7 ms·

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a

by muglug 7d ago

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations. Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.

dofm 7d ago
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational. (In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.) These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them. He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit. I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
- stackghost 7d ago
  It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
  - shakna 7d ago
    But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?
    - graemep 7d ago
      People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness. I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
    - opiotrek 7d ago
      He was unprofessional for years, see the firings of 2024
      - dofm 7d ago
        Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way. That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it. WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
        voakbasda 7d ago
        When crooks are stealing from you and no justice can be found? He is right to be unhinged.
        FireBeyond 6d ago
        WP Engine were not 'crooks' stealing from him. WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his. WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery? Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other? Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit. Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend. Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters. Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them. Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants? Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".
  - abanana 7d ago
    Exactly. Don't use "mental illness" as an excuse, he's just incredibly arrogant.
  - deleted 7d ago
    [deleted]
- tshaddox 7d ago
  I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
  - chii 7d ago
    I dont know any clinical information, but some (many, in fact) people assume mental illness when someone behaves in such a way that they believe their world view and mental model is absolute and fight to the last tooth and nail against any opposing view points (to the detriment of their own well being and others).
    - voakbasda 7d ago
      Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.
      - lioeters 6d ago
        Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal. (Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
        jasomill 6d ago
        "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.html#id00151 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.ht...
- Yizahi 7d ago
  You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
- Citizen_Lame 7d ago
  I guess Hacker News went full Reddit, we have mentally unwell (self proclaimed mind you) commentors proclaiming other people mentally ill. The irony.
  - BenjiWiebe 7d ago
    There's different types of mental illness. For example, don't you think a person with depression would be better at diagnosing depression in others, than someone who has never experienced it?
    - monkey_monkey 7d ago
      No, absolutely not.
      - deleted 7d ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 7d ago
        [deleted]
      - rurp 6d ago
        An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.
        dofm 6d ago
        To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception. There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc. (I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)
pocksuppet 7d ago
That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
pluc 7d ago
I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.
patcon 5d ago
> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this

by muglug 7d ago

dofm 7d ago

> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful. There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational. (In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.) These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them. He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit. I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.

stackghost 7d ago
It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
- shakna 7d ago
  But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?
  - graemep 7d ago
    People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness. I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
  - opiotrek 7d ago
    He was unprofessional for years, see the firings of 2024
    - dofm 7d ago
      Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way. That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it. WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
      - voakbasda 7d ago
        When crooks are stealing from you and no justice can be found? He is right to be unhinged.
        FireBeyond 6d ago
        WP Engine were not 'crooks' stealing from him. WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his. WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery? Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other? Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit. Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend. Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters. Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them. Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants? Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".
- abanana 7d ago
  Exactly. Don't use "mental illness" as an excuse, he's just incredibly arrogant.
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]
tshaddox 7d ago
I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
- chii 7d ago
  I dont know any clinical information, but some (many, in fact) people assume mental illness when someone behaves in such a way that they believe their world view and mental model is absolute and fight to the last tooth and nail against any opposing view points (to the detriment of their own well being and others).
  - voakbasda 7d ago
    Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.
    - lioeters 6d ago
      Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal. (Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
      - jasomill 6d ago
        "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.html#id00151 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.ht...
Yizahi 7d ago
You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
Citizen_Lame 7d ago
I guess Hacker News went full Reddit, we have mentally unwell (self proclaimed mind you) commentors proclaiming other people mentally ill. The irony.
- BenjiWiebe 7d ago
  There's different types of mental illness. For example, don't you think a person with depression would be better at diagnosing depression in others, than someone who has never experienced it?
  - monkey_monkey 7d ago
    No, absolutely not.
    - deleted 7d ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 7d ago
        [deleted]
    - rurp 6d ago
      An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.
      - dofm 6d ago
        To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception. There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc. (I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)

pocksuppet 7d ago

That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.

pluc 7d ago

I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.

patcon 5d ago

> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this