how much that will affect Wordpress's market presence. The average person who would use the service isn't likely to hear about any of this.
- ericjmorey 2y agoProbably enough to notice, but not in a way that threatens the company to continue operating profitability.
- iamdbtoo 2y agoHe's making the ecosystem generally unstable and there are a lot of businesses that depend on that stability.
- frereubu 2y agoI've been building websites on WordPress for 15+ years, run a WordPress agency and have many clients who come to us specifically asking for us to use WordPress. I'm seriously considering moving to something else because we use the WP Engine plugin Advanced Custom Fields (pro version) and him pulling the free version from the plugin repo in a hissy fit has made me seriously concerned about the stability of the ecosystem if one guy can do something like that in a fit of pique.
- shiftpgdn 2y ago[flagged]
- mjburgess 2y agoAh yes, the specific structure of WPE's ownership is sufficient reason to move away from them -- but the behaviour and structure of WP's ownership isnt...
- shiftpgdn 2y agoYes? There are without exaggeration 1000+ companies offering WordPress hosting. It's a replaceable product. Nothing WPEngine offers is unique or special. WordPress itself is an entire ecosystem.
- curiousgal 2y ago[flagged]
- kotaKat 2y agoIt’s time for a 5150 now, right? Dude is a danger to himself and others.
- nozzlegear 2y ago> when this guys self-Luigis What does this mean?
- summeroflove20 2y ago[dead]
- CaptainFever 2y agoI'm guessing "Luigi" is another way of saying "murder" now, so "self-murder" means "suicide".
- mtmail 2y agoLuigi Mangione killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
- kopirgan 2y agoYet another Trump win cascade. Better to prepare for more. Some did it out of conviction. But as we saw with FB the ones that did for other reasons are going to back pedal
- ericjmorey 2y agoWhen the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked.
- _the_inflator 2y agoWordpress is more of an OS today. I took a 12 years hiatus from WP and just went back into actively using it since a couple of weeks now. The shift went clearly into massive plugins that frees you from all the grunt work that was necessary 10+ years ago. To me as someone who once wrote plugins on my own, had to develop themes totally by hand using the infamous WP loop etc. this is like going from command line to drag and drop UI. WP is a OS and Divi, ThriveTheme etc. took over. I like it, it saves a ton of time.
- n3storm 2y agoIt saves a ton of time creating. It wastes a lot of time maintaining and cleaning up infections and debugging poor performance. Is like Dreamweaver but you have to run Dreamweaver all the time your site has visitors and an instance of Dreamweaver for each visitor.
- bl4kers 2y agoWhy did you start using it again?
- LordAtlas 2y agoThe latest childish tantrum Mullenweg has thrown is this passive-aggressive post where, ostensibly to get a Wordpress fork off the ground, he's deactivated the Wordpress.org accounts of 5 people, including the people who just asked for a change in the governance model of Wordpress. That entire post is a huge ball of bitter passive-aggressive shit couched in "howdy" language. [1] This includes the account of someone who has not been involved with Wordpress development since 2020. [2] [3] [1] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/ https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/ [2] https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-stochastic-harassment-for-old-times-sake/ https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-stochast... [3] https://bsky.app/profile/mor10.com/post/3lfgqcge62c2d https://bsky.app/profile/mor10.com/post/3lfgqcge62c2d
- charlangas 2y agoHaving only been exposed to Mullenweg on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I perceived him as the benevolent, zen-like steward of one of the biggest open source projects ever. Watching this drama over the past few months has been... interesting. It's like the dude on the podcast hit his head badly and had his whole personality replaced.
- frankdenbow 2y agoMore likely that a podcast is a performance for marketing
- mmooss 2y agoMaybe this is the performance. The podcast, based on the GGP, is a far more realistic form of human behavior. The current mode seems like a performance, following the trend of other SV CEOs. For people who claim to be really smart, original thinkers, they follow the herd right toward the cliff.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI haven't learned much in my career, (cue "burn after reading" clip [0]), but I do know that CEOs hate it when changes in governance are discussed by underlings, it's way more of a threat to power than any fork. [0] https://youtu.be/J6VjPM5CeWs https://youtu.be/J6VjPM5CeWs
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago[flagged]
- twasold 2y agoTLDR; Mullenweg made a poorly received joke/trolling post on Reddit on Christmas. It could have been perceived as reconciliatory /self deprecating or trolling depending on your perspective. That was the straw in the camel’s back that led the sustainability chief to resign. Mullenweg then disbanded the entire sustainability team which he announced by taunting them on slack.
- pluc 2y agoHe's been doing so much more: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7fc225d https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f... Again, I hold no sympathy for Silver Lake, but I hope they fuck him up good.
- lawgimenez 2y ago> …Mullenweg threatening to physically dismantle their booth in the middle of the show This is crazy if true.
- voakbasda 2y agoIn all seriousness, I wonder if Matt has a brain tumor. His behavior has gone from merely sociopathic to outright despotic, appearing both irrational and self-destructive. Certainly, he has single-handedly turned the entire WP ecosystem into a toxic cesspool. I feel sorry for everyone that he seems to have threatened, bullied, or outright extorted. Anyone aware of these shenanigans would be wise to steer clear of the entire mess until he is out of the picture.
- RobotToaster 2y ago> The website Plugin Vulnerabilities catches an interesting detail: the language related to hosting forked premium plugins on wordpress.org has been modified, starting on the same day that the ACF takeover happened. I wonder if Matty boy saw my comment, on the post here about the ACF takeover, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy, lol.
- GavinAnderegg 2y agoI wrote a piece yesterday about the recent WordPress drama, including this bit. A fun thing I learned while digging into it is that Mullenweg himself requested that the Slack channel for this team be set up live on stage at WordCamp Europe in 2022. When disbanding the team, Mullenweg said, “today I learned that we have a sustainability team”. Maybe he forgot, but setting up this team was — at least in part — his idea. https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble
- xyst 2y agoDude has gone full Elon at this point. Why hasn’t WP 86’d this guy?
- raverbashing 2y agoI think even Elon is looking more normal than Matt at this time
- throw16180339 2y agoMatt controls the WordPress foundation, owns and operates wordpress.org, is CEO of Automattic, and votes 84% of its stock (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150). AFAICS, there's no one who has the means to remove him.
- mschuster91 2y agoThere's always ways to remove someone completely gone off the rocker. Employees or customers voting with their feet, some big and established name(s) forking off the project, getting the target arrested (if only by provoking an escalation), getting a judge to declare the target mentally unfit, and various illegal methods as well.
- Aurornis 2y agoWordPress and Mullenweg are one and the same, despite all of the superficial distinctions and organizations. He controls it all. There is no viable way to separate without forking the project and using a different name. Mullenweg is already trying to make like difficult for anyone he suspects might be thinking about forking, so anyone leading a fork has to assume that Mullenweg is going to make their life hell. He’s not afraid of dumping money into lawsuits to crush people, so forking WP is a scary proposition.
- skeeter2020 2y agoI didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" was, so I clicked the link to the linked website in this story. I was surprised that it was in fact an initiative to do things like "have a dashboard that shows the climate impact of publishing" and "promote static publishing over..." I assume because serving this content (under someone's model) uses less electricity? Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.
- markx2 2y ago> Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too. This was costing Matt nothing. Zero. The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.
- lupusreal 2y agoSo then nothing was actually cut and these weird people who are super passionate about the climate impact of WordPress of all things can continue to do.. whatever it was they were doing, for free as they were before? If the issue is having a slack channel in the WordPress org, they can just make their own discord server. No big deal.
- voytec 2y agoPerson exhibiting textbook traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder for years goes into mental meltdown, gets sued and loses preliminary injunction. It's only downhill from there.
- coldpie 2y ago> It's only downhill from there. I just hope it's over quickly and some other ownership model comes into place. WordPress is an impressive & important project, it'd be a shame to lose it because of one lunatic.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- knallfrosch 2y agoSounds like he just created a Slack channel where people could chit-chat about "sustainability" much like they chat about football or ESports. Then he found out these guys actually spend all their working lives implementing plugins that do little more than display "Your site needed 0.04663kg of CO2 to run this year" next to a green leaf. Seeing how they spent 1,5 years on this and have little more to show than "concepts of a plan" he was right to shut this down.
- typeofhuman 2y agoOne could argue the sustainability team was disbanded in the name of sustainability.
- philipov 2y agoOne could argue the moon is made of cheese.
- jasonlotito 2y ago> spend all their working lives These were volunteers. > Seeing how they spent 1,5 years They didn't. > he was right to shut this down. Ignorance is a choice.
- knallfrosch 2y agoThank you for all the information you provided.
- neilv 2y ago1. Is Mullenweg's recent behavior as bad as it seems to those of us not very familiar with WordPress? 2. If the behavior is as bad as it seems... Did Mullenweg always behave like this? (Like, hints of it, even if the circumstances at the time meant it wasn't very negative?) Or did it increase slowly over time, or change rather abruptly? I think a national-politics-grade PR attack campaign is unlikely. So, if it wasn't that, I'm wondering whether the current character was always there, or there was some gradual or punctuated mental health change. That can often be helped and healed. Separately, in any case, the larger WordPress community will hopefully realize the risks of dictators and kingdoms, and move to be more resilient. And not make the same mistake yet again, just with a new overlord, like we often do in tech consumption (and in human history, for that matter).
- ternnoburn 2y agoSeeing his posts here, it would appear that his behavior is indeed "as bad as it seems". A serial poster who cannot seem to disengage, took everything personally, and refused to try to understand other perspectives.
- badlibrarian 2y agoI think it started with Tumblr, perhaps behind the scenes. He then did some stupid things under pressure and said some highly inappropriate things in response to criticism. Like others who faced pushback from certain communities, he decided to double down on the arrogance and insensitivity. Unlike others, he doesn't have the charisma, goodwill, or video podcast to pull it off.
- spondylosaurus 2y agoAgreed that his bizarre Tumblr meltdown seemed to be a tipping point, but I still wonder what caused that.
- medimikka 2y ago> Did Mullenweg always behave like this? Matt, literally (he turned 21 then), came of age in the 2004-2006 Silicon Valley climate of the post-Bubble "Trümmerfrauen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%BCmmerfrau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%BCmmerfrau) movements that brought us things such as DHH and Rails, Matt and WordPress, Andreessen being himself, and others, all of which are now considered "problematic." I don't think Matt has changed. The climate these projects operate in, has. To some it's an eggshell walk, to others a game of signaling the right virtues while acting against them in secret, and to some a chance to achieve relevancy or dominance. And for all of them, there's a day of reckoning. 2005s proclivities have no similarities to 2025 dogma, and why should they. Neither did 2005 have any with 1985. Feel old, yet? Matt's Matt. That Matt was what was needed to kick a floundering piece of software (P2) into the kind of trajectory that helped transform it into the absolute unit of a social and communications portfolio, Automattic is today. That kind of Matt is a dinosaur in 2025. As were 1985 coders and founders in 2005. Heck, 2005 didn't look too kindly upon 1999 Silicon Valley mindsets. I guess Matt's "problem" is not, that he has changed. Matt's difficulty is, that he hasn't, and that 2025 is nothing like 2005. And, like DHH or Andreessen or Brendan Eich back in 2014, that can ... hurt. I'm too old to care, but I'd presume today's "golden child" will be a very problematic person in 2045, unless they learn to change or hide behind signals.
- orochimaaru 2y agoWhat did the sustainability team do? I don’t mean an offense to the team members but sustainability for a software company is very niche. Unless you’re a hyper scaler like public cloud services your impact is limited. The whole sustainability area needs a rethink. It needs to be linked to cost of doing business (and no - not idiotic carbon taxes) and I think if you’re using public cloud services it already is. If your code is inefficient you will be hit with higher bills (I know I’m abstracting wildly but this is mostly true). If you need to lower cost/utilization write the code to do optimize. If you own your own data centers, now that’s a very different proposition. Not sure whether Wordpress owns these - and I don’t mean renting space and racks. I mean owning the entire space.
- paulcole 2y agoFrom the article: > Varszegi said the team’s most impactful contribution to WordPress was the publication of the Sustainable Events Handbook, designed to help WordCamp organizers improve the sustainability of their events. The team was also developing a plugin to help site owners estimate the carbon footprint of their website. So the answer is: Not much.
- mmooss 2y agoWhy not carbon taxes? Those are certainly a cost. Why should I and others pay that cost of your business?
- grimblee 2y agoThese people are just feeding his bad buzz by caring, just let him flail alone in the kid playground, don't feed him.
- thot_experiment 2y agoThis, along with facebook cancelling DEI etc is a performative measure that basically means nothing, these people never cared about DEI or the climate, they just correctly understood the political zeitgeist and performed accordingly, just as they are doing now.