alt.hn

1/12/2025 at 11:01:55 AM

Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash

 https://www.therepository.email/mullenweg-shuts-down-wordpress-sustainability-team-igniting-backlash

by robin_reala

1/12/2025 at 1:56:02 PM

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.

https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble

by GavinAnderegg

1/12/2025 at 2:19:56 PM

“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.

by mattrad

1/12/2025 at 3:48:40 PM

> “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.

by Aurornis

1/12/2025 at 6:05:31 PM

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.

by prox

1/12/2025 at 4:21:14 PM

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.

by RobotToaster

1/12/2025 at 2:54:16 PM

Embarrassing behavior for someone that became wealthy off other peoples' open-source contributions.

by evantbyrne

1/12/2025 at 6:19:18 PM

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.

by Lammy

1/12/2025 at 6:29:05 PM

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.

by evantbyrne

1/12/2025 at 10:10:00 PM

Well, that and Mullenweg did a bunch of actually illegal stuff instead of just arguably immoral stuff.

by immibis

1/12/2025 at 7:03:23 PM

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.

by chris_wot

1/12/2025 at 2:02:47 PM

Dude has gone full Elon at this point. Why hasn’t WP 86’d this guy?

by xyst

1/12/2025 at 3:51:59 PM

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.

by Aurornis

1/12/2025 at 4:28:57 PM

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.

by _fat_santa

1/12/2025 at 5:30:23 PM

I hope EFF have more important things to do than forking a php cms. It's popular but not important IMO

by gizzlon

1/12/2025 at 8:46:27 PM

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?

by wormius

1/12/2025 at 5:02:15 PM

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

by xyst

1/12/2025 at 5:42:43 PM

Drupal has spent at least the last ~9 months positioning for this with the 'Drupal CMS'/'Starshot' product development initiative.

by 1shooner

1/12/2025 at 2:14:12 PM

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.

by throw16180339

1/12/2025 at 6:16:50 PM

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.

by mschuster91

1/12/2025 at 4:47:25 PM

They’re XFree86’ing him.

by jl6

1/12/2025 at 2:04:28 PM

I think even Elon is looking more normal than Matt at this time

by raverbashing

1/12/2025 at 4:46:28 PM

That’s standard authoritarian gaslighting.

“Why did you do this thing?”

“Sir, you told us to.”

“Don’t argue with me. You’re fired”

by pavlov

1/12/2025 at 4:58:52 PM

A bit of an aside, but how is that gaslighting?

by danieldk

1/12/2025 at 7:02:34 PM

It implies that the person is arguing. They are not.

by recursive

1/12/2025 at 5:54:42 PM

Gaslighting has had a lot of scope creep in the past few years. lol

by xeromal

1/12/2025 at 5:31:10 PM

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

by meta_x_ai

1/12/2025 at 1:59:56 PM

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.

by skeeter2020

1/12/2025 at 2:07:55 PM

> 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.

by markx2

1/12/2025 at 3:56:16 PM

> This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.

These were salaried employees working on the sustainability team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?

by missinglugnut

1/12/2025 at 5:14:38 PM

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.

https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

by aimazon

1/12/2025 at 5:29:07 PM

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.

by lupusreal

1/12/2025 at 5:51:20 PM

>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.

by poincaredisk

1/13/2025 at 10:51:36 AM

There is literally nothing stopping them from continuing in another chatroom, not administered by Matt.

by lupusreal

1/12/2025 at 6:22:41 PM

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.

by scarecrowbob

1/13/2025 at 10:58:24 AM

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.

by lupusreal

1/13/2025 at 6:25:11 PM

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.

by scarecrowbob

1/12/2025 at 10:25:27 PM

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.

by johannes1234321

1/12/2025 at 3:44:52 PM

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.

by lupusreal

1/12/2025 at 3:53:02 PM

Mullenweg was the one who requested the creation of the Slack channel.

by Aurornis

1/12/2025 at 5:19:51 PM

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.

by kevin_thibedeau

1/12/2025 at 4:13:28 PM

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?

by lupusreal

1/12/2025 at 4:14:15 PM

[flagged]

by miunau

1/12/2025 at 11:23:02 PM

> 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.

by gibrown

1/12/2025 at 4:31:42 PM

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.

by _fat_santa

1/12/2025 at 3:55:17 PM

I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was done that's the issue for me.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 6:26:08 PM

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.

by ToucanLoucan

1/12/2025 at 9:21:02 PM

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.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 10:12:05 PM

You believe core WordPress code should be poorly engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?

by immibis

1/13/2025 at 12:31:07 AM

Have to admit, I'm kind of amazed by this question.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 2:48:16 PM

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.

by jgalt212

1/12/2025 at 3:39:39 PM

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.

by bastawhiz

1/12/2025 at 4:19:57 PM

you can say that, but are big tech building new data centers and contracting with nuclear energy producers to support WP websites?

by jgalt212

1/12/2025 at 4:39:04 PM

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.

by jazzyjackson

1/12/2025 at 6:19:27 PM

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...

by jgalt212

1/12/2025 at 8:07:36 PM

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)

by jazzyjackson

1/12/2025 at 7:40:20 PM

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.

by spondylosaurus

1/13/2025 at 4:11:02 PM

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.

by bastawhiz

1/12/2025 at 4:37:41 PM

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.

by luckylion

1/12/2025 at 3:27:53 PM

... like raising public awareness about the broad issue?

whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just commenting?

by throwawayqqq11

1/12/2025 at 4:22:07 PM

I am raising awareness around the energy wastefulness of LLMs.

by jgalt212

1/13/2025 at 6:35:47 PM

"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.

by silexia

1/12/2025 at 3:20:13 PM

> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team"

You still don't.

by jasonlotito

1/12/2025 at 12:26:34 PM

> 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.

by Y_Y

1/12/2025 at 6:13:32 PM

A "journalist" who won't talk to the principal of the story. Now that's bizarre behavior.

by mrcwinn

1/12/2025 at 1:48:32 PM

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.

by safety1st

1/12/2025 at 2:04:16 PM

Is this recursive satire?

by ericjmorey

1/12/2025 at 3:35:24 PM

[flagged]

by aithrowawaycomm

1/12/2025 at 4:15:11 PM

Why do you say he's a transphobic bigot?

by westlifer

1/12/2025 at 4:30:23 PM

Possibly because he is one. You could Google "mullenweg" and "transphobia" together for more details, dear troll account created 3 minutes before commenting.

by immibis

1/12/2025 at 4:39:52 PM

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?

by westlifer

1/12/2025 at 5:52:50 PM

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.

by aithrowawaycomm

1/12/2025 at 6:16:39 PM

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.

by westlifer

1/12/2025 at 12:44:05 PM

[flagged]

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 1:18:16 PM

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?

by DemocracyFTW2

1/12/2025 at 1:48:40 PM

[flagged]

by Dalewyn

1/13/2025 at 9:51:08 PM

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.

by dang

1/12/2025 at 2:01:36 PM

However you feel about her wording in this case, Kara Swisher is definitely a journalist, not a “journalist.”

by rafram

1/12/2025 at 2:04:40 PM

[flagged]

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 2:13:48 PM

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.

[1]: https://www.threads.net/@karaswisher/post/DEniSxyS01i

by rafram

1/12/2025 at 2:23:28 PM

[flagged]

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 2:33:55 PM

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.

by matwood

1/12/2025 at 2:39:03 PM

I'm not sure what level in Mental Gymnastics is required to say that calling someone a "stone cold asshole" is "reporting".

Honestly, Matt gets my kudos if for no other reason because he's the bigger man (relatively speaking) by engaging in artful trolling instead of plainly undressed insults. At least that shit's potentially funny.

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 2:43:36 PM

> he's the bigger man (relatively speaking) by engaging in artful trolling

No, being immature does not make you “the bigger man.”

by rafram

1/12/2025 at 2:46:54 PM

She said what everyone has been saying for weeks. The wording is also clearly her opinion, nothing hidden there. She also included Mullenweg's post so everyone can read the source.

Are you saying that journalists can never share an opinion? Also, are you trying to argue Mullenweg is only looking bad because of journalists? His own actions and words seem to be doing a pretty good job on their own.

by matwood

1/12/2025 at 3:54:49 PM

>Are you saying that journalists can never share an opinion?

No. A journalist's job is to journal something and nothing else, it's literally their job name. Much like I do not expect nor want NTFS or ext4 to tell me what it thinks about my files, I don't want a "journalist" to tell me what it thinks about what happened let alone how I should think. That's not what I would read journalism for.

If a "journalist" wants to write their thoughts they should be an author, critic, commentator, influencer, or the like instead. They will still be cancers upon society, but at least they won't sully journalism.

>are you trying to argue Mullenweg is only looking bad because of journalists?

Matt dug his own grave, but "journalists" are definitely making it harder to have worthwhile conversations about him.

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 5:08:14 PM

Your comparison between humans and machines is revealing. If you want a soulless computer to tell you what’s going on in the world, talk to Grok or something. Humans have personalities.

by rafram

1/12/2025 at 5:19:46 PM

People can be multiple things at once as mind blowing as that may seem. They can act in public as a journalist and at the same time have private opinions that they share on social media.

Just as programmers not only “design schedule or plan radio or television programs”, journalism is not just “journaling”

by portaouflop

1/12/2025 at 5:28:07 PM

> Honestly, Matt gets my kudos if for no other reason because he's the bigger man (relatively speaking) by engaging in artful trolling instead of plainly undressed insults.

That is a pretty plainly terrible mindset, but one that I don't think is very uncommon.

by cdblades

1/12/2025 at 5:07:43 PM

OK so now I feel it's rather immaterial who of us was right and who was wrong

by DemocracyFTW2

1/12/2025 at 5:06:33 PM

Looks like you're right!

by DemocracyFTW2

1/12/2025 at 6:42:45 PM

Kara Swisher is an emotional activist type of journalist and not to be taken seriously. It’s not surprising to see manufactured outrage here.

by blackeyeblitzar

1/12/2025 at 6:59:17 PM

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.

by calmbonsai

1/12/2025 at 2:40:15 PM

I 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.

by DoneWithAllThat

1/12/2025 at 5:05:55 PM

I 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.

by add-sub-mul-div

1/12/2025 at 1:26:33 PM

He's been doing so much more: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

Again, I hold no sympathy for Silver Lake, but I hope they fuck him up good.

by pluc

1/12/2025 at 1:31:12 PM

> …Mullenweg threatening to physically dismantle their booth in the middle of the show

This is crazy if true.

by lawgimenez

1/12/2025 at 7:57:06 PM

> 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.

by RobotToaster

1/12/2025 at 6:34:15 PM

In 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.

by voakbasda

1/12/2025 at 4:17:38 PM

1. 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).

by neilv

1/12/2025 at 4:30:53 PM

I 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.

by badlibrarian

1/12/2025 at 7:41:54 PM

Agreed that his bizarre Tumblr meltdown seemed to be a tipping point, but I still wonder what caused that.

by spondylosaurus

1/12/2025 at 4:21:09 PM

Seeing 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.

by ternnoburn

1/12/2025 at 9:40:46 PM

> 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) 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.

by medimikka

1/13/2025 at 1:45:26 PM

> As were 1985 coders and founders in 2005. Heck, 2005 didn't look too kindly upon 1999 Silicon Valley mindsets.

> I'd presume today's "golden child" will be a very problematic person in 2045, unless they learn to change or hide behind signals.

It's probably worth pointing out that most people do actually grow up and change with the times.

by squigz

1/12/2025 at 10:32:11 PM

Thanks. I'm not sure I agree with all the points, but upvoted for the the info and thoughtful comments.

by neilv

1/12/2025 at 11:02:37 PM

I am always willing to learn and change. What did I get wrong?

by medimikka

1/12/2025 at 12:16:18 PM

> 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...

by MattGaiser

1/12/2025 at 1:11:22 PM

Wordpress 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.

by _the_inflator

1/12/2025 at 2:53:48 PM

It 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.

by n3storm

1/12/2025 at 8:12:00 PM

That's more like Frontpage with the notoriously insecure Frontpage extensions.

by Kye

1/13/2025 at 5:55:47 PM

Totally. Even MsPublisher! because wizzards you know,...

by n3storm

1/12/2025 at 4:55:46 PM

Why did you start using it again?

by bl4kers

1/12/2025 at 2:07:34 PM

Sounds 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.

by knallfrosch

1/12/2025 at 2:32:10 PM

One could argue the sustainability team was disbanded in the name of sustainability.

by typeofhuman

1/12/2025 at 3:55:02 PM

One could argue the moon is made of cheese.

by philipov

1/12/2025 at 3:19:44 PM

> 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.

by jasonlotito

1/12/2025 at 11:17:04 PM

Thank you for all the information you provided.

by knallfrosch

1/12/2025 at 12:42:01 PM

> “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?

by bipson

1/12/2025 at 1:29:38 PM

It 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.

by bromuro

1/12/2025 at 2:02:28 PM

This 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.

by bipson

1/12/2025 at 3:07:26 PM

> - You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years ago, and getting mad on others in consequence?

Forgetting? That’s a lot of good faith on your part. Where in the time of people denying everything even with undeniable video/audio evidence and their target audience believes them. If you don’t believe then you were not the target audience and are irrelevant

by dylan604

1/12/2025 at 2:38:03 PM

> 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.

by matwood

1/12/2025 at 1:27:13 PM

He himself clearly showed it's a lie as he admitted on Threads that he started said team. Utterly bizarre.

by ulfw

1/12/2025 at 1:15:50 PM

> If this is true

It's not true. It's a blatant lie, as the embedded video in the article proves.

by lapcat

1/12/2025 at 12:44:00 PM

Mullenweg'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.

by bovermyer

1/12/2025 at 1:40:16 PM

I'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.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 3:23:11 PM

I'm curious what you'd consider moving to. Managed Wix/Squarespace? Ghost, maybe? I honestly haven't dug into that world in many years, I don't know what it looks like these days.

by bovermyer

1/12/2025 at 3:29:09 PM

Craft and Wagtail are the two I've heard of as WordPress replacements. In our sector (nonprofits) Drupal has too much of an (mostly undeserved, now) reputation as being very hard to use. I found Craft a bit too convoluted (as I mention in another comment, perhaps just due to unfamiliarity). Interested in Wagtail but that would mean a switch from PHP to Python. Not a deal-breaker but a bit of a hump to get over. Wagtail also used to be a bit too beholden to Torchbox (a UK agency) for my tastes - I think they started the project - but looks like that's shifted a bit in terms of the core team.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 4:39:35 PM

At my job one of the sites I work on, a large government agency you have heard of, uses Drupal. And honestly? I like Drupal more than Wordpress as a developer.

But, I will say, Drupal is definitely confusing at first with all its nodes and entities and content types and poor documentation and so on. But on the other hand, it doesn't really force you into anything. You can build almost anything with Drupal, which I think makes it a great CMS.

by 65

1/12/2025 at 7:56:44 PM

There is a ... version? distro? "Drupal CMS" that seems to be aimed at being simpler / setup out of the box than regular Drupal.

https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms

Going to look into it in the next few weeks as a possible alternative.

by tehbeard

1/12/2025 at 9:24:16 PM

I quite like Drupal too, but I know that clients find it confusing (or at least they used to the last time I spoke to an ex-Drupal client). We find people find WordPress much easier to reason about intitively, although that might well be familiarity.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 3:13:37 PM

Unless you're at a theme chop shop, then you might as well move onto greener pastures. There are so many alternatives now for website control panels like Wagtail, Payload, and Craft CMS.

by evantbyrne

1/12/2025 at 3:20:19 PM

No, mostly ground-up custom built themes. I've tried Craft and found it pretty convoluted (althought that might just be familiarity), but will be looking at Wagtail. Still hoping that WP can pull out of the tailspin because it's going to be a huge headache to switch.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 1:44:44 PM

[flagged]

by shiftpgdn

1/12/2025 at 3:10:06 PM

This is far too dismissive - I'm guessing you don't run a WordPress agency. We don't use WP Engine for hosting, we only use the ACF plugin. ACF is not "very easily replaced" because we've built the site data structures around it and we'd have to completely rearchitect the sites - at our own cost. "Moving our sites" is not easy either because we have 100+ sites, each of which would involve DNS updates (which we often have to walk our clients through because they don't understand DNS at all) and a complete reconfiguration of our build / deploment process. I don't really understand the motivation behind this comment.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 6:16:57 PM

What hosts do you recommend that offer built-in development/staging environments? (one of WPEngine's selling points)

by bdcravens

1/12/2025 at 9:29:46 PM

On the basis that this isn't an entirely rhetorical question, two I know of are Kinsta and Pressable. We use Pagely, but I have some hand-rolled Bash scripts which perform the same function.

by frereubu

1/12/2025 at 9:50:25 PM

Thanks, it was intended as a bona fide question. Our company does use WP Engine, and while we could total insource it (we already manage our bread and butter app), to do so I'd have to recreate the staging (and ability to push to production) ability (already have some ideas on how to accomplish this easily), but I'd rather save the engineering cycles for our actual product.

by bdcravens

1/12/2025 at 2:02:27 PM

Ah 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...

by mjburgess

1/13/2025 at 4:46:37 PM

Yes? 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.

by shiftpgdn

1/12/2025 at 3:45:46 PM

What do you replace ACF with?

by dageshi

1/12/2025 at 7:10:30 PM

I'm not as sure about that; products like Wordpress have an amplification effect with their users. The average person who uses Wordpress doesn't just have one Wordpress site; they have dozens to thousands, because they're actually an agency/contracting firm/whatever. Its the same, but opposite, reason why Microsoft can build products that piss off literally every corporate end-user they've got on the whole planet; they aren't selling to corporate end-users, they're selling to people with higher leverage, and they haven't pissed those people off.

by 015a

1/12/2025 at 1:26:05 PM

He's making the ecosystem generally unstable and there are a lot of businesses that depend on that stability.

by iamdbtoo

1/13/2025 at 1:48:14 PM

The "average person" using this is not some average citizen - they're developers or business folks, and such nonsense as has been going on will not go unnoticed by them. People don't want to build a product on this system and have to wonder whether the plugin they're using will be removed by Automattic or whatnot.

by squigz

1/12/2025 at 2:10:17 PM

Probably enough to notice, but not in a way that threatens the company to continue operating profitability.

by ericjmorey

1/12/2025 at 1:11:40 PM

The 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/

[2] https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-stochast...

[3] https://bsky.app/profile/mor10.com/post/3lfgqcge62c2d

by LordAtlas

1/12/2025 at 3:40:23 PM

Having 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.

by charlangas

1/12/2025 at 4:00:01 PM

More likely that a podcast is a performance for marketing

by frankdenbow

1/13/2025 at 5:29:58 AM

Maybe 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.

by mmooss

1/12/2025 at 4:48:45 PM

I 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

by jazzyjackson

1/12/2025 at 10:26:14 PM

This, 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.

by thot_experiment

1/12/2025 at 10:10:31 PM

So 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.

by lobochrome

1/12/2025 at 5:11:32 PM

What 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.

by orochimaaru

1/12/2025 at 6:11:17 PM

From 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.

by paulcole

1/13/2025 at 5:27:44 AM

Why not carbon taxes? Those are certainly a cost. Why should I and others pay that cost of your business?

by mmooss

1/12/2025 at 6:58:12 PM

These people are just feeding his bad buzz by caring, just let him flail alone in the kid playground, don't feed him.

by grimblee

1/12/2025 at 2:02:18 PM

Person 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.

by voytec

1/12/2025 at 2:32:05 PM

> 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.

by coldpie

1/12/2025 at 1:21:56 PM

TLDR; 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.

by twasold

1/12/2025 at 2:06:28 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

1/12/2025 at 1:15:45 PM

[flagged]

by DemocracyFTW2

1/12/2025 at 12:48:37 PM

[flagged]

by curiousgal

1/12/2025 at 1:51:38 PM

> when this guys self-Luigis

What does this mean?

by nozzlegear

1/12/2025 at 2:01:54 PM

I'm guessing "Luigi" is another way of saying "murder" now, so "self-murder" means "suicide".

by CaptainFever

1/12/2025 at 1:57:58 PM

[dead]

by summeroflove20

1/12/2025 at 2:04:12 PM

Luigi Mangione killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

by mtmail

1/12/2025 at 1:03:36 PM

It’s time for a 5150 now, right? Dude is a danger to himself and others.

by kotaKat

1/12/2025 at 1:09:48 PM

Yet 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

by kopirgan

1/12/2025 at 2:13:40 PM

When the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked.

by ericjmorey