Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP

This is a really basic blog post and it doesn’t make any kind of convincing argument for the provocative title.

Towards the end it says:

> I really like WordPress, as I’ve stated many times, but Matt has become an irresponsible and damaging actor. He urgently needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership, or he risks undermining WordPress’ popularity and driving the community away.

But it makes at best, a really weak case for how he is “irresponsible” or a “damaging actor”. Sure there may be some minor controversies like this redirection thing it mentions, but that really doesn’t seem like a big deal or anywhere close to requiring anyone to step down. I find the accusation that Matt Mullenweg is doing something wrong by mixing in commercial interests to be ridiculous - he CREATED Wordpress. That was 20 years ago. Given its success and adoption, I think he deserves the commercial spoils of it.

> WP Engine was acquired by a private equity firm, Silver Lake.

It is hilarious that this blog post does not actually talk about Silver Lake or private equity at all. PE is a cancer on society - all they do is acquire assets and financially optimize them to squeeze money out at the expense of everyone else - employees, customers, society. They don’t actually add value to the product or affected people around the product. Silver Lake is one of the worst of them. This is a firm that was literally called evil by Wired magazine (https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/), for firing employees right before the Skype sale in a purposeful scheme to rob hard working people who built the company of their equity. Why should anyone trust WP Engine or its leadership? Let’s start there, because it sounds a lot like Matt Mullenweg is right.

> Additionally, it’s also ironic (hypocritical, I’d say) for him to complain about the lack of post revisions as something that undermines WordPress, while Automattic offers WordPress without access to plugins and all themes in its basic hosting plans, and makes Jetpack, a Trojan horse to upsell features (even the basics, like… stats), mandatory for all users.

It's absurd that they gate so many features behind their higher tiers.

Early this year I wanted to blog about something and was tired of my Ghost self-hosted blog. I decided that I was just going to pay someone else to host it and since I get like 100 visitors/week (if that) I really was put off by the pricing from so many blog providers that want to charge you based on visitors. Especially since my blog is read by normally either very few (<100) or it hits on somewhere like HN (rare but it's happened) and I have thousands of visitors for a day or two.

I finally settled on wordpress.com, I've used Wordpress in some form or fashion for 15+ years and so I thought it would be a good choice. I went ahead and paid for 3 years at once for the savings (bad idea) but then started running into issues. Want to see analytics? You need to pay for Premium or above. Want to upload video? Need to pay for premium or above. Want plugins (you know, a /massive/ aspect of wordpress)? You need to pay for business or above (Starting at $25/mo). Yes, I could have worked around some of the issues but in the end I paid for Premium so I could get my stupid little blog up and running. I'm still bitter to be paying that much for a rounding error of traffic blog and still not have plugins but whatever.

I don't know what I'll do in 2 years but I know it won't be wordpress.com. I'd rather deal with self-hosting again than give them another penny.

The author should put the context which would help understand the situation better instead of a pitchfork.

> Couple days ago he [Matt] posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41613628#41614406

The founder of an open source project he founded should step down because you don't like his opinions?

He's allowed to be pissed off that some other company is profiting without contributing back. Developing the single most popular website framework is not without cost. Don't like his paid service? Don't use it!

Related:

WP Engine is not WordPress

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41613628

A lot more reasons, in a timeline, to Matt step down: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1--Erh8gHfFs0M-Ty1G7LODwx...

The dude(Matt) thinks WPEngine is doing the enshittification without realizing that he started it!