WordPress Drama: Is It Worth It?
opinionAutomattic confirms Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted ouster by board
By Sarah Perez
I have been holding off on writing about Matt Mullenweg and everything happening around WordPress because I wanted to make sure I wasn't just reacting to the latest round of drama.
I don't know Mullenweg personally, just like I don't know Elon Musk. But the more I watch his public actions and statements, the more I see a similar pattern.
That pattern is what bothers me.
It is the attitude of: I built this, I know what is best, and if you don't like the way I run it, there's the door.
With Musk and Twitter, at least the situation is fairly clear. Musk bought the company, took it private, and Twitter is a closed commercial platform. I may not like what he does with it, but there isn't much ambiguity about whose platform it is. So I left.
WordPress is different, but increasingly it feels like it is being treated the same way. So I left that too.
Automattic is privately owned, but WordPress is open source and surrounded by a much broader community of developers, hosting companies, businesses, nonprofits and ordinary users who have spent years building on top of it.
That is why Mullenweg's recent behavior bothers me more.
The public message says openness, community, stewardship and democratizing publishing.
The behavior increasingly looks to me like: My way or the highway.
That contradiction is what feels fishy.
I don't know Mullenweg personally, and I can't know his private motivations. But I can look at his public actions, the fight with WP Engine, his control over WordPress.org, the failed attempt by Automattic's board to put him on leave, and the concentration of control that remains around him.
Taken together, it increasingly looks less like a healthy open ecosystem and more like an ecosystem that still revolves around one founder.
And I am tired of that model.
I am tired of wealthy founder-entrepreneurs building something people come to depend on and then acting as if everyone else is merely a guest in their house.
This is mine. These are my rules. Do it my way or leave.
That may work for Twitter.
I don't think it fits nearly as comfortably with something that presents itself as an open-source community project.
I had already left WordPress long before most of this drama.
I left because I never really enjoyed using it. It had become too complicated. Plugins, themes, updates, security, compatibility problems and the learning curve all piled up until maintaining WordPress started to feel like a job in itself.
Eventually I noticed something more important: I was posting less.
The software that was supposed to help me publish was making me less likely to publish.
That was enough reason for me to leave.
Now, watching everything happening around Mullenweg and Automattic just reinforces that decision.
And for me, this doesn't stop with WordPress. Automattic also owns Pocket Casts, which I actually liked, Gravatar, and now Beeper. The more uncomfortable I become with the direction and leadership of Automattic, the less interested I am in depending on more of its products.
There are simpler tools today. There are static-site generators, lower-dependency publishing systems and other ways to put words on the web without carrying all of WordPress's technical complexity and, increasingly, its organizational drama.
So maybe the real question isn't whether WordPress can survive all of this. It probably can.
The question for me is simpler:
Is WordPress, with all of its complexity and the drama surrounding its founder, still worth using?
And beyond WordPress, do I really want to keep investing my time in other Automattic products? For me that answer is NO!
