Comment by throwaway463645 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway463645 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway463645

I'm not involved at all in WP, but one thing that I've noticed is that when people talk about Matt Mullenweg online, it's apparently alright to call him mentally ill, scum, unhinged, wish him harm, cheer his setbacks, etc etc.

I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too.

Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild.

More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg?

I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.

The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences.

Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).

And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).

Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.

Matt was here on HN writing strange comments and undermining his own legal case despite people telling him to stop underming himself. That self destructive behavior is why people started to think he was having a mental health crisis.

And you seem to know way too much about this to be "not involved at all in WP".

If you understood the history then it would make more sense. Mullenweg is himself a notorious bully. There have been Mullenweg related uhh... "controversies" going back roughly two decades. People are tired.

Is the WP community toxic? No, it's absolutely lovely. But there is a dark cloud over everything when it comes to the project's direction and governance.

Mullenweg yields enormous power and is famously vindictive, so people can't speak up in healthier ways. I think this is the result; when a leader constantly wields his power to destroy critics, they tend to move underground.

But nobody posts this stuff "with glee". Quite the contrary.

(For the record, I think some of the critique goes over the line as well, but that's just the internet. I don't think it's as prominent as your comment seems to imply).

> I'm not involved at all in WP

That's an oddly specific thing to clarify upfront.

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