Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
techcrunch.com440 points by impish9208 2 days ago
440 points by impish9208 2 days ago
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 for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.
Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...
(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)
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.
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.
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....
I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.
Thank you for the "direct link to the bottom of the rabbit hole". This article makes the point clearly and succinctly.
That guy was right predicting conflicts. The comments on that post are something.
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"
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.
“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.”
> 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.
Let him destroy Wordpress with his antics. Something better will emerge and it’ll not have this man-child at the helm.
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.
Dismissive naivety of a 20-something year old redditor.
“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.
> Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.
https://wagtail.org/ is a solid CMS
> could be a libre fork of the project
They should call it PressWord.
Then get a ton of free publicity when Microsoft sues them.
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/ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing
Have a favorite one? (Not a list of ten, please, just one or maybe two.) I've found WP easy & pleasant to use for my personal blogs, but I'm open to switching to something that's better and not associated with this nutbar.
Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?
WordPress is a lot more than it's core code. There's a whole ecosystem of plugins, for example, and the usual place to share them (wordpress.org/plugins) is, essentially, controlled by one guy. It's not so easy to fork that.
Then start with a new place to share plugins.
The first people to take this step will most likely have their plugins stolen, just as Matt did with ACF. This means taking this step is a massive danger for the first contributors - those with the highest impact are those with the most to lose.
What do you mean? If you create a neopress.org and host the existing open source plugins there, how can they be stolen?
Just the code of WordPress needs to be updated that the plugins are downloaded from the new URL.
It's not so hard.
What do you exactly mean with „stolen“? Honest question.
He forked the plugin and pointed the original uri to his fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821400
Matt's company will fork your project, replace your original plugin listing and claim all your reviews as theirs, while also stopping you from distributing security updates to force people to switch to their fork.
Imagine if you make your money from selling your plugin, and Matt does this to you. Every WP plugin developer has to live in fear of this happening at any moment, and you can be certain it will happen if you show any kind of resistance towards Matt.
I'd suggest guerilla-scraping the entire plugin site under the radar, unbeknownst to them. Go live with a new site that simply has all the same directory data as the existing site and additional mirror site links for each plugin, And create a process for plugin authors to claim the existing page in the directory.
Matt may be able to fork plugins, but they won't be able to fork every single plugin in the directory, as it isn't very feasible.
It also would then not necessarily be obvious to Matt which plugin listings in the new directory have been claimed, and which plugins are being updated by other people from the community.
Sounds fun. You would only have to provide listing editing if the plugin is not on the other site.
If anyone fills a complaint and can prove ownership a redirect can be provided.
Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.
Just scraping the site isn't quite enough. You'd also have to fork Wordpress to be able to use a plugin directory not under Matt's control, which is important for the average admin to quickly patch security-relevant issues.
But even when you do that, I'd expect him to just give people an ultimatum - either "officially" host on his plugin directory, or others, but not on both. You'd have to reach critical mass pretty much immediately, or Matt can bully the ecosystem into compliance.