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If you're coming to this late you may be missing the history, which is that Wordpress seemed to abuse every power at its disposal to force a third party company

If you're coming to this late you may be missing the history, which is that Wordpress seemed to abuse every power at its disposal to force a third party company out of its ecosystem unless they "paid up", a demand associated with no formal process or agreement or contract of any kind which brought avalanches of negative press and a lawsuit to Wordpress. In the aftermath of that news, he personally wrote blog posts and participated in comment sections, getting deep into the weeds of arguments and going into personal attacks in ways that seemed unflatteringly blow back on him. And seemingly neutral third parties watching these events have found his actions hard to justify and he seems to have alienated a lot of the Wordpress ecosystem (though by no means all and it's hard to quantify that kind of thing). And here, if you read the article (and if the article is basically right in its details), he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. I don't think unhinged is a controversial characterization of his choices both to flex power and get into personal attacks leading up to this point, and this seems like yet another entry. So try looking at the face value of the events being reported before treating the reaction like it must be astroturfing. If you don't read about it, you won't have the context to know what the comments are reacting to.

hypfer 12d ago
> he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. There are a lot of people in this comment section repeating this as if it was an act of heresy, but I kinda do not see why one would do that? I'd like to see terms like "unhinged" to stay reserved for non-made-up structures. Stuff where someone genuinely harms other people and not just their financial wants/needs/etc. The board itself of course wants people to believe that it has power and not following its orders is wrong, but that's just.. their opinion. And they rely on someone actually believing that. It is genuinely weird to me to keep reading this, because it's normal people defending how power structures in which they are not winning work. Why would one do that? What do you care if a board is respected? I kinda get the general desire for "order" thing and all, but boards - generally speaking - do not get there through merit or a democratic mandate, nor do they act in the interest of normal people, so.. why care if he pisses his board off? Care to the degree that is being cared here, I mean. Should he be doing this? Probably not. But the immediate "victim" of it is most likely just a group of people with equally deep pockets doing exactly the same kind of brazen power play. I don't see why that would get strong emotions out of normal workers. Unless of course it's not them at all. Hence that suspicion. __ I've consulted the LLM about this, and while doing so, I've remembered that Boards usually are full of VCs, and YC is VC, so. Yeah, I can see why not respecting the board would be seen as heresy here. Weird how all the money in the world cannot buy one everything, huh?
- glenstein 12d ago
  I would recommend working on control over your attention. You've gone from saying negative reaction was "heavily astroturfed" to acknowledging he should not be doing this and you've gone from that to drifting into first impression shower thoughts about how boards work, apparently learning about the facts your commenting on for the first time every step of the way. I think I can tell from how you're talking about boards that you're underestimating how many there are, how varied they are (non profits, community theaters, land trusts, boring but non-scandalous corporate governance) and how diverse their cultures and missions can be. And we don't need vague shower thoughts about how you think "most" boards work when there's a lot of reported detail about the Wordpress drama that sets the context for their operating conditions with a lot more specificity than your guesstimations. It should be enough to note that the details coming straight out of the reporting are inflammatory enough to the average person that it can explain why there's a negative reaction against Mullenweg without having to assume it was astroturfed, which was the point you were originally making.
  - hypfer 12d ago
    I've learned something today. Thank you for that :)

hypfer 12d ago

> he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. There are a lot of people in this comment section repeating this as if it was an act of heresy, but I kinda do not see why one would do that? I'd like to see terms like "unhinged" to stay reserved for non-made-up structures. Stuff where someone genuinely harms other people and not just their financial wants/needs/etc. The board itself of course wants people to believe that it has power and not following its orders is wrong, but that's just.. their opinion. And they rely on someone actually believing that. It is genuinely weird to me to keep reading this, because it's normal people defending how power structures in which they are not winning work. Why would one do that? What do you care if a board is respected? I kinda get the general desire for "order" thing and all, but boards - generally speaking - do not get there through merit or a democratic mandate, nor do they act in the interest of normal people, so.. why care if he pisses his board off? Care to the degree that is being cared here, I mean. Should he be doing this? Probably not. But the immediate "victim" of it is most likely just a group of people with equally deep pockets doing exactly the same kind of brazen power play. I don't see why that would get strong emotions out of normal workers. Unless of course it's not them at all. Hence that suspicion. __ I've consulted the LLM about this, and while doing so, I've remembered that Boards usually are full of VCs, and YC is VC, so. Yeah, I can see why not respecting the board would be seen as heresy here. Weird how all the money in the world cannot buy one everything, huh?

glenstein 12d ago
I would recommend working on control over your attention. You've gone from saying negative reaction was "heavily astroturfed" to acknowledging he should not be doing this and you've gone from that to drifting into first impression shower thoughts about how boards work, apparently learning about the facts your commenting on for the first time every step of the way. I think I can tell from how you're talking about boards that you're underestimating how many there are, how varied they are (non profits, community theaters, land trusts, boring but non-scandalous corporate governance) and how diverse their cultures and missions can be. And we don't need vague shower thoughts about how you think "most" boards work when there's a lot of reported detail about the Wordpress drama that sets the context for their operating conditions with a lot more specificity than your guesstimations. It should be enough to note that the details coming straight out of the reporting are inflammatory enough to the average person that it can explain why there's a negative reaction against Mullenweg without having to assume it was astroturfed, which was the point you were originally making.
- hypfer 12d ago
  I've learned something today. Thank you for that :)