Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
239 comments
·January 11, 2025rmccue
wyclif
I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.
Implicated
I've been saying this on twitter for months now. I don't believe this is a mentally healthy individual. His continued defence of his behavior with the whole "if you knew what was happening you would understand" style responses indicates he's lost in the sauce.
If he's not having some sort of mental health crisis it really begs to question how we got here with someone like him running those organizations for this long.
If he is, and he makes it out of this state, I feel for the emotions he's going to have to deal with when he sees (with a different perspective) what he's done to what is ultimately his life's work.
It's sad. All the way around, truly just sad.
ookblah
I thought that too until you go down the rabbit hole and realize it's been this way since apparently the beginning. It's also interesting to note just how hard everyone was tearing the author apart in the comments only for it to basically become true a decade later.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....
I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.
bugglebeetle
Nah, this is just what they call “mask off.” The amount of people like this at the top of orgs is not small, nor is this atypical. One could speculate as to the many reasons why this has become more obvious over or they’ve felt emboldened to make this clear over the past 10 years or so, but I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions.
gigatexal
Let him destroy Wordpress with his antics. Something better will emerge and it’ll not have this man-child at the helm.
chii
not really - there's a lot of existing investment in wordpress which would be lost if this is the case.
I think it's better for wordpress community to push out Mullenweg, and establish a community owned source. It is both a fork, but not just of the source code.
I think surviving this sort of disaster makes the whole stronger/resilient in the future. Starting anew will surely just have history repeat.
pixxel
[flagged]
justin66
> Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.
The generosity inherent in this sentiment is fundamentally a mistake. Mullenweg will keep dominating his domain if people cannot even recognize that he's an adversary, not a friend in need.
edoceo
If you're in leadership it's a good idea to get some outside advisors/mentor/muse.
Hard to find but, much cheaper than a lawyer. Many times just rubber-ducking the problem with someone can help build a more complete thought experiment.
robocat
Presuming he has a problem. What makes your think you think he would welcome intervention, or seek professional help, or respond to help?
He's clearly ignoring blunt feedback, and I've yet to see anything that suggests he thinks he's doing anything wrong.
Our society has been validating his behaviour with his half-billion dollar business: clearly some of his behaviour has value. Our society seems to reward and encourage similar behaviours in other founders (especially in current zeitgeist).
Sadly in my experience we don't have many options to help, and sometimes all we can do is watch someone burn themselves and those around them down.
He's losing his game and I can't see Automattic surviving the reshuffle that's coming. Business clients hate this shit and they have agency. Matt has been giving employees non-voting shares (a different class): https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/ although he owns 84% of the normal shares (although details of control depend on agreement with investors).
The saddest thing is that I'd guess he will toxically blame Jason Cohen. I'm sure Jason can deal with it (surely dealt with in past) and Jason seems smart enough to take strong advantage of the opportunity he's been gifted by Matt.
mthoms
FWIW, Matt has never claimed to own 84%. He's only ever claimed to "control" that percentage. Presumably, some investors have assigned him their voting rights by proxy. Oops.
disgruntledphd2
Is Jason still at WPEngine?
mmooss
Doesn't he seem to be following the trend: Embracing contempt for anything but ego and power? That's what Musk does, prioritizing those things over profit and the well-being of his businesses. Zuckerberg is all in, so are many others. It's 'founder mode'. In a way, they are following Trump.
Why treat it like a novel case, or like he has a mental health issue - unless all these people do.
rurban
Same for Elon. He still runs several companies.
See also your presidents (current and next), both not fit for any job.
inglor_cz
Let us ponder for a moment that this is how autocracies go astray, but instead of the banhammer, it is jail or gallows for the dissidents, and possibly a war against an external enemy. No checks on an individual's power will result in self-defeating madness, at least sometimes.
It is also a counterpoint to the "just educate people more" crowd. That doesn't save bad institutions from going haywire. Matt Mullenweg is almost certainly a highly educated, well-traveled individual, and yet he rules his roost like Mao once did.
pathartl
Been following your posts since the beginning of this. We met a while ago after a Milwaukee WordCamp and I remember talking about API v2 and how WP was going to be brought into the modern era.
Honestly, the project just feels stagnant to me. I get wanting to support plugins/the community for as long as possible, but I fear not having a sensible web framework has done nothing but given credence to the common criticism that WP shouldn't be taken seriously.
From my perspective as an owner of a small open source project, Matt's comments have been petty and vindictive. I personally probably will never touch the platform again. There's too many other frameworks out there, whether you want something similar like Statamic, Grav, Drupal.. or if you want to build with an actual app framework with Laravel, ASP.NET Core, etc.
pclmulqdq
Honestly, my first response to this whole fiasco was "people still use WordPress?" It turns out to still be very popular despite HTML infrastructure subsuming many features that WordPress used to offer (on one side) and competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.
everforward
> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.
The "just" is your explanation there. Most businesses want a blog, but also a half dozen other things. An event calendar, a mailing list, contact forms, an online store, etc, etc.
WordPress is kind of a mess technically, but you'd probably be surprised at some of the name-brand sites that use it. I want to say the NYT was using it at some point. It's the epitome of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough". You could build a better site by duct taping together a dozen services or open source products, but WordPress is generally good enough.
acomjean
The plugin system is pretty amazing, and block themes allow really much better styling/ management of sites.
It’s not perfect but its easy to use and a lot of people know how to use it.
We switched our non profit to using it so we could have more people helping post content. We could teach something else, but this was fairly easy..
coldpie
> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing
Have a favorite one? (Not a list of ten, please, just one or maybe two.) I've found WP easy & pleasant to use for my personal blogs, but I'm open to switching to something that's better and not associated with this nutbar.
bachmeier
Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?
troymc
WordPress is a lot more than it's core code. There's a whole ecosystem of plugins, for example, and the usual place to share them (wordpress.org/plugins) is, essentially, controlled by one guy. It's not so easy to fork that.
econ
Then start with a new place to share plugins.
geuis
Momentum. Heavy objects in motion have inertia. Oddly works in a similar fashion with software projects.
20+ years of OSS contributions and Matt leading the project is a LOT of inertia. You can fork the project right now yourself, but until some significant number of contributors move their efforts to your fork, you get no change of direction.
rmccue
The value of WordPress is in the brand, the ecosystem, and the community, and we’re all trying desperately to hold that together.
null
Dalewyn
Maybe stop doing that? There's a reason revolutions usually involve total destruction at some point along the way.
Makes me wonder with the apparent lack of strong will just how much of the dissent is actually a (very) loud minority.
grandpoobah
When I've worked with the REST API I've been quite pleasantly surprised by its flexibility. I thought it was quite cleverly designed. Good job mate.
moralestapia
>I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.
Harsh lesson to learn. He who builds on the people builds on mud. GG.
ValentineC
The TechCrunch headline is not accurate. As far as I understand, none of the people whose WordPress accounts were deactivated were planning a fork.
The current top comment and discussion on this Reddit thread provide good context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hylx50/matt_tro...
baobun
So it's actually worse and more scandalous than the clickbait headline claims. I guess that's an achievent on @photomatt's part.
softwaredoug
Basically they discussed reorganizing governance of Wordpress, not necessarily forking.
diggan
From Mullenweg (https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/):
> To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
He seems to be justifying the deactivation by claiming it will 'help them', somehow?
sd9
This post is wild. Mullenweg comes across as completely unstable, insecure, and appears to feel very threatened. He takes every opportunity he can to give a thinly veiled insult.
Wordpress is a giant. If he’s as confident as he tries to present in this post, he could just do nothing and Wordpress would prove the more valuable software in the end. Instead, he’s accelerating progress on the fork.
He could have done with taking a few deep breaths before publishing this post.
bdndndndbve
Have you followed this at all? The man has been in HN threads arguing about posts about himself for months. He's on some kind of scorched earth ego trip.
His profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
saagarjha
I see he’s back to posting again. Do we think he fired his lawyers or that they quit?
wodenokoto
I think down voting photomatt is immature and unconstructive. Whether you agree or disagree with his opinion, I think his views are quite central to a discussion on what is going on.
Down votes hides posts. I don't understand why so many HN'er wants Matt's comments removed from HN threads about WP.
2Gkashmiri
I even asked Matt to sue me just for lulz and my 2 minutes of fame. Hehe
indigodaddy
Interesting his karma is currently 20XX. If I had to guess, it was probably significantly higher before this whole thing blew up?
mingus88
It feels like this decade or so is defined by people who just don't know when to fade out and retire with their legacies intact.
Whether it be this guy, elderly politicians, or billionaires with social media addictions, everyone's lives would be far better, including their own, if they simply knew when to stfu and enjoy their success in peace.
softwaredoug
This sort of black and white thinking of you’re either 100% in agreement with me or you’re 100% agreeing my enemies, with no room for nuance, is the stuff of the mentally unwell.
rafram
> Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.
Oh, the level of snark here is unreal.
ablation
The fact that any of the Wordpress community is standing by him at this point makes it feel more like Stockholm syndrome or a cargo cult than a healthy open source project.
bigiain
Heather Burns responds:
https://xcancel.com/WebDevLaw/status/1877979616045891649
"At this point you either need to check into rehab, or frankly do the world a favour and overdose."
jjulius
Hah, her comment after that is equally fantastic.
j45
It feels like a backhanded compliment and encouragement.
If there wasn’t a threat perceived you could with them well and ask them to let you know them how they might need help.
gpm
Huh, the injunction against "blocking, disabling, or interfering with WPEngine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ (hereinafter “WPEngine and Related Entities”) access to wordpress.org;" [0] is still in effect right? There's nothing on the docket saying otherwise...
These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says
> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.
That sounds like a partnership to me.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
andypants
> with WPEngine’s
"WPEngine's" being key here. Some of the banned people are wordpress contributors, unrelated to WPE. The other banned people are not contributors at all and seemingly the only reason they were banned is that matt is angry at their tweets.
gpm
You can't cut "WPEngine’s" off from the disjunctive that follows.
> and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’
That clause is why I discussed the evidence that the people banned seem to me to fall under the meaning of the word partners.
rmccue
I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker: https://journal.rmccue.io/468/on-contribution/
The only potential cause of this were some posts discussing the arguments behind the original lawsuit - they’re written in my personal capacity, and I’m not a partner of WP Engine. Matt is simply banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made - it’s nothing to do with their partnership status.
(I’m not a WP Engine partner, and my day job is running a competitor to them. Aside from that, I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.)
SpaceNugget
They didn't, they emphasized it.
How do you figure that the people mentioned are partners with an unrelated wordpress hosting platform?
atkailash
Parters involved in WPEngine so yes, you can cut it off. If they aren’t working on that specifically it’s irrelevant if they’re partners on a separate project, even if it’s similar
that_guy_iain
That does not sound like a partnership at all. It sounds like an intent to work with the community.
gpm
Is "committed to working with" not a subset of the class of "partners" in your vernacular? What do you think is required to be "partners"?
And it names the specific members of the community, Joost, Karim, who subsequently had their accounts deactivated, not just the community at large.
jcranmer
> What do you think is required to be "partners"?
We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition. And while I'm not sure of the particular definition that's going to be in play, I strongly suspect that the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction.
"We are committed to working with [...] We stand ready" isn't strong enough to actually constitute a partnership, I'm pretty sure--it is at best an expression of intent to make one.
that_guy_iain
In my vernacular, a partnership is actually working together. Talk is cheap, lots of people say they're committed to stuff but aren't really.
iambateman
This is - without question - the best thing that could happen for their fork. It’s generating 100x the amount of attention they would’ve gotten otherwise.
I’ve known about Joost for many years and have a ton of respect for his work. Best of luck making this happen!
mthoms
They never claimed to be starting a fork (at least not yet)[0]. They only called for reform to the existing governance structures.[1]
Matt Mullenweg painted it as a fork to suit his narrative and pre-emptively poison the well (by implying they are incompetent) of a potential future fork.[2]
He's done that a couple times now. He claims to support forks and says "I'll even promote them on WordPress.org" (paraphrase) but what he does is post before a fork is even ready or properly organized. Thereby sabotaging the effort and making everyone involved look bad. [3]
It's truly evil.
[0] https://x.com/jdevalk/status/1878210129914409063
[1] https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/
[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
[3] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
EDIT: Matt just posted another childish taunt in response to Joost's clarification. See https://x.com/photomatt/status/1878227222927933815
TehCorwiz
If they weren't planning a fork like one of the other comments suggests they totally should now because the have the media initiative, people will be looking for it. Strike while the iron is hot basically.
LeonB
Mullenweg needs to be more careful doing this. The moment Mullenweg realises exactly what Mullenweg’s doing to WordPress, Mullenweg will deactivate Mullenweg’s account.
GavinAnderegg
In case anyone is looking for some background on this, I wrote this post before seeing the news today. Stuff's not been great in the WordPress community leading up to this point, and Mullenweg deciding to deactivate the accounts of folks who might start new forks certainly isn't helping matters.
ookblah
I know assholes like this exist everywhere, but it's the constant need to re-affirm that he's the "nice guy" while brazenly punching you in the face that unsettles me somehow. At least I know what I'm getting with certain politicians or tech moguls when they speak heh.
softwaredoug
Some people thrive on the drama they create and feed on the outrage. I try to remember that when consuming content about certain personalities. The outrage they elicit is what they love. So I try to roll my eyes and not give it to them.
mthoms
Joost clarified on Twitter he never asked for a fork. He was asking for reform of the current structures. Which is plain to see from his original post. Matt was the only to one to claim there was a fork forthcoming. He literally made it up.
In case there was any question about the utter pettiness of Mr Mullenweg, here's something he JUST posted in response to Joost's clarification.
ChrisArchitect
Related:
Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork
itronitron
and also:
Forking is Beautiful - WordPress News >> https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
jazzyjackson
The link to “open press” was a bit confusing since the website no longer mentions that name, boasting an open source knowledge graph for LLM agents now, but with a little jumping around I found the empty git repo with the feature list quoted in the blog
LexiMax
It's kind of wild that he's escalated from stalking ex-Tumblr users a year ago to...this. I guess when people show you who you they are, believe them.
dylan604
I feel like Matt is one step away from hosting a telethon showing his "evidence".
He's clearly a fan of the idea that the vast majority of the public does not care about anything other than what the loudest voice in the room is saying. Say it loud, say it often. Even if what is being said is contrary to evidence, most people are not going to look at it any further.
nchmy
Absolutely. Despite overwhelming evidence against everything that he says, I continue to see many absolute half-wits defending him in various forums
BeefWellington
Is that a wrong take though?
The instability this is causing is, mostly from what I can tell, strictly tied to the OSS dev community. I haven't seen tonnes of users talking about it or even caring enough to see what the fuss is about.
To be clear, I think what he's doing is bad in a variety of ways. I may be just jaded by years of watching corporations ignore the things that "should" matter and never being punished for it.
This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.
Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...
(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)