Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash
therepository.email217 points by robin_reala 3 months ago
217 points by robin_reala 3 months ago
I 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.
“WordPress is in trouble” depends on what “WordPress” is.
WordPress the supply chain is currently dependent on wordpress.org. The community is working to route around this by decentralising distribution - see efforts such as AspirePress.
WordPress the software development project is dependent on wordpress.org, and there is no way to route around this unless Matt agrees to give up his DFL position or a fork is created.
WordPress the brand is being tarnished, mostly by Matt’s actions. wpdrama creates a riskier environment when assessing whether to use it as a CMS.
WordPress the community is being denigrated and diminished. Again, I think only a change in governance can resolve that.
> “WordPress is in trouble” depends on what “WordPress” is.
The one thing I’ve learned from all this drama is that all of the separated components of “WordPress”, from the .com to the .org and from the code to the hosting, were mostly superficial. Mullenweg appears to be equally in control of all of them and throws his weight around wherever it suits his agenda.
The only thing I have not seen Matt do is taking even an ounce of accountability. It simply does not exist for him. Just like his professionalism that’s not there.
I know Matt hangs around these parts and at no turn have I seen him engage in curious conversation.
Basically what I have seen is emotional outbursts and crusading against the windmills.
Even in implementation they're pretty intertwined. The org version is missing a bunch of basic features that make com's "jetpack" plugin almost mandatory, which includes invasive tracking that's hard to turn off.
Embarrassing behavior for someone that became wealthy off other peoples' open-source contributions.
That's literally every rich tech CEO though. All of the FAGMAN companies use hundreds of open source projects internally, and even when they do contribute back they end up driving those projects in directions that benefit their bottom line above all else. Presumably they wouldn't contribute at all if if the dollar cost of an internally-developed equivalent wasn't even higher than contributing to OSS.
I don't have any stake in this drama since I haven't used WordPress for something like 13 years, buy to me this feels like crab bucket mentality, going after Mullenweg because he feels like a target that could actually be taken down as opposed to people like Zuck/Page/Brin/Nadella/etc who are truly untouchable. The level of vitriol just seems unreasonably high for something that isn't really that big of a deal.
Maybe if he wasn't personally and very publicly trolling an entire open-source community, which has created financial burden for users, then people in that community wouldn't be so upset.
Well, that and Mullenweg did a bunch of actually illegal stuff instead of just arguably immoral stuff.
Mullenweg has decided to pretty much shutdown development efforts for 6 months on WordPres? Why? Legal actions, he forced upon himself!
I cannot understand how he is the guy in charge of all of this.
Dude has gone full Elon at this point. Why hasn’t WP 86’d this guy?
WordPress 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.
Given the risks, it would likely have to be done by a foundation with deep pockets and clout in the community. I could see an org like EFF do the work, they have the clout that any attacks against them would fall flat and they probably have deep enough pockets too.
Besides an org like that that would do it for ideological reasons, the only other party would be some large org that is deeply invested in the WP ecosystem. I imagine there is some ecomm giant that's probably got 8 or 9 figures sunk into WP, for them it would be worthwhile to fork as it would likely be cheaper than migrating to another solution, but that's a hard maybe because you would need the right org with the right set of priorities to take on something like this.
All of this is just pure speculation, if I'm being honest I find it unlikely that either scenario plays out in the real world.
I hope EFF have more important things to do than forking a php cms. It's popular but not important IMO
Thinking Apache, Mozilla, FSF or Linux foundation would be better stewards than EFF.
Counting income + assets - liabilities - expenses:
Mozilla ~142.7 million https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
Linux Foundation ~136 million https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
Apache has ~4.25 million based on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/470...
FSF - 902k if I did the math right on this (ouch) https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/428...
Not sure I'd trust FSF to steward a project. Apache could but it feels like they're almost a graveyard.
Also not sure I'd want Linux to control it based on the latest Chrome/Google dealings.
Not a huge fan of Mozilla, but it's somewhat in their wheelhouse, at least.
What else is there for tech non-profits and dev stewardship of something like this?
So it’s the end of Wordpress, within a decade if it continues at its current trajectory.
Drupal community to benefit here tremendously. As well as consultant work to migrate away from WP
Drupal has spent at least the last ~9 months positioning for this with the 'Drupal CMS'/'Starshot' product development initiative.
Matt 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). AFAICS, there's no one who has the means to remove him.
There'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.
That’s standard authoritarian gaslighting.
“Why did you do this thing?”
“Sir, you told us to.”
“Don’t argue with me. You’re fired”
or may be typical leaders have a better vision of what "sustainability" means.
"Hire great engineers that have sustainability in their bones"
Actual implementation by the grifters : Hire other grifters with Sustainability in their resume, whose only job is to act as gatekeepers with psuedo-science garbage and make this team as big as the Engineering Team.
It's perfectly fine for the leader to look at the implementation and say "what's this fucking bullshit and cut everything".
These concepts are of course completely alien to leader/rich-hating HN
I 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.
> 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.
> This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.
These were salaried employees working on the sustainability team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?
No, they were all community members working for free.
Check out the bios of the team reps here: https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability/2024/12/13/proposa...
Here are all the contributors on the GitHub repo, also all volunteers: https://github.com/WordPress/sustainability/graphs/contribut...
Mullenweg can shut down the team because he has complete control over all the WordPress.org infrastructure.
My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members.
He cannot control how people choose to spend their own free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt, there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily do this for free.
This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.
>There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for (...)
I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.
There is literally nothing stopping them from continuing in another chatroom, not administered by Matt.
You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things.
That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.
And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.
Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.
So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
They can publish their "how much carbon did this WordPress instance burn" plugin without any approval from Matt, under the name of their own organization. Since they weren't being paid to do this in the first place, the only thing Matt was giving them was a chatroom which they can replace for free.
If they were actually being paid for this, which is contrary to numerous other comments in this discussion, then it actually does make sense for Matt to cancel that work. But I have been assured they weren't being paid, so they didn't have any money on the line and can just walk away from Matt's org while simultaneously continuing the work they are supposedly super passionate about.
In one level,yeah you're right- a) I don't know if it's really super important work and b) the physical payout is probably the same for those folks doing that work regardless of if it's done in the context of WP or not.
You might consider, though, that the context of a bit of work does matter. And to other folks working in that context might take that capricious dismissal as a mark of how their own contributions might be seen.
Like yeah, they weren't getting paid, but that also means it wasn't a big cost to keep them volunteering- there are people up and down the WP ecosystem doing a lot of work for the exact same reasons. It's why- to my original point- I never tried to participate in the larger development efforts: the thing is locked up by one person so ultimately those folks are working on someone else's toy.
He can't stop them from doing stuff on their own as they like. That is true.
However once the publish: He has the trademark, and unless this group of people was very careful in their wording, to only state technical facts and not opinions, he can sue them for perceived damages and based on recent action he seems to have chosen the aggressive approach, despites potential trouble for his company and product.
So 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.
Mullenweg was the one who requested the creation of the Slack channel.
Its purpose was to be a greenwash figleaf. These activities are supposed to be toothless and accomplish nothing because that isn't why they exist.
If he can make the channel, he can delete the channel. If the people in that channel want a new place to chat, they can make one. So what's the problem?
> The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.
The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.
I found it kinda silly at first, like how would WP actually contribute to a reduction in climate change. But I think at the scale that WP is deployed at (millions upon millions of sites), changing something like static output by default could contribute to a non-negligable reduction in electricity spent on hosting.
I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was done that's the issue for me.
I disagree in principle. You can call it a pro-environment initiative or you can call it just... promoting good engineering. Making code more efficient benefits literally everyone from the people making it to the people using it to the planet upon which it is used, and who's resources it is dependent on. I wish efficiency was a more prioritized thing in basically every facet of the modern tech industry which, at present, is addicted to an absolutely stressful number of libraries that cause nearly every prominent tech product to be ludicrously bloated.
Like, it's incredibly irritating to me that mobile browsers are practically unusable, not because mobile design isn't ubiquitous, but because every website now makes my phone hot because it's running 800 MB of fucking JavaScript to render text.
Perhaps we're talking about different principles. I believe very much in good engineering and more efficient code / websites to reduce resource use. I just don't think it should be in core WordPress code.
You believe core WordPress code should be poorly engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?
LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do is retask itself to higher impact problems.
For every one LLM user, there are hundreds if not thousands of people visiting WordPress sites. WordPress is unimaginably ubiquitous. When you're that popular, making your software more energy efficient has an actual, real life impact (even if other things are using lots of energy). In aggregate it's still a massive amount of energy.
you can say that, but are big tech building new data centers and contracting with nuclear energy producers to support WP websites?
There are no nuclear energy producers being contracted, just upstarts that promise to deliver energy later, in exchange for a promise to buy that energy.
Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers
> Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown, Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power Microsoft's data centers
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...
I'll eat my hat if that bears fruit but it's like I said, a power purchase agreement for a source that is slated to come online at a future date. (I should have been more specific in my assertion: no nuclear companies currently producing energy are being contracted)
Worth noting that they'll be using a different reactor than the one that melted down, and that "the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history" remarkably, thankfully, didn't result in any direct casualties. Our track record is pretty solid.
Where are there data centers running WordPress exclusively? It runs everywhere. It's smeared across probably every shared data center in the world.
If WordPress was released today and had the sort of growth that AI has has, yeah, there would probably be considerations to spin up new power sources.
Saving 5% electricity per WordPress http request is a massive amount of electricity in aggregate.
Did they do that though? I mean, there's a lot of code to improve in WP where you can eek out more performance (the default jquery with all the ie6 compatibility nonsense? really?). Seems like this team wasn't for that though.
... like raising public awareness about the broad issue?
whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just commenting?
"Sustainability" is a garbage buzzword that at best means money being wasted on people writing pointless reports and usually means pushing a far left agenda.
> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team"
You still don't.
> 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.
A "journalist" who won't talk to the principal of the story. Now that's bizarre behavior.
Kara Swisher is an emotional activist type of journalist and not to be taken seriously. It’s not surprising to see manufactured outrage here.
I 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.
It 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.
[flagged]
Why do you say he's a transphobic bigot?
Possibly because he is one. You could Google "mullenweg" and "transphobia" together for more details, dear troll account created 3 minutes before commenting.
I 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?
The 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.
As you most likely know, the context of that first tweet was Matt correcting disinformation about Tumblr moderation that was being spread on Twitter by that user. There's no indication that in doing so, Matt was acting on transphobic intent nor that he is any sort of bigot. Nor is there any evidence of the purported misgendering that has apparently been cranked out of the rumor mill.
It's quite funny that you doubled down with a feels over reals argument though. Just shows that deep down, you know you're throwing around spurious allegations.
[flagged]
the 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?
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot, on multiple topics. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we've already asked you to stop.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
However you feel about her wording in this case, Kara Swisher is definitely a journalist, not a “journalist.”
[flagged]
She 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.
[flagged]
Mullenweg brought this on himself. Swisher is just reporting on it. A rush to judgement can be an issue, but that is definitely not the case here.