I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway.
His behaviour makes me sad – but he's not the only one. So many onetime good guys of tech have gotten rich and their former concern for the welfare of others and of society is gone. Google's founders most famously had the guideline "don't be evil" and did practise it, but now the company is run just like any other corporation whose guideline is "maximize short-term shareholder value" even though Larry and Sergey still control it through the multiple-class share structure. I imagine that one factor is that becoming rich switches a person to a different socioeconomic class, where the people they now share circumstances with have very different values and the new focus is on richness – "why does so-and-so have more money than me when I'm more deserving?". Only a minority, perhaps a small minority, seem to be like Craig Newmark and Mackenzie Scott, whose major focus for their money is how best to give it away.
This reminds me of the "strong beliefs held loosely" mantra. Feels like the wordpress.org Matt created some business relationships that made sense *then*, not-so-much today yet those strong beliefs from *then* are still being held today.
I wonder what this will do to the open source community. To Rohan's comment, who is wordpress.org's "shareholder", and what is that "value"?
Given the title of the article here I had hope you would have clearly laid out how he is intentionally sabotaging it, but instead it is just mostly a summary of what has already been said and shared in other ones. I was a bit disappointed by that.
Given that the headline is a question with two possible answers, I thought that set up what I was trying to do, which was to review the available evidence and then come down on one side or the other, and I thought it was pretty obvious that I came down on the side of sabotaging it — certainly Matt's response would seem to indicate that. But perhaps I wasn't clear enough!
I don't think what I said was clear, let me try that again. I mean everyone knows he is doing the wrong thing. But I believe laying out what he is doing, "the facts", aren't interesting. What would be interesting to read is someone who believes he is intentionally trying to do it, and how each one of these things he is doing is a carefully crafted plan to disable WordPress as a whole.
Right now it is easy to believe he believes he is doing the right thing, and he is wrong. It is much more interesting of a perspective to believe that he believes he is doing the wrong thing, and he is doing it on purpose. I would love to read that article.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but this latest Matt Mullenweg drama isn't the only insane thing he's gotten up to this year -- earlier in the year he appointed himself specific CEO of Tumblr and began a dedicated harassment campaign of a specific trans woman user who made a joke about him "exploding in a car covered with hammers and hammers fly everywhere", even following her to twitter and publically revealing all of her former private tumblr accounts. For several days after the event it also really looked like he was searching his own name on tumblr and banning anyone who talked about the incident. He made a lot of public statements with no PR advisement about the entire thing and was eventually persuaded to take a sabbatical. It's interesting to see him pick up another personal crusade after how badly that one went!
His behaviour makes me sad – but he's not the only one. So many onetime good guys of tech have gotten rich and their former concern for the welfare of others and of society is gone. Google's founders most famously had the guideline "don't be evil" and did practise it, but now the company is run just like any other corporation whose guideline is "maximize short-term shareholder value" even though Larry and Sergey still control it through the multiple-class share structure. I imagine that one factor is that becoming rich switches a person to a different socioeconomic class, where the people they now share circumstances with have very different values and the new focus is on richness – "why does so-and-so have more money than me when I'm more deserving?". Only a minority, perhaps a small minority, seem to be like Craig Newmark and Mackenzie Scott, whose major focus for their money is how best to give it away.
Great point, Rohan
Thanks for the great summary, Matthew.
This reminds me of the "strong beliefs held loosely" mantra. Feels like the wordpress.org Matt created some business relationships that made sense *then*, not-so-much today yet those strong beliefs from *then* are still being held today.
I wonder what this will do to the open source community. To Rohan's comment, who is wordpress.org's "shareholder", and what is that "value"?
Given the title of the article here I had hope you would have clearly laid out how he is intentionally sabotaging it, but instead it is just mostly a summary of what has already been said and shared in other ones. I was a bit disappointed by that.
Given that the headline is a question with two possible answers, I thought that set up what I was trying to do, which was to review the available evidence and then come down on one side or the other, and I thought it was pretty obvious that I came down on the side of sabotaging it — certainly Matt's response would seem to indicate that. But perhaps I wasn't clear enough!
I don't think what I said was clear, let me try that again. I mean everyone knows he is doing the wrong thing. But I believe laying out what he is doing, "the facts", aren't interesting. What would be interesting to read is someone who believes he is intentionally trying to do it, and how each one of these things he is doing is a carefully crafted plan to disable WordPress as a whole.
Right now it is easy to believe he believes he is doing the right thing, and he is wrong. It is much more interesting of a perspective to believe that he believes he is doing the wrong thing, and he is doing it on purpose. I would love to read that article.
I think I understand what you are saying, and I agree that it would be interesting to read, but that is not what I was trying to do
I'm not sure if you're aware, but this latest Matt Mullenweg drama isn't the only insane thing he's gotten up to this year -- earlier in the year he appointed himself specific CEO of Tumblr and began a dedicated harassment campaign of a specific trans woman user who made a joke about him "exploding in a car covered with hammers and hammers fly everywhere", even following her to twitter and publically revealing all of her former private tumblr accounts. For several days after the event it also really looked like he was searching his own name on tumblr and banning anyone who talked about the incident. He made a lot of public statements with no PR advisement about the entire thing and was eventually persuaded to take a sabbatical. It's interesting to see him pick up another personal crusade after how badly that one went!
Thanks — I had seen rumblings about this but had not looked into it any further, but I will now
a good writeup of that situation can be found here: https://www.supporthuman.cx/25feb24-roundup-a-masterclass-on-why-we-have-trust-safety-teams/#fnref11
id also recommend going through ex-tumblr staff user "tinystepsforward"'s tumblr meta tag, where they collect a lot of news and info about Matt's other exploits! https://tinystepsforward.tumblr.com/tagged/tumblr%20meta