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I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keepin

I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only list products that run their billing through Shopify and give Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts hate you're fine. The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
  - jjmarr 2y ago
    > The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits. Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/ [2] https://archive.is/OkfOY https://archive.is/OkfOY
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply commenting in another sub, especially for just one comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme of the sub.
      - encom 2y ago
        When r/thedonald was around, I would debate misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line regularly. Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.
        wink 2y ago
        That subreddit could basically not be further from the ones I frequent. There are some ok cycling ones, relatively low traffic, not many people, good content - and especially not only typical computer nerds.
        zdragnar 2y ago
        If you like British panel shows (or any version of taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal lol.
        echoangle 2y ago
        Tech support for niche issues is pretty good there.
    - ismail 2y ago
      Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims. There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms. “You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.” Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do think it is.
- pants2 2y ago
  I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.
  - gunsle 2y ago
    Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content
    - Implicated 2y ago
      As someone who has been ingesting a high volume of reddit "content" for the better part of 3 years - the spam/bot problem is _wild_. I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users) And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective. What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild. It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).
- duxup 2y ago
  People care about content, apis less so, unfortunately.
- brookst 2y ago
  > undiscerning users will stay no matter what That's one take. Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  I've found that the API changes improved the subreddits I was in because it made it harder for spambots to operate. Reddit got away with the changes because ultimately the power users were a tiny fraction of its userbase, and they were using clients that hid the ads so Reddit wasn't making any money from them so Reddit didn't care about their wants.
- radium3d 2y ago
  Reddit is not GPL so while hostile it’s incomparable to WordPress core. The user base of Reddit would have to rewrite from scratch. Wordpress can and will be forked if it comes to it. There are enough businesses relying on it that it would be worth it to re govern it under an alternate name.
- wink 2y ago
  You're making it sound like Reddit was unusable without API/client in the past though. I'd never used a Reddit client before I started using it at all on mobile. I bet a good chunk of users (esp casually browsing, or frequenting exactly one niche subreddit) just used the web. Not saying it wasn't user hostile or sucked, it just doesn't match the experience I had (or when I talked to some people).
forgetfreeman 2y ago
Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?
daitangio 2y ago
I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…
- hobs 2y ago
  That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.
- shiftpgdn 2y ago
  Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.
  - debesyla 2y ago
    True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger) offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or more sites in. Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...
    - whycome 2y ago
      There’s value to users in using a service that’s the same as the software. Trust is worth it to consumers. It’s why many still prefer to take their cars to the dealer rather than an Indy shop
      - grogenaut 2y ago
        I've had 3 cars totaled by dealers and none totaled by indy shops. One was actually messed up by them beyond repair. One was messed up and they wanted more to fix it well beyond the replace cost. The final one just wanted well beyond the replace cost, and I got it fixed for much much less at an indy shop. Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.
chrismsimpson 2y ago
Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.
- labster 2y ago
  Late stage capitalism is almost indistinguishable from a mental disorder, though.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  How is this unique to "late stage capitalism"? That same sentence can be used mad lib style for any human endevor. >Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation
  - JBiserkov 2y ago
    Don't argue with me about definitions, I'm trying to explain what I think the GP meant and why `the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation` is incorrect. Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus maintaining demand, sort of. Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward, so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain in power, while the masses see their quality of life decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had. > the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene now.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs. It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.
- citizenpaul 2y ago
  The only interaction i have with wordpress is sleazy small consultancies selling it to clueless mgmt as the magic solution to all their problems. I really have never had a positive impression of wordpress due to this. I can't even remember all the times I've been suckerpunched with "hey we hired these people to implement <magic wordpress> and its not going so well. They tell us its because our systems are bad and our employees are not doing things right. Can you get with them and see what the <Insert Manager speak for blames you> seems to be....? ME: The problem is they are some hack shop that "sold you" and bit off more than they could chew and they also don't have a clue about systems integrations. MGMT: Nope the problem is our employees that have been working here getting "Exceeds expectations" on reviews that are the problem. We have no explanation for why though... So we are hiring McKinsey to come in and do a department evaluation to find out.
kedean 2y ago
He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.
- threeseed 2y ago
  But there is every possibility that they were always going to do this. Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.
    - throwpoaster 2y ago
      Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.
      - technion 2y ago
        This feels very "no true scotsman" to me. It's accurate if none of the large places I've worked are "serious".
      - Nectar0516 2y ago
        At best, "serious" businesses (which I take to mean large, successful ones) pretend to take EQ seriously.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
legitster 2y ago
One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog. If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him. This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.
- lupire 2y ago
  Using the GPL is not racketeering. Why would any user expect more rights than a contributor?
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I don't understand your point about forking, yes they'd have the GPL but so what? They can control their fork from then on, it doesn't matter if they have to continue open sourcing contributions, in fact it'd be preferable to whatever Matt is doing.
  - shaded2 2y ago
    I think you underestimate the work it takes to maintain and more importantly grow such a large open source project. If wp engine can barely contribute today, what are the chances they want to take on the whole thing. Nope they just want to get rich off open source. That's understandable , they are a for profit after all. But at what point does it make sense to give back in terms of either money or time to make improvements to the ecosystem that you depend on. I agree with Matt's ideals but not the actions. The reality is theres not a whole lot he can do without looking like spoilt kid taking his ball away from the game.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  He drives the project long enough that probably no b2 code remains. He could have prepared and take a contributor agreement or some other measures to allow relicensing. Question however is, whether auch a scheme would have made WordPress successful, or if it thrives from the community, where many assumed that everybody plays on the same field via GPL.
vasco 2y ago
I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-delicious-and-if-you-disagree-you-cant-log-in-to-wordpress-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?
- harikb 2y ago
  Here is an alternate possibility 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine" 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lupire 2y ago
    That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the same location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How will they be able to distinguish?
    - LocalPCGuy 2y ago
      You're assuming they actually care to distinguish. But real answer, barring a brief period where some users may get a cached version, they can likely just use the date of change to determine before and after if necessary.
    - nathansherburn 2y ago
      I don't think the purpose of the checkbox was to collect useful data but an any case storing it as a date would probably solve the issue.
    - lolinder 2y ago
Nectar0516 2y ago
I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.
MrSkelter 2y ago
There is no “we” here. It’s a man making arbitrary decisions about pineapple on pizza. There is no plan and the watch and drawn out nature is indicative of someone reacting to events rather than implementing a plan. I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to take a strategy like this.

llm_trw 2y ago
Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts hate you're fine. The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  > The average user... stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits. Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/ [2] https://archive.is/OkfOY https://archive.is/OkfOY
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply commenting in another sub, especially for just one comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme of the sub.
    - encom 2y ago
      When r/thedonald was around, I would debate misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line regularly. Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.
      - wink 2y ago
        That subreddit could basically not be further from the ones I frequent. There are some ok cycling ones, relatively low traffic, not many people, good content - and especially not only typical computer nerds.
      - zdragnar 2y ago
        If you like British panel shows (or any version of taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal lol.
      - echoangle 2y ago
        Tech support for niche issues is pretty good there.
  - ismail 2y ago
    Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims. There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms. “You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.” Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do think it is.
pants2 2y ago
I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.
- gunsle 2y ago
  Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content
  - Implicated 2y ago
    As someone who has been ingesting a high volume of reddit "content" for the better part of 3 years - the spam/bot problem is _wild_. I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users) And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective. What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild. It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).
duxup 2y ago
People care about content, apis less so, unfortunately.
brookst 2y ago
> undiscerning users will stay no matter what That's one take. Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.
gamblor956 2y ago
I've found that the API changes improved the subreddits I was in because it made it harder for spambots to operate. Reddit got away with the changes because ultimately the power users were a tiny fraction of its userbase, and they were using clients that hid the ads so Reddit wasn't making any money from them so Reddit didn't care about their wants.
radium3d 2y ago
Reddit is not GPL so while hostile it’s incomparable to WordPress core. The user base of Reddit would have to rewrite from scratch. Wordpress can and will be forked if it comes to it. There are enough businesses relying on it that it would be worth it to re govern it under an alternate name.
wink 2y ago
You're making it sound like Reddit was unusable without API/client in the past though. I'd never used a Reddit client before I started using it at all on mobile. I bet a good chunk of users (esp casually browsing, or frequenting exactly one niche subreddit) just used the web. Not saying it wasn't user hostile or sucked, it just doesn't match the experience I had (or when I talked to some people).

forgetfreeman 2y ago

Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?

daitangio 2y ago

I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…

hobs 2y ago
That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per instance, when you look at how much things are write once and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down to pennies per instance per month.
shiftpgdn 2y ago
Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.
- debesyla 2y ago
  True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger) offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or more sites in. Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...
  - whycome 2y ago
    There’s value to users in using a service that’s the same as the software. Trust is worth it to consumers. It’s why many still prefer to take their cars to the dealer rather than an Indy shop
    - grogenaut 2y ago
      I've had 3 cars totaled by dealers and none totaled by indy shops. One was actually messed up by them beyond repair. One was messed up and they wanted more to fix it well beyond the replace cost. The final one just wanted well beyond the replace cost, and I got it fixed for much much less at an indy shop. Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.

chrismsimpson 2y ago

Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power.

labster 2y ago
Late stage capitalism is almost indistinguishable from a mental disorder, though.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
How is this unique to "late stage capitalism"? That same sentence can be used mad lib style for any human endevor. >Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation
- JBiserkov 2y ago
  Don't argue with me about definitions, I'm trying to explain what I think the GP meant and why `the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation` is incorrect. Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus maintaining demand, sort of. Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward, so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain in power, while the masses see their quality of life decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had. > the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene now.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting, maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress jobs. It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.

citizenpaul 2y ago
The only interaction i have with wordpress is sleazy small consultancies selling it to clueless mgmt as the magic solution to all their problems. I really have never had a positive impression of wordpress due to this. I can't even remember all the times I've been suckerpunched with "hey we hired these people to implement <magic wordpress> and its not going so well. They tell us its because our systems are bad and our employees are not doing things right. Can you get with them and see what the <Insert Manager speak for blames you> seems to be....? ME: The problem is they are some hack shop that "sold you" and bit off more than they could chew and they also don't have a clue about systems integrations. MGMT: Nope the problem is our employees that have been working here getting "Exceeds expectations" on reviews that are the problem. We have no explanation for why though... So we are hiring McKinsey to come in and do a department evaluation to find out.

kedean 2y ago

He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.

threeseed 2y ago
But there is every possibility that they were always going to do this. Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.
satvikpendem 2y ago
Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.
- kibwen 2y ago
  What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.
  - throwpoaster 2y ago
    Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.
    - technion 2y ago
      This feels very "no true scotsman" to me. It's accurate if none of the large places I've worked are "serious".
    - Nectar0516 2y ago
      At best, "serious" businesses (which I take to mean large, successful ones) pretend to take EQ seriously.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

legitster 2y ago

One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog. If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him. This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.

lupire 2y ago
Using the GPL is not racketeering. Why would any user expect more rights than a contributor?
satvikpendem 2y ago
I don't understand your point about forking, yes they'd have the GPL but so what? They can control their fork from then on, it doesn't matter if they have to continue open sourcing contributions, in fact it'd be preferable to whatever Matt is doing.
- shaded2 2y ago
  I think you underestimate the work it takes to maintain and more importantly grow such a large open source project. If wp engine can barely contribute today, what are the chances they want to take on the whole thing. Nope they just want to get rich off open source. That's understandable , they are a for profit after all. But at what point does it make sense to give back in terms of either money or time to make improvements to the ecosystem that you depend on. I agree with Matt's ideals but not the actions. The reality is theres not a whole lot he can do without looking like spoilt kid taking his ball away from the game.
johannes1234321 2y ago
He drives the project long enough that probably no b2 code remains. He could have prepared and take a contributor agreement or some other measures to allow relicensing. Question however is, whether auch a scheme would have made WordPress successful, or if it thrives from the community, where many assumed that everybody plays on the same field via GPL.

vasco 2y ago

I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-delicious-and-if-you-disagree-you-cant-log-in-to-wordpress-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?

harikb 2y ago
Here is an alternate possibility 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine" 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lupire 2y ago
  That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the same location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How will they be able to distinguish?
  - LocalPCGuy 2y ago
    You're assuming they actually care to distinguish. But real answer, barring a brief period where some users may get a cached version, they can likely just use the date of change to determine before and after if necessary.
  - nathansherburn 2y ago
    I don't think the purpose of the checkbox was to collect useful data but an any case storing it as a date would probably solve the issue.
  - lolinder 2y ago

Nectar0516 2y ago

I would hope that this would cause more people to realize that allowing total control of the things you use to be centralized in one person (or business) is bad, but well... quite similar things have happened to plenty of other open source projects before.

MrSkelter 2y ago

There is no “we” here. It’s a man making arbitrary decisions about pineapple on pizza. There is no plan and the watch and drawn out nature is indicative of someone reacting to events rather than implementing a plan. I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.