The article says that ~80% of the departures (126 people) were in the WordPress division, but doesn't indicate the size of that division. That's a much more interesting number than 8% of the company as a whole—depending on the size of the division and the sub teams affected that could be an enormous amount of WordPress brain drain.
For scale, Automattic has previously indicated that "over 100" people work on WordPress full time [0]. How many of those ~100 were part of the 126 WordPress employees who left?
WordPress division doesn’t mean the open source one, it means anyone working on WordPress related products, like jetpack, Woo, VIP, dotcom… The rest work on non-wp like tumblr, dayone, beeper and other apps.
I realize that, but the question remains: if 80% of the people who quit came from a single division, the percent of the company that quit is somewhat irrelevant. That division is the one we're interested in here, and it might have been completely gutted for all we know.
Division is probably the wrong term used, we have several divisions, you can categorize them into 2 categories:
- WordPress ecosystem (majority). Around 80% of the company.
- Non-WordPress ecosystem (minority). Around 20% of the company.
The % of people who left is consistent between those 2 divisions.
How's the distribution of departures by tenure and level? We know one of them was Executive Director over WordPress—is she an outlier or does the departure list skew to the top?
And within the "WordPress division", is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?
> is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?
Spread mostly evenly. I'm not sure I'm allowed to share tenure, I'm mostly going to share what was here, but tenure felt logical, most people who left were on the 3-5 years range, most of people in Automattic joined in that period of rapid hiring.
> The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr") will "switch to other divisions."
I've brought this up in another thread, but what's stopping Automattic from going after anyone making a profit in the WP community? Website developers, plugin makers, theme designers, etc.
Everyone is using the Wordpress trademark to promote their service and the plugins library to keep their services updated. If that's the legal precedent being used now, Automattic winning the lawsuit implies that nearly the entire community loses it's legal right to exist.
> WP Engine's lawsuit points to promises made by Mullenweg and Automattic nearly 15 years ago. "In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open access for all," the lawsuit said.
> Mullenweg wrote at the time that "Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company."
This sure sounds like Automattic made WordPress - both it's technology and the trademark - free to use. Apparently Automattic basically lied about making WordPress open:
> WP Engine alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg did not disclose "that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being 'independent of any company' as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic's hands."
It's possible that Automattic's trademark claims are not valid. Trademark claims become weaker if companies don't actively defend the use of their trademark. Even if the secret revocation of its permission to use the WordPress trademark is real, the fact that they've ignored 15 years of WP Engine's use of the trademark really weakens their case.
The logo was transferred to the WordPress foundation nonprofit, which in turn let people build products and services using the trademark free of charge. This is where the "free to use" comes from. Except secretly, the WordrPress trademark was transferred back to Automattic on the very same day.
Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody. Then, after a decade and a half, I start claiming infringement and demanding that people pay royalties to use the trademark. Is that valid business practice?
This is one of the reasons why trademarks have to be actively defended to stay viable. This is why companies can be very aggressive and paranoid about use of their trademarks: inaction people infringe on the trademark can lead to the trademark being considered abandoned. In this case, Automattic let WP Engine and others use the trademark for well over a decade. There's as strong case that the trademark was abandoned by Automattic due to this inaction.
> The logo was transferred to the WordPress foundation nonprofit, which in turn let people build products and services using the trademark free of charge. This is where the "free to use" comes from. Except secretly, the WordrPress trademark was transferred back to Automattic on the very same day.
> Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody.
I've been around WordPress since it was beta (though I got disillusioned after Gutenberg). Automattic/the Foundation has never let people "build products and services using the trademark free of charge".
Many people in the ecosystem have honoured that and avoided trouble by naming their WordPress products using the "WP" abbreviation.
The problem here is that even though many people have used WP from the start, Matt somehow thinks now that "WP Engine" is confusing enough people [1]:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
I mean, nothing. It's clear Matt will do whatever Matt wants, which is fine for him, but bad for the community and the platform.
The "Wordpress era" has gone on a really long time.
That longevity makes it easy to forget how quickly these things can change; remember Movable Type was the king of the blogging systems for a good while, until THEY (if I recall correctly) did a gross moneygrab and WP filled the gap.
How quickly MT became a footnote should be something Matt keeps in mind.
Movable Type never had the foothold that Wordpress has developed over the years.
Once you reach a certain size, inertia alone will allow you to survive for a very long time, even making bad mistakes. Digg died because it was still small enough that a mistake could kill it; Reddit is now so big that the exact same mistakes (or even worse ones) will just not stop it. Same for Twitter or Facebook. Wordpress is way past the size where it will take something more than an isolated legal case to cut it to size.
It seems like a great deal at any company, if you're confident you can find a new job within six months. This plus the extortion makes me wonder if Automattic is strapped for cash?
They raised $588m across rounds in 2019 and 2021. For a company founded in 2005. They’ve started doing something that’s burning A LOT of cash and I didn’t find public product direction that explains it (in only 20 minutes of googling tbf).
Dwindling runway as a theory to explain squeezing WPE and Matt’s public communications is getting harder to ignore.
The only rational reason to lay off 159 employees and demand millions of dollars from your competitors, ruining your reputation in the process and losing all your customers, is if not doing that results in an even worse outcome.
You begged the question of whether this is rational and I think it’s worth considering that it isn’t. It would not be out of character with other middle-aged guys making bad decisions because there’s something else going on in their life which they don’t control and so they’re going to flex their power where they can – Musk appears to have flushed tens of billions of dollars on Twitter in no small part because his daughter isn’t a robot he can control – but an even simpler explanation I’ve heard is that MM simply hadn’t had anyone tell him no about his business in decades and has gotten used to it. That’s not uncommon for CEO-types in unregulated industries and can be particularly bad if paired with an unwillingness to recognize that you’re making a mistake.
Is this Matt being a mercurial, megalomaniacal jerk, or is there some darker motivation that makes his behavior here borderline-rational?
It kinda doesn't matter, but it would be interesting to know. OTOH, I'm well past being surprised when some super wealthy tech bro shows his ass, so...
They most certainly did not do a lay-off. Private companies in financial trouble don't do voluntary buy-outs. The "demand for millions of dollars" also explicitly stated "or equivalent investment in WP".
I guess you shouldn't let facts get in the way when you're pushing a narrative...
Unless the lack of cash is expected to manifest 6 months in to a very costly and lengthy lawsuit.
All of Matt's discourse suggests that there will be no settlement because he sincerely believes (in the face of all released evidence) he's in the right, so this very well could be them preparing for the long haul.
I think this is correct. Some people were misaligned, but the majority seemed to be taking advantage of a generous severance for different personal reasons. And anyone on a pip would have a hard time turning it down.
if you've got the resources this is a great way to clear out the dead wood. Most orgs either make life so unpleasant the person leaves to escape, or do nothing and let the poison kill other parts of the company.
As entertaining as it can be to follow a public meltdown for 5 minutes, this hurts because Automattic was a company I used to look up to. I had the idea that some day I might work for them. Not sure this will still be possible. Maybe on a business unrelated to Wordpress.
> 159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!
That is an interesting (meritful, imo) way of putting it.
I’m not commenting on any other claim - I think it’s an interesting framing that 90% of the company still has its back (perhaps already yes-people? I suppose there were signs of his erratic behavior before this).
They’re making some very rude statements about the people who accepted the severance package.
Not too long ago, there was this unspoken rule amongst humans where we don’t trash a large group of former coworkers in public like that. We wouldn’t speak in absolutes about large groups of people. We had class.
And now I see this person who has trashed everyone who left. They apparently aren’t allowed to state what division they’re in. But trashing over 100 people seems to be okay. I cannot imagine a single functional organization approving of such a thing.
I haven’t used Wordpress in a very long time. But I had a lot of respect for Automattic. My hope is that I don’t have to keep the verb in the past tense.
Somewhere along the lines, we lost a lot of our humanity. It is very embarrassing to think that we traded humanity for social media likes.
I didn't realize they own Day One! That really stinks. It's a great app, but his childish antics make me question the wisdom of relying on it. I wonder if I can get a prorated refund.
I'll second that Day One is a great app... I've used it nearly every day for the past 13 years. I was afraid it would stagnate after it was acquired by Automattic, but it's only gotten better.
Day One is really nice. I actually prefer Apple's Journal app, but for some reason they don't want to put it on the iPad which makes no sense to me. IMHO, Journal should have been an iPad-first app.
Until Apple does that, I'll likely keep using Day One.
I was thinking more about the features unique to the iPad. With the Pencil you could sketch and doodle and hand write the entries. I think that would make it feel more personal and, if the benefits of writing by hand are true, more valuable.
As of today we are 1,733. But that may go up soon, we are hiring aggressively to fill roles of some people who left and meet increased customer demand! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
there's another comment above from someone who appears to work there, stating approx 80% of total staff work on WP and 20% on the other properties, so the percentage seems inline across the company & "divisions"
The handling of this is so bizarre it makes me want to sympathize with Matt (even though some of the information against him seems pretty damning), grab him by the shoulders and yell "please, for your sake, get offline, listen to your lawyers - this can't be healthy".
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
There's nothing to indicate that they're hiring a lawyer to deal with this situation. That was just speculation on the part of the parent comment. They probably just need to fill a vacancy in their legal division.
The job specifically asks for a JD with 8+ years of experience. The position will lead corporate, securities and governance work. This is not a junior attorney.
Yup, that’s what I was referring to - but they’re already doing a lot of weird stuff, so hiring someone internally to handle litigation (or similar) would be the kind of dumb I would expect.
And, while I'm not invested in this in any aspect, I feel: About time! I appreciate an executive with the passion/guts/ignorance to push a direction that's controversial and not safe. I'm really sick of working for companies that have no opinion or passion, and do a bunch of boring things.
While I don't deny CMSs has been a big part of my money income for decades, and CMS are a great entry both for designers, developers and business, Wordpress is probably the most horrible one. His popularity IMHO is just a matter of timing and good usability (which I won't deny), but not is not backed by a good code design and implementation behind.
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
They made several acquisitions that have nothing to do with WP which probably inflated the headcount a good bit.
For example they own Pocket Casts, a podcast application on Android (bought from NPR - I really wish NPR had decided to keep it, I feel like they would have been much better stewards).
I'm surprised more didn't take the offer. Maybe they have a better package of shares in the company that's worth the wait? Otherwise it seems like a great offer to take even if you've enjoyed working there and support Matt and his public meltdowns.
We have a special stock program called A12, and one cool feature of it is that you can still sell stock after you've left, with windows every six months. (You can only buy if you're currently employed, and it's downside protected, so you effectively have a 1x liquidation preference just like sophisticated investors.
I thought the same, but the thing to remember is that 80% of the employees who took the offer were in the WordPress part of the company. Automattic is at this point a bunch of loosely related companies, it’s understandable that the Pocket Casts team for example are probably quite disconnected from WordPress and the drama.
In other words, for those actually affected by the drama, a much higher percentage left.
Right, but I think coalface’s point is that it’s a good deal regardless of the drama. I’ve never really hated a job in my career, but if at any point I had a chance to take a paid break and then get paid two salaries for a bit, I’d probably have taken it more times than not.
And if you think that AI is going to eat away at dev jobs around the margins going forward, maybe you're thinking that you can't find another job within 6 months and even if you do it's likely to face an even more uncertain future.
This is a great offer but "a bird in the hand" etc.
Automattic is a fully remote company, getting jobs in APAC, Africa, and europe is tricky, not a lot are going to throw that away and hunt for a job for 6 months.
Getting remote jobs in general is tricky if you're not from certain countries. I'm from Algeria, Automattic was one of the few companies that hired there. Every other country would ask you to be in the US, or US timezone, or in a certain European country. Not all remote is built equal.
This actually makes me really suspicious about Automattic. Companies generally don't refuse to hire outside of certain countries just to be jerks, they do it because complying with international tax obligations while paying employees in dozens of countries is complex and expensive.
Given that, and the behavior we've seen from Matt and Automattic so far, what are the odds that they've actually got a bunch of really great international accountants and are doing everything correctly everywhere, versus they're just ignoring all of the tax laws and winging it, and are therefore at high risk of getting smacked down once the relevant authorities get wind of what's going on there?
we do this in Poland. While they're technically contractors everyone is treated like employees as much as possible. Hiring globally is really expensive, slow and risky for all but the largest companies. It's hard to be an expert in one system, let alone dozens, and that's before state/province/territory/etc differences.
My understanding is that it's a lot more work for a company to have employees across many different countries.
Things like payroll, insurance, health benefits, retirement benefits, equity, unions, etc. all need to be done differently for different countries. This means that there's a lot of "extra stuff" that's specific to each country. For example, US employees expect a 401(k) plan and health insurance. For a US company, that's par for the course, but for a French company (for example), you need local expertise to navigate all the laws and protocols.
There are middlemen like Rippling that help centralize some of those things, and paper over the differences. But it's still a lot of added complexity. Not insurmountable, but smaller companies may decide to not burden themselves with it.
It feels like you are just piling on really by engaging in such speculation. If I am wrong though please share your expertise on the difficulties of hiring remote in Algeria.
You seem to never been in that shoe (from a country no one hires from). Companies avoid that because it’s too much hassle. Automattic cares and goes through the hassle, simple as that.
You’re also talking without concrete knowledge. We work as international contractors, we handle our own local taxes. Automattic pays us the gross salary and it’s up to you.
Agree. Also I think Automattic was one of the few companies who actually paid a really good salary to even people from generally low income countries instead of paying market salaries and underpaying them.
Kudos to Matt man. Dude has actually done a lot of good stuff. Sure he has his problems. But who hasn't.
> You seem to never been in that shoe (from a country no one hires from).
Why do you say that? I do have sympathy for people in such countries and circumstances, but this isn't about that. It's about corporate compliance. For better or worse, corporations cannot just do something because it's a nice thing to do. They have to comply with the law in both the country they are based in and operate in, as well as in any country any prospective remote workers might be in.
I also never claimed to have any concrete knowledge. It's entirely possible they are doing everything correctly. I just find it odd that they are reportedly doing something that many companies do not do due to it being legally complex, and also their CEO is spouting off a bunch of unwise statements on public forums while being actively sued, which any sane corporate lawyer would strongly advise them not to do.
I may be wrong but I understand the comment above as saying that "getting jobs" in those places is now tricky. Not "getting remote jobs", just "getting jobs". In the sense that people who got now have a remote job at Automattic would have a hard time finding another job, even a non-remote one.
Jurisdiction issues are also probably a big factor.
If you have employees in N jurisdictions you potentially have to deal with N different sets of laws and regulations concerning income taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, health insurance, employment contracts, layoffs, maternity/paternity leave, unions, and probably many I've overlooked.
Remote employees in the same city? Trivial.
Different cities in the same county? Possibly slightly more work.
Different counties in the state? Maybe a slight step up in work.
Different states in the same country? Could be a big step up in work.
Different countries? Likely much more work than for employees in your country. With employees in different states in your own country things will work similarly. The bureaucracy you have to deal with for an employee in Florida and for an employee in Washington, for example, will be fairly similar, and much more similar to each other than they are to the bureaucracy you'll be dealing with for your employee in say Germany.
With the current job market, I'm surprised so many took it. Some people in my Linkedin network have been searching for tech and developer jobs for over 6 months.
If it were me I would have stayed while I kept looking. It's always better to search for a job when you already have one, and you really don't know when/if the right thing will come along.
On the other hand, it's a great mini-runway for people who want to start their own company.
I was effectively forced to take a similar "offer" recently (iow laid off with six months severance), and while I did end up getting another job relatively soon it was an extremely stressful time. I do not think I would have taken it voluntarily in the current economy, even if it did happen to benefit me in the end.
When it happened to me I was surprised to see what was being commented. There was nothing about the actual business decisions that led to the exodus, it was just vitriol about anyone who left was an imposter and now finally the real engineers can get to work.
Well, IMO you were a big part of why the WWE was successful, and they're declining while your career in movies is really taking off, so your personal success should provide you with a lot of validation.
if you've worked at the management level you've seen that GOOD attrition for a software company is maybe around 10% annually (we saw well above 25% coming out of Covid). There's always around this number leaving, looking to leave, or about to. If this flushed out 8.4% with very generous terms that seems low. We should watch the next 6-12 months to see if the expected level of departures continues, or there's a respite.
It will be interesting how many customers start flying the coop. Wordpress can be entrenching software but I have also found that a lot of the plugin heavy sites are just using plugins/customizations for trivial things you could easily eclipse. Migrating off of it is easier done than said in that case. We will be leaving WP Engine and Wordpress behind after we spend 2 months rebuilding on sensible software on a sensible host (WP engine is also terrible) this Q4.
We actually had a contingency plan to just leave WP Engine and fix our wordpress up, but in light of Matt’s nonsensical actions we have scrapped that option.
Congrats to these employees on fleeing what appears to be tyranny for the Automattic employees and the customers.
Probably not too many. The average WordPress site is run by a small business that doesn’t care the slightest bit about tech industry drama, or what open source even means.
I think these days, the average WordPress site runner is trying to find a cheap/free. Non-technical solution.
I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites.
- One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.
- Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updated"
They really just want a CMS that allows them to share announcements, post schedules and where to show up to play.
But it gets the job done, for cheap, and there is a decent community on plugins and themes.
Wordpress was originally popular because of its openness and community right? I wonder if that's still the platform it is.
No I don’t see it as an open platform with a strong community. Matt has demonstrated he will shut off features for large swaths of sites where is the openness there? The community plugins are loyal to a few popular plugins that all have pay walls if you want to do more than the basics. Any time Wordpress implements a new feature they have to do so it doesn’t completely crush the plugin community. Like site maps for example are trapped behind using a wordpress hook or using a plugin like Yoast to customize them.
I'll second the sibling poster here by saying anything useful you want to do with WordPress will probably have a non-negligible cost, and usually a subscription. WooCommerce for instance requires a subscription to add a minimum quantity to a product! I volunteer for a non-profit that uses it, and it's absolutely insane how many plugins will give you a little for free but charge $5/month or $50/year for just slightly more features.
About a decade ago, there was a huge kerfluffle about making the plugin directory include pricing and payments (like an app store). Matt was hugely against it. I think they did themselves a huge disservice. Pricing is opaque until you install the plugin, often requiring you to go "off site" to install the paid version (or it silently uses a different plugin repository). Lastly, there is no quality control or even ensuring that best/ethical practices are being followed.
So, you end up with this scummy feeling every time you install a plugin and discover its pricing.
If you were to guide them today, what would you set them up that's not WP that gives functionality similar to wp+woo?
(asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)
I went with wordpress for a website for a small charity I help with, I'm not usually a web guy but I used it years ago and, hey, it's open source right?
I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS.
I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Maybe I'd feel different if I was doing this for a company, but I was doing this for free for a charity with near zero budget.
The only real competition seems to be ghost though, and it doesn't even have a real plugin system. If you want something simple like a event calendar you need to host it entirely separately.
> I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Oh gosh I had to use a blog post to even find documentation on it. It’s basically a pile of hidden legos, for a simple table with columns you have to essentially implement it yourself with a few helper methods to help out. Then there’s the new system based on react because they could that has an entirely separate implementation stack. Also for a simple table you end up implementing all the functions and JSX yourself.
> I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source.
I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.
"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.
That may be enough, the average Wordpress site probably is subsidized by the larger sites that may leave. I don’t see the amount of employees exiting as a small amount even though it’s not even 20%.
Pretty unlikely. In my experience, WordPress is basically the go-to solution for people that need a cheap website and don't want to think about it too much. Especially for non-technical people running a law firm, consultancy, etc. The technical folks that care about recent events most likely left WP years ago.
I’m not sure what’s unlikely. Customers leaving? My company is a customer, we’re leaving. Or that most free sites are subsidized by paying customers? Why is that unlikely that seems pretty par for the course for free services.
I'm saying that WordPress is incredibly widespread, far more than I think most tech industry people realize. The average WordPress site builder doesn't know or care who Matt Mullenweg is or what open source means. WordPress is just the simplest way to make a usable website – and has been for the last 20 years, almost.
Okay I get that but I’m discussing people that don’t self host or need more than the basics. Those are the users affected by Matt’s action. For example, our site repos only include the site theme we deploy to WP Engine, so our stack is essentially Wordpress, not WP Engine Wordpress. All the WP Engine stuff is handled once deployed invisible to us. So when we log in we expect Wordpress features.
Yes there are a lot of Wordpress installs, a lot of them perhaps never even updated. You can claim those as being loyal to Wordpress but if they just set it up and forget it then there’s probably no real loyalty to Automattic. If you have concerns about just setting up a site on a different platform outside of Automattic for whatever reason, why would you trust it any longer? Those people will move on to another just as easy to install cms. Wordpress hasn’t gotten easier to customize in the last x years since your 3.0 install or whatever.
Easy to install and forget isn’t a Wordpress exclusive idea. It perhaps has a lot of mind share, but this is the 2nd time Matt has taken drastic action. It’s now at historical precedent levels.
They don't need to be loyal, they just need to be lazy, lazy enough to not want to learn a new technology and spend money + time switching to it. They won't move on to another CMS, because they don't care about WordPress tech industry drama and they don't know who Matt Mullenweg is. WordPress will continue to work just fine for them and they will continue not caring about an issue that will be forgotten about in a month. The vast, vast majority of people using WordPress think of it as an old, reliable, simple way to make a website, and nothing more.
I bet they know someone who cares and all a switch takes is “hey I found this other cms just as easy as wordpress to setup and it’s less confusing to manage”. Yes there will be people who will never switch, but there are also people that do the advising to those people. If you’re not technically inclined you probably have someone you keep around that IS technically inclined, no?
In my experience, it's more that a small webdev company runs these sites and the client pays $50-200/month to maintain it, maybe do a little SEO, etc.
To recreate the site in another CMS will cost hundreds of more dollars, at minimum, (probably thousands, realistically) and even then: what CMS are they switching to that's easier to use and has as wide a variety of plugins as WordPress? Because I'm not sure that CMS exists.
So the conclusion is: why switch? WordPress is perfectly fine for these people.
Okay you seem pretty cemented in this belief. My belief is that there are plenty of CMSes available. The plugin ecosystem is a side effect of a poorly developed cms, not really a feature. You can abstract a lot of need for plugins by using a CMS that isn’t “just the basics to support a plugin culture”. If you want to lock yourself into wordpress requirements then you’ll never escape it.
I don't disagree with you that there are alternatives, I'm just saying that this requires a level of knowledge, expertise, and desire that the average WordPress user simply doesn't have. WordPress is so old and so entrenched that it will take a really big push to get them to go anywhere - and the recent debacle isn't that big enough of one.
Wordpress itself doesn’t have to be deprecated or removed. It can be around forever, but people should have agency to use something else for new projects.
I run dozens of WP sites and help others create and maintain with it, I won't be leaving it any time soon - although at times it is appropriate to change hosts or even to change to a static site.
Wordpress makes those things easy.
I always have discussions with people about possible hosting issues, and issues with licenses changing when suggesting to use or continue to use WP (or anything else you do not control)
This whole kerfuffle does not bother me, as it reminds me of the licensing issues with some of the AI models being released - if you are super big you can't use them for free.. well fine - if I get that big and my biggest worry is how to brigade online to save face while trying to save a few million - well that is .1% problems I wouldn't mind having,
seriously, at that level a person/company can make all sorts of choices, and those choices don't have to be to convince people to throw salt and shade at the sandbox you are leaving.
Well you can change hosts to ones Matt like and doesn't like, and I'm glad you understand how easy it is.
Most hosting companies have some sorts of limits and some have wordpress related limited specifically.
If a web host is not able to provide the connectivity to the things you want or need, just switch.
From what I understand of my limited reading about the issue, wp engine may have to change how they advertise the use of wordpress related terms and they may have the mirror the plugin and other repositories as they may not be able to pass through access to the WP servers, this is a hindrance for sure, but it's not a full stop your site can't function.
Of course it's bloated for many use cases, because it is possible to do so many things with it (many things many may never need, sure) - poorly developed is not how I would characterize the development with WP - I've certainly loudly complained about some choices over the years, but the development is pretty robust compared to similar projects I have seen over the years.
If wordpress wants to change how they allow access to their servers based upon whether a host is making millions promoting WP, it's fine with me - they would not be the first company to decide to limit access at different thresholds and ask for more money based on usage.
It may be shocking and a big change, but the individual website owners can get the wp files and plugins and deploy in thousands of places around the world, and it takes just minutes in most cases.
Matt himself suggested the exodus: fork Wordpress, call it something else, host the plugin directory yourself.
And it's not like Wordpress is known for it's phenomenal code quality or anything. This is your chance to ditch some of the bad ideas (cough Gutenberg cough) or legacy code.
Yeah so WP Engine will just proxy the Wordpress plugin search results and cache the top plugins on their end. That’s a lose in this case for Automattic if that’s his suggestion then why even block WP Engine customers in the first place?
> “I think a fork would be amazing,” he told TNS. “They should fork WordPress, because what they offer is not actually WordPress. They call it WordPress, but they really screw it up.”
Yeah, part of the confusion here is Matt's unreliability as a narrator of his motivations. He wants WP Engine to fork, but then he asks them to pay. He wants Wordpress to grow and be open source, but suddenly he champions branding and restricting trademarks.
It's hard to know what his stated end goal in all of this is - maybe he's okay shrinking the Wordpress community so long as they control a bigger slice of it?
What did you move away to? I loved wordpress back in the 2-3.0 days lol. But all the other CMS are way too complicated for me, let alone normal people. I still have old sites stuck on relatively old versions.
To recap, in the lawsuit post, someone said about the law firm WP Engine got:
> Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour.
And I noted the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian who was lead counsel for Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in search results being fair use.
Automattic chose Neal Katyal. His latest accomplishment was trying to defend Johnson & Johnson 's dicey "Texas Two-Step" and lost while billing $2,465 an hour.
A hell lot of money will be spent on this case, that's for sure.
My guess is WPEngine looked at the amount being asked from them (the lawsuit says "tens of millions of dollars" based on public posts indeed it seems above thirty million a year), divided it by the hourly rate of the best legal representation they thought they can get and decided it's cheaper. They wanted to take no risks. From the other side, after you are sued by Rachel Kassabian you really have no choice but get the best you can find and they thought a former (Acting) Solicitor General of the United States is it. As they say, that escalated quickly.
There's not really a measure to say how much worse an $1000 or $500 per hour lawyer would be but no one is taking chances when you have this much money on the line.
The case could go to trial but most cases are settled outside of court. You need to ensure the other side sees how much they have to lose should the case proceed to trial. In many ways this is a game of chicken.
If you are saying it’s essentially random, why would you go with an expensive lawyer when you can hire basically anyone (competent). Is it just virtue signalling?
2. If it does go to court presentation will matter an awful lot. There are really technical topics involved which for us are easy to understand but not so much for a jury of peers. Translating well the facts for the jury involves experience, a very good team and talent.
Do you know the phenomenon of "Tournament wages"? Very prevalent in sports, it's why Ronaldo is worth a billion dollars. Because the lawyer's work is only valuable if they actually win, it's a very binary payout, and that drives up competition for "the best".
20% of the employees across all campuses took the buyout. The percentage of staff (not faculty) that accepted it varied across campuses from 8% to 41%.
Fun part, Automattic already gives you 3 months sabbatical every 5 years. For the people who were going to take sabbatical, they got those 3 months off.
So whoever is good enough to land a job in this crappy market got a sweet payday and the moat will stay in the company. What a brilliant move!
I think these people really overestimate how much people give a shit about their company and what they are doing. Automattic is a sweet remote first shop which pays well - albeit I've heard you have to drink plenty of BS in day to day job.
Attacking WP Engine and preventing them to access OSS (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like) was moronic enough, but this tops that.
I wonder who the hell advises these people - or maybe they're rich enough they just don't listen to anyone.
> (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like)
You're hallucinating that part of OSS. There's no requirement in any open-source software to interact with people you'd rather not interact with, for whatever reason you have, and there are extremely low limits to your continuing obligations for past interactions if you decide to "ban" them. (I'm using my non-lawyer understanding/memory on OSI-approved licenses, but I'd appreciate counter-examples to what I'm saying here if anyone knows of them.)
Technically you can of course discriminate in other ways and remain Open Source, like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective, for eg when there are multiple download mirrors that don't have the same bans as you, or people use Tor etc. Some of these sorts of bans don't seem to be in the spirit of the FLOSS movement though.
> ...like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective [including because the folks you banned can interact with an intermediary]
You miss the point. I'm not sure if this will help, but I'll see if I can expand and reiterate. Seeing this whole reply now, I apologize for the length. You might go back up to the parent comment and re-read what I was addressing: the claim that one's ability to "ban" is "not even OSS". Regarding ban evasion through Tor or similar, that plays into whether a ban is technologically feasible -- rather than about ability and freedom to make your choice in the first place -- and I won't address it further here.
If I don't want to interact with someone, I make that choice for myself. No open source license prevents me from making and implementing my choice for myself. If I previously chose to interact with someone and am now no longer willing to do so, then open source licenses have either no continuing obligations (eg BSD) or extremely low continuing obligations (eg GPL).
(If someone knows of a license that meets the Open Source Definition, to use a handy threshold, which does in fact require me to interact when I would prefer not to, then I would appreciate the counter-example. In fact, when I wrote "low" in my parent comment, I was thinking specifically and only about the GPL's requirement to provide source code for 3 years after interacting with a party, so I'd appreciate any counter-example that requires more than that.)
If others choose to interact with that same someone, then that is their choice, not mine. I am not a party to their interaction with that same someone. I may even choose to now include them in the list of people with whom I will no longer interact -- but that only goes forwards and does not change prior interactions -- and whether I even desire to make that choice is now getting far away from the topic of ability to make that choice.
My choices not affecting other people is very much in the spirit of open source and FLOSS, as I understand them.
The part that you quoted from the Open Source Definition is that the license cannot have discrimination terms. That has nothing to do with whether I choose to interact with anyone else on any basis that I choose, regardless of whether that basis is socially acceptable or not.
What that OSD requirement does do, however, is prevent my interaction choices from affecting others when I use an open source license. You might imagine a hypothetical license that discriminates against particular nationalities or industries, and contrast that with someone who uses open source licenses while still refusing to interact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or North Korea, to use two current, real-world examples.
Why the source is open- you can get all the ideas and copy it one way just like open source. Its differs from other "One-way-street-source" only by ownership of the public rights.
photomatt made a smart move to incentivize the exit of employees who disagreed with him on this important issue (as it would have festered in the company), but I think he offered them too much money.
I agree - he's facing a lot of criticism for reducing diversity or difference of opinion, but you don't promote this in context of your core values and conceptual integrity. You have private debate, reach a decision and then everyone publicly supports the direction. If you don't believe in the decision or can't support it, you need to leave.
>So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
Mullenweg doesn't explain when the offer was announced, but the earliest I can imagine is the Monday after he blocked WPE customers from accessing wordpress.org, which would mean employees had a max of four days to consider this deal. If it was after the WPE lawsuit, then employees had less than a day to consider it.
For comparison, when Basecamp did this in 2021, they originally had a deadline for the offer but extended it indefinitely.[0]
It's interesting to compare the way DHH presents the buyouts to the way Mullenweg does. Here's DHH[1]:
>Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.
DHH's explanation of the buyout feels gracious and that he genuinely wished well to the employees who accepted the buyout.
Mullenweg explaining his buyout just feels like a petty tyrant purging anyone who won't pledge loyalty to him. He highlights the tight deadline and the immediate shunning of employees who take the deal. He uses the word "enticing" as if the employees who accept the deal are the weak-willed ones who succumbed to temptation.
The offer had no limits (someone who was at the company for 2 days took it). Matt was also willing to continue sponsoring visa for the 6 months for whoever is on an work visa.
This was a very distracting 4 days, I'm glad it ended quickly, the dust is settling now, and we're slowly going back to work.
The whole drama is not done, but the colleagues and friends leaving all at once is done, and that was stressful, you don't know who's leaving next until you see their name.
To OP's point, I don't think the provided buyout window was long enough to determine that. If a bunch of other shoes drop, like more stuff comes out of discovery with the WP Engine lawsuit, knowing that you only had 4 days to accept or GTFO might still leave a bunch of on the fence employees.
This was more generous than both the Basecamp and Coinbase buyout offers, I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant. I can be a little ASD so sometimes my written communication doesn't come through the best.
I agree that you made more lucrative offers than Basecamp, but they presented their offers (publicly, at least) in a way that feels more professional and respectful of their employees.
So what you're saying is that Matt is a tyrant because he isn't as an effective communicator as DHH is? That's quite an unusual take on tyranny.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
There is no objective measure of what makes a tyrant. If one comes across as a tyrant, they are a tyrant!
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
I appreciate your interpretation. I too am a poor communicator, so I had no expectation of you interpreting it in line with my intent, but I am a bit saddened that I did such a poor job that it seems you didn't even begin to pick up the main point of the folly of trying to interpret statements absent of full context.
But perhaps you did and that realization frightens you. That would explain why you have decided to tell us that you are running away now. Logically, if you were just bored of the conversation you'd simply stop replying. Clearly something has gone haywire in your thought process for you to think it is necessary to share that you are going to stop.
Or maybe I'm just not grasping what you are trying to say. Such is the risk of dealing with those who are not good communicators.
They stopped engaging because you seem either unwilling or incapable of understanding the difference between personal attacks and criticism of an artifact.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
What personal attacks are you referring to? There are no personal attacks found anywhere in this thread, nor would there be any logical reason to bring emotions into it at all.
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
The whole point of this thread is that you're defending what you perceived to be a personal attack against Matt (calling him a tyrant) and the other poster was trying to explain that it was not, in fact, a personal attack.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
I made no suggestion that calling Matt a tyrant was a personal attack. Nor would I ever consider it to be. It is nothing more than a relaying of information about the state of the universe. There is no conceivable situation where pointing out that someone is a tyrant is an attack. That makes absolutely no sense.
But that's not what we were talking about anyway. The entire discussion has been about how communication is hard. Which I guess is what you have set out to prove by showing us that you have no clue as to what is going on around you. But I already established that communication is hard right from the very first comment, so what, exactly, do you think you are giving us by this live demonstration of what we already know?
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
It looks to me like passive aggressive lynch mobbing. Putting the issues aside, you seem to be doing a good job not letting the comments that charge you with medical and psychological issues get to you.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
I don't care about wordpress or this situation. I may be, just maybe, being too generous. Somehow people feel it's proper to question someone's sanity, provide armchair legal advice, and even suggest carbon monoxide intake is involved. Maybe people should be a little self aware of their critiques of others. Maybe.
Being made to make that kind of decision in such a short time clearly isn't fair.
In many jurisdictions it would be an unfair contract.
To then say "Look at how many people didn't take up the offer so they clearly support us" despite such a short notice on the offer makes a mockery of the company and it's leadership.
I'm not a lawyer, but there is the concept in English law of duress which can invalidate contracts that had undue pressure.
My point was a broader one not a legal one, that the company is acting in a manner that is hostile to a good work environment, putting up this kind of life-changing decision with only a few days to decide and then trying to paint decisions to stay as being a champion of the current direction.
That's treating your workforce with contempt.
Make the same offer with 30 days notice and see how many stay.
> And the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior...
I would expect you have to have been there for X months or Y years already in order to be given the deal. Unless Mullenweg is really that desperate to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with his hissy fit.
Seems like another CEO/lawyer misstep. Why offer the same package for someone who started 2 days ago? Someone could've made "Length worked at company" as a factor in the maths.
A 30K budget would make a very nice 6 months vacation indeed...
The offer probably come with some sort of a non-compete clause. Otherwise WPE could pull a Pressable by offering to secure a job for everyone who leaves A8C.
It's an exaggeration. Starting salary in LA for a bus driver is $53k/year; NYC is $61k. Atlanta is $42k; Seattle $69k; Dallas $48k; Miami $43k. It's really only a very limited amount of cities that have $60k salaries for bus drivers.. and they're all cities where $60k doesn't get you that far.
For a comparison, starting salary for a bus driver in Paris is 30k euros (with no prerequisites, they will send you to learn how to drive a bus). I'd imagine the conditions are much better (a lot more time off, lower working hours), and the cost of living is lower, so those compensate for some of the difference.
Netherlands is around €37k/year, and a minimum of 41 holidays xD
While you are learning it’s only €22k though.
I guess the fact you get free insurance helps, and it’s not quite as bad as I thought, but with an income like that you can get a mortgage of around 170k, which will net you around 40% of a house.
How much after income taxes, though? I recently learned that after taxes, my salary in Eastern Europe is around average salary in a few US states, although on paper (pre-tax) it looks like the US is 4 times richer.
I dunno, some-one who started 2 days ago may take just as long, or longer, to find their next employer as some-one with years of employment/experience.
Then again I’m only speaking from my experience. Fewer companies are interested in interviewing and hiring me than ever in my career right now. If I had a job, I wouldn’t be leaving it.
Maybe other people are having an easier time. I hope so!
Ah yes, this chap is tanking his company into the ground for Reasons! Like feelings!
No one in the entire history of the world has been on a coke bender and made bad life choices!
By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired. It was growing in revenues and profit and since then has shrunk drastically in both measures.
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.
The people who said that had no idea what extent the Twitter tech team had gone to to build a robust application that wouldn't fall over. The fact it withstood 75% of the staff being removed is a testament to the good work they did, not a sign that they weren't needed in the first place.
>By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired.
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
> However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
No, if you want to establish correlation or causation, you have to prove it. Don't have access to the data to prove something? Sucks, but then you can't draw that conclusion, at least not definitively.
I can believe, though, that you're at least somewhat correct that the mass firings were responsible for Twitter's decline. But it's plausible that other things are also to blame, and possibly even primarily to blame: questionable product decisions made post-acquisition (Twitter Blue, lax moderation, requiring logins to view, ...), the volatility and offensiveness of the new owner causing advertisers to leave, etc.
From the 2019 annual report (one of the only years where Twitter posted any net profit):
> We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to maintain profitability.
Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2018, we had an
accumulated deficit of $1.45 billion. Our revenue has grown from $664.9 million in 2013 to $3.04 billion in 2018. While we
were profitable on a GAAP basis in 2018, we believe that our future revenue growth and our ability to maintain profitability
will depend on, among other factors, our ability to attract new users, increase user engagement and ad engagement,
increase our brand awareness, compete effectively, maximize our sales efforts, demonstrate a positive return on
investment for advertisers, and successfully develop new products and services. *Accordingly, you should not rely on the
revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance.*
This is standard boilerplate that every public company puts in their official statements to pre-empt any shareholder lawsuits in case something goes wrong.
Imagine if a company told its investors: “Our growth is guaranteed! Nothing can affect our revenue and margins.” The only companies that give that kind of promises are ponzis (and to-the-moon cryptocurrency projects, which is not categorically too different).
It is actually quite remarkable that Twitter has kept functioning at a technical level. A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
On a technical level, I tend to agree. Never underestimate the skill of the employees to save their boss from horrible decisions.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
That might be true about the traffic, but twitter wasn’t open before the musk purchase either, it would stop you from seeing posts if you weren’t logged in if you tried to scroll more than a few times. Its current behavior of showing just a few posts sorta, uh, randomly selected might be easier on the server, idk.
For most of its life, Twitter was completely open. You could see any tweet or user page with the URL, whether or not you were logged in. The only exception was if someone had “protected” their account.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Do you know when they stopped being frictionlessly open? I’m curious when they started doing the to continue you have to log in pop overs. It preceded musk, as I said. I think every link still worked, but scrolling and navigating twitter like a typical website instead of typing in a link had log in gates.
That is NOT true. As a Twitter addict, I know that was not the case.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
As someone who wasn’t a twitter addict, I know it was true because people would link me to twitter, I would see the tweet but attempting to scroll too much would result in a log in popover years before the musk buyout.
I'm skeptical, honestly. Within the first few months of the acquisition, it seemed pretty clear to my tech-friend group that Twitter was on its way out and was going to fail. But it's been 2 years, and many of those same people still use Twitter quite a lot. Maybe it'll still fail, of course... it'll just take longer than anyone expected.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
My friends who were passing around twitter links still seem to do it. And the content of those links hasn't changed (random nature/technical info that geeks like) so the twitter posters haven't left either.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
I don't get why whole developer circles didn't leave the platform yet. You can't ask people something via DMs without paying for the blue checkmark and it's totally unhelpful, plus it sends the message you care not enough about the right wing messaging that is send by the platform now. Or these people are just ok with that, I don't know.
They have. Lots and lots of developers are now on the Fediverse. But there's a cultural schism between the types of developers that frequent Silicon Valley cafes and the ones that frequent the Chaos Computer Club.
It's not network effect. There is nothing valuable that happens on twitter that doesn't make it's way out of twitter to the rest of the internet and reality. Avoiding twitter is actually a great way to filter out literal nation-state produced misinfo and propaganda that doesn't pass the smell test, but seems rampant on twitter.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
Software can work for a very long time with minimal maintenance. A different question is if it can keep making revenue without investing.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
> A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
When SWEs in tech want to flex, they code Twitter on a whiteboard as an interview question. Major respect for the the work they're doing at xAI, but the hardest challenges building Twitter itself are social.
Uh, it has doomed them. Have you not heard about their massive drop in revenue as advertisers leave?
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.
The revenue problem is mostly because of Twitter's new leadership, on the technical side the few people that remained have managed to keep the platform running quite well.
Sure, it has been plagued by the occasional random errors and downtime ever since Musk came in, but I don't expect most companies to remain operational on a technical level when 80% leaves.
An important lesson for tech companies: hire strategic H1B employees throughout your company so when times are real tough, you're sure you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave.
I was curious if this is true or not. Found this: https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/twitter-facts-s... which came from before Twitter went private. It's technically correct that they did make a profit (e.g. 2022 Q1), but also made a lot of loss (e.g. 2022 Q2).
Comparatively, it's hard to find information about Twitter now. Most news articles mocks the revenue, but has no information about profit. However, given that Elon said Twitter "will be" profitable in 2024, I think it's safe to assume it isn't profitable yet?
This surprises me, I thought it became profitable from cutting expenses, but the truth is complicated. It used to be both profitable and not profitable at the same time (see the first link), but now it's mostly not profitable.
The massive debt Elon has set Twitter up with is probably driving their current losses. Advertisers wanting nothing to do with him after telling them to fuck off is one thing, but the interest on those billions of borrowed money aren't cheap to hold on to.
What also doesn't help Twitter's case is that employees are still fighting to get paid their severance fees. That's a couple hundred million dollars that Elon probably assumes he doesn't need to pay. Other fees on the order of tens of millions of dollars also include the rent that Elon decided he doesn't need to pay, as well as a bunch of other bunch of unpaid stuff.
My guess is that Twitter is banking on not having to pay all of its debts at once, slowly building up a profit and regaining its value so it can have the cashflow to pay back its arrears later, but that's a risky move that may lead to a debt spiral or bankruptcy.
The spam filtering system sure as shit isn't working. The amount of spam DMs I get is crazy. The trends section has also been busted for ages. Click on the "Show more" link and it shows you less.
- Scrolling after a while, the sound of a video doesn't stop anymore => force close
- A lot of violence, literally. I keep on blocking them ( recently logged in with another account due to a new phone and I had to do it again). It's nuts how much violence it promotes recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people who got fired did censorship and I miss it.
> In a blog post, Mullenweg said the package offered $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher, but the employees who took it would not be eligible to be re-hired by Automattic.
Like never eligible? That seems kind of petty. I would understand some timeframe, like "not eligible for 3/4/5 years", but a permanent ban seems weird.
> The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
That doesn't make sense to me. People stay in jobs they don't like all the time, with leadership they don't agree with all the time. Here's the reason: it's because they pay you to go to work. Like, money. If everyone just pulled up stakes every time the thought occurred to them that their CEO might be a petty tyrant, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through every Slack channel in the world.
Serious question: What is the percentage of people intending to get re-hired at a previous place? Or at least definitely not rejecting that idea?
Personally, i have never done so, be it because was always leaving by a "voluntary" "termination agreement", and the employers involved being either not attractive, not existent, or plainly incompetent. If you are residing in a major city, there are always other options.
And given 100% remote seems to be a must for many people, even more so.
That was peak tech idiocy. If I remember correctly nearly half the company took the severance package? Generous of them to offer all that free money, but a crazy business decision.
I’m not saying DHH is a great company leader (I don’t know!). But did the business do worse afterwards? Having too many employees can hinder the business, even if they are great people.
They say that before the layoff in 2021 they had been trying to grow aggressively. And since the layoff they have decided to stay small and not rehire. They say they were 83 and now they are 60. Specifically they have not hired anyone to be a full time manager since. Now everyone works on non-managerial tasks. Management is only part of your work.
I did see David post that they had 1500 applicants for a recent job posting. They offer extremely good pay for remote jobs outside SF and the US so it makes sense that lots of people are interested.
Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.
Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-mul...
This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer. He did this without any notice to WPEngine. Dragging users into this seriously and negatively impacts WordPress itself and calls have mounted for a WordPress governance overhaul eg https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/1839340016738480226
That he is not acting rationally was crystal clear when the lawsuit got filed because he came to this very place and started commenting on it while multiple people begged him to just stop because he is digging himself deeper into a hole. Everyone knows you shut up the moment you are sued.
And after that he cut off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin team who is employed by WPEngine from wordpress.org. This plugin has a few million users. https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355
My personal take on this is obviously not positive. This entire debacle hurts open source itself. Mind you: I do not know whether Matt is right or not but there was no need for any of this. If Matt thinks WPEngine violated his trademarks? Asking for a license fee, sending a C&D and suing them are what a trademark holder normally does. Indeed, it might even be beneficial for us all to get judicial review on trademark usage like this, mostly these open source trademarks operate on "gentleman's agreements", I don't think they have ever been tested in court. If Matt has a beef with WPEngine using too much wordpress.org resources? 1) he could've announced that in say three months there will be a cutoff so WPEngine can implement a proxy 2) either fastly or cloudflare would've been happy to take that traffic off his hands (indeed, Matt said after the cutoff both reached out to him). For both of them a thriving web ecosystem means more business and it has a nice marketing value too. Finally, if he has a problem with the amount WPEngine contributes? That's a very hard problem, some ideas are at https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem but inconveniencing countless sites because you have a beef with their hosting company is not going to help that's for sure.
Reading WPEngine's legal complaint https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP... they sound like cuckoos. My best guess is WPE's WordPress hosting business grew larger than Automattic and they're lashing out to survive. For example, WPE has 1000 employees and Automattic has 1700, but Automattic has their attention divided on 20 other products too, which left them blindsided when WPE forked their product, made it their core focus, outcompeted them on rizz alone, and cut them out of the profits without contributing to the costs. At that point Automattic is de facto unpaid employees of WPE and they're probably not happy about that. Their WordPress division is either going to be destroyed or have to use its guns. They chose the latter and many of their employees were angry because they signed up to be benevolent open source people. Unfortunately that's only really practical for a business when it possesses great advantage i.e. not being laid low by private equity. We should worry about Automattic's because if WordPress crumbles, Tumblr and a lot of other stuff may too.
Whether the factual claims of WPEngine are true is the matter of the lawsuit but it's incredibly well put together. What have you found illogical in there? Your tone doesn't fit at all a serious discussion. "rizz" "cuckoo" , I detest your garbage is posted as an answer to my rather detailed post.
Did WPE fork WordPress though? They clearly claim in their legal filing that the WordPress installs they use come directly from the official sources. I don't use WordPress or WPE, but I would (perhaps naively) assume that if they are making a clear statement of fact in a court filing that they are not lying about that fact.
They forked their business, which is WordPress hosting. In the complaint they brag about how they haven't changed a single line of code in WordPress itself. That's way more adversarial than forking the codebase, since the GPL ensures people still give back when they go their own way.
... is that even a thing? How is WPE the bad guy even if it is when there are NUMEROUS other wordpress hosting companies?
> GPL
The GPL specifically allows you to even SELL the GPL'd code to people, so I don't see how they are even violating the _spirit_ of the license.
More to the point, it's not like WPE is a black hole. They _are_ engaging and spending money on the community from what their court filing claims. Is it all self serving? Of course it is! A for-profit corporate entity rarely (never?) does things not in it's self interest.
I will freely admin I'm not a part of the WP community and have zero investment on either side of this fight. I will also say that just from reading what has been posted by all parties, I feel really strongly that Matt needs to stop talking/acting and let the lawyers sort things out at this point.
As an aside, as I was thinking about it this morning, Matt claims that WPE is causing him personally due to excessive usage of wordpress.org, right? But, if WPE goes away today, all those sites they were hosting are suddenly going to other hosting companies and the SAME amount of traffic will still hit the wordpress.org site. Trying to claim that WPE is causing undue traffic is just saying the WP as a whole causes too much traffic. So, are ANY hosting companies beyond Matt/Automattic funding the wordpress.org website? It's clear from the WPF financial filings that they don't contribute to funding that critical resource. And it's clear from Matt's posts that he prefer that every WP install uses those resources as he's expressly questioned why he would make it easy to point to another resource.
Every dollar WPE makes is a dollar Automattic doesn't. If you're David, and Goliath wants to use your platform and trademark to make you poorer, would you let him? All the stuff you're talking about is a distraction, because this is an unnatural relationship, and they're going to come up with whatever excuses they can to rectify that.
If you are saying this is just Automattic being mad that WPE is making money and they want some of it, that's a major concern for any professional services company in the WP space. Once they are done with WPE, who's next on the list? This is not hyperbole. Any company that is a similar line of business would be foolish not to asses this as a high risk.
Being mad that someone is using the open source software EXACTLY as the license allows them to is indicative of very poor planning. If you didn't want anyone else to make money off the software, then why open source it in the first place?
They can claim all day long that WPE was misusing the WordPress marks and the courts will resolve that complaint. Their use of WP was expressly allowed as WordPress expressly disclaimed WP as a trademark.
They can cry about WPE's usage of the wordpress.org services and say they are abusing them. Until they change the code and make the update URL configurable, they are being highly disingenuous. Considering that Cloudflare has offered to provide free CDN services to WPF for this, it seems like the best solution for the community would be for Matt to give wordpress.org to the foundation and let them use the freely offered services.
As I don't know you personally Justine and just go on what I've seen you contribute to the world, I must say I'm actually surprised at your apparent hard line on this. As I have said a few times, I have zero involvement in this debacle and I think both parties are likely bad actors. But what I've seen Matt post during this would make me 100% never get involved with him in any kind of business. He's displayed a shocking lack of self-restraint and level of malice towards those he feels have wronged him or are in his way.
The world needs Matt and Automattic. It doesn't need WPE. The WordPress community should be more worried about what'll happen to them when no one is developing WordPress anymore, than what'll happen if Matt goes to war with everyone else too. He's so self-sacrificing that he didn't fight back against WPE until WPE alone was threating his survival. Apple would have never let someone in their App Store in the first place who directly competes with them, and Matt looked the other way for ten years. Matt is obviously guileless considering how he behaves. That would make me not very afraid of him if I were a business in this space. The fact is though that Matt is one of the people who gives to the community more than he's taking, and WPE is the opposite. You won't have a community anymore if the takers demoralize and alienate all the helpers. What's happening now is completely WPE's fault. As the most profitable entity in the WordPress space, they have a duty to help lead the community and fund its development. Asking for 8% isn't unreasonable.
Is the Wordpress community so weak that after all these years they couldn't weather Matt retiring?
And if Automattic is such a business which can only exist as a monopoly then it shouldn't exist. Because that's what you are implying.
Once again: if WP Engine misuses trademarks which Matt holds then by all means send a C&D to them and if they resist then sue them. That's a completely normal business behavior. What's happening here is lunacy.
> Every dollar WPE makes is a dollar Automattic doesn't.
This is the same fallacy as "immigrants are taking our jobs".
No, this is not true. The market can expand, competition spurs innovation, they put in marketing and so forth. The income of Automattic in a world where WPE doesn't exist is less , likely much less than the income of real Automattic plus WPE.
You have been posting nonsense ever since you started, just stop.
Wow I don't think I've ever made someone on Hacker News this upset before. If it makes you feel better, I chose to reply to your comment because you put the most effort into your analysis, and your comment contributed actual information, unlike a lot of the other low effort stuff.
boykie? cookoo, rizz so you are answering to yourself as a sock puppet. People don't talk like this especially not here.
And once again which one it is: you didn't answer me. If you think you did that's because you forgot to switch accounts. https://i.imgur.com/LeF241n.png
I finally have an analogy for the "Open Source company":
A company creates a free buffet and sells seats at a table. They hope a competitor doesn't come and take the free food, slather it in hot sauce, and sell it at their own restaurant, because that would be rude.
> This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer.
This is the big one. I believe his argument was that when WPE customers updated they were using WP.org bandwidth for free.
That's a reasonable point.
But...doesn't that also apply to nearly everyone else who is running WP somewhere other than via a paid plan on WP.com?
If I download the install zip from WP.org and install WP on my own server, won't it get updates from WP.org?
If I get shared hosting at one of the zillion shared hosting companies that include cPanel or something similar, and click the button to set up WP, won't that then get its updates from WP.org?
What about if I use the Wordpress docker image from docker.com? That comes configured by default to just do the initial install from the WP that is included in the image and then update that as needed, so it seems that if I go that way and don't explicitly change it to be static (and then do updates by redeploy when new images are available) I'm going to be hitting WP.org.
Do I need to be worrying that if I use WP in any of those ways I'm going to be cut off from updates because WP.org isn't getting paid when I update?
Generally the "real work" is outsourced (briefed out), in house legal only manages the work. In house lawyers don't have the day to day experience of dedicated trial lawyers.
Based on yesterday’s thread where Matt started answering questions about the lawsuit here on HN, I doubt losing half of the legal team would make any difference.
I'm really surprised that we don't have term limits for CEO's of companies. Since they occupy power positions, all top power positions should have term limits. That would fix a lot of problems in our societies.
The CEOs/Corpos have way more representative power than any real person these days since bribery is legal. I'm surprised this isn't a common issue being raised all the time; well besides the lack of civics education in general.
A competing product would have to at least be on par in terms of quality, licensing, UI/UX, app availability, sync, web interface. They'd have to start sacrificing living animals before I'd consider switching.
They're even still honoring lifelong premium access for first purchases of their apps.
I've checked it out here and there. UI is way too convoluted for my taste and the legacy Android UI elements shine through way too often. Looks like Material Design on a pig. If it works for you, all good though.
While not necessary, especially because of the proprietary sync stuff you can't self host, Pocket Cast is open source.
Overcast had an update earlier this year which made it completely unusable (for my use case, at least). The developer's reaction to feedback from and apparent contempt of users was so poor that I wouldn't use a product they created again.
This particular matter also affects me professionally (although not directly, but by precedent), so as a matter of principle, I'll find another solution.
Hard to say now but I was coming from AntennaPod on Android, and when I switched to iPhone I needed a new podcast app, and Overcast was different in annoying ways and with Pocket Casts I was able to change some settings to get it to be more like AntennaPod. I think part of it was having a download button on each episode in the list.
there are a few choices that were made that are very odd. Like the old interface where you could swipe on the 'poster' to get the episode info was nice, they switched it to a button, but it looks like the recently undid that one and it's back to swipe.
It's obvious that you're somehow personally involved in this situation, since you have filled this thread with multiple comments which range from dismissive to plain rude. And the whole thread reeks of comments who just try to frame company's CEO as irrational, which contribute next to nothing to understanding the two companies' dispute, while raising some disbelief for their motive in the first place.
The article says that ~80% of the departures (126 people) were in the WordPress division, but doesn't indicate the size of that division. That's a much more interesting number than 8% of the company as a whole—depending on the size of the division and the sub teams affected that could be an enormous amount of WordPress brain drain.
For scale, Automattic has previously indicated that "over 100" people work on WordPress full time [0]. How many of those ~100 were part of the 126 WordPress employees who left?
[0] https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/09/26/our-wordpress-contribu...
WordPress division doesn’t mean the open source one, it means anyone working on WordPress related products, like jetpack, Woo, VIP, dotcom… The rest work on non-wp like tumblr, dayone, beeper and other apps.
I realize that, but the question remains: if 80% of the people who quit came from a single division, the percent of the company that quit is somewhat irrelevant. That division is the one we're interested in here, and it might have been completely gutted for all we know.
Division is probably the wrong term used, we have several divisions, you can categorize them into 2 categories: - WordPress ecosystem (majority). Around 80% of the company. - Non-WordPress ecosystem (minority). Around 20% of the company.
The % of people who left is consistent between those 2 divisions.
Oh, you could have said you work for Automattic!
How's the distribution of departures by tenure and level? We know one of them was Executive Director over WordPress—is she an outlier or does the departure list skew to the top?
And within the "WordPress division", is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?
> is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?
Spread mostly evenly. I'm not sure I'm allowed to share tenure, I'm mostly going to share what was here, but tenure felt logical, most people who left were on the 3-5 years range, most of people in Automattic joined in that period of rapid hiring.
Most of Tumblr's staff no longer works on Tumblr. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/tumblr-is-reportedly...
> The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr") will "switch to other divisions."
tumblr's backend is migrating to WP apparently
Two months ago, this sounded like a pretty cool idea.
a buddy of mine who works on wordpress said that matt basically announced that without any prior discussion & that it has never come up since
I've brought this up in another thread, but what's stopping Automattic from going after anyone making a profit in the WP community? Website developers, plugin makers, theme designers, etc.
Everyone is using the Wordpress trademark to promote their service and the plugins library to keep their services updated. If that's the legal precedent being used now, Automattic winning the lawsuit implies that nearly the entire community loses it's legal right to exist.
It's unclear if WP Engine is actually violating any copyright or trademark: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/automattic-deman...
> WP Engine's lawsuit points to promises made by Mullenweg and Automattic nearly 15 years ago. "In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open access for all," the lawsuit said.
> Mullenweg wrote at the time that "Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company."
This sure sounds like Automattic made WordPress - both it's technology and the trademark - free to use. Apparently Automattic basically lied about making WordPress open:
> WP Engine alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg did not disclose "that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being 'independent of any company' as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic's hands."
It's possible that Automattic's trademark claims are not valid. Trademark claims become weaker if companies don't actively defend the use of their trademark. Even if the secret revocation of its permission to use the WordPress trademark is real, the fact that they've ignored 15 years of WP Engine's use of the trademark really weakens their case.
How do you equate transfered to an independent company with free to use? That's not the same thing at all
The logo was transferred to the WordPress foundation nonprofit, which in turn let people build products and services using the trademark free of charge. This is where the "free to use" comes from. Except secretly, the WordrPress trademark was transferred back to Automattic on the very same day.
Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody. Then, after a decade and a half, I start claiming infringement and demanding that people pay royalties to use the trademark. Is that valid business practice?
This is one of the reasons why trademarks have to be actively defended to stay viable. This is why companies can be very aggressive and paranoid about use of their trademarks: inaction people infringe on the trademark can lead to the trademark being considered abandoned. In this case, Automattic let WP Engine and others use the trademark for well over a decade. There's as strong case that the trademark was abandoned by Automattic due to this inaction.
> The logo was transferred to the WordPress foundation nonprofit, which in turn let people build products and services using the trademark free of charge. This is where the "free to use" comes from. Except secretly, the WordrPress trademark was transferred back to Automattic on the very same day.
> Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody.
I've been around WordPress since it was beta (though I got disillusioned after Gutenberg). Automattic/the Foundation has never let people "build products and services using the trademark free of charge".
Many people in the ecosystem have honoured that and avoided trouble by naming their WordPress products using the "WP" abbreviation.
The problem here is that even though many people have used WP from the start, Matt somehow thinks now that "WP Engine" is confusing enough people [1]:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
[1] https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
> "WP Engine" is confusing enough people
Up until the 2024-09-24 that section of the trademark policy read:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240924024555/https://wordpress...
I mean, nothing. It's clear Matt will do whatever Matt wants, which is fine for him, but bad for the community and the platform.
The "Wordpress era" has gone on a really long time.
That longevity makes it easy to forget how quickly these things can change; remember Movable Type was the king of the blogging systems for a good while, until THEY (if I recall correctly) did a gross moneygrab and WP filled the gap.
How quickly MT became a footnote should be something Matt keeps in mind.
Movable Type never had the foothold that Wordpress has developed over the years.
Once you reach a certain size, inertia alone will allow you to survive for a very long time, even making bad mistakes. Digg died because it was still small enough that a mistake could kill it; Reddit is now so big that the exact same mistakes (or even worse ones) will just not stop it. Same for Twitter or Facebook. Wordpress is way past the size where it will take something more than an isolated legal case to cut it to size.
That's definitely true, but MW shouldn't mistake inertia for immortality. WP doesn't really do anything novel.
I disagree about Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately; it's been in all the papers.
> Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately
I know, but it has taken more than two years to take serious wounds and it's still very far from being dead.
As of 11 months ago, Fidelity had marked down their stake by 71%.
As of now, it’s 80%.
Are you saying that your threshold for “serious” is more than a 71% loss of value?
These losses are squarely in the territory of those who are commonly labeled as “worst ceo’s of all time”.
MT was a huge pain to install, in part due to Perl.
Every shared host had PHP/MySQL, which made WP installs dead simple.
Winning a lawsuit generally does not create any binding precedent. You’re thinking of an appellate decision.
I suspect it was the 6 months salary rather than any major philosophical agreement.
It seems like a great deal at any company, if you're confident you can find a new job within six months. This plus the extortion makes me wonder if Automattic is strapped for cash?
They raised $588m across rounds in 2019 and 2021. For a company founded in 2005. They’ve started doing something that’s burning A LOT of cash and I didn’t find public product direction that explains it (in only 20 minutes of googling tbf).
Dwindling runway as a theory to explain squeezing WPE and Matt’s public communications is getting harder to ignore.
Matt has stated in a recent Slack conversation that Automattic is doing great financially.
Has anybody credible made that claim though?
The only rational reason to lay off 159 employees and demand millions of dollars from your competitors, ruining your reputation in the process and losing all your customers, is if not doing that results in an even worse outcome.
You begged the question of whether this is rational and I think it’s worth considering that it isn’t. It would not be out of character with other middle-aged guys making bad decisions because there’s something else going on in their life which they don’t control and so they’re going to flex their power where they can – Musk appears to have flushed tens of billions of dollars on Twitter in no small part because his daughter isn’t a robot he can control – but an even simpler explanation I’ve heard is that MM simply hadn’t had anyone tell him no about his business in decades and has gotten used to it. That’s not uncommon for CEO-types in unregulated industries and can be particularly bad if paired with an unwillingness to recognize that you’re making a mistake.
I think we're far past rational behavior
I mean, that's the question.
Is this Matt being a mercurial, megalomaniacal jerk, or is there some darker motivation that makes his behavior here borderline-rational?
It kinda doesn't matter, but it would be interesting to know. OTOH, I'm well past being surprised when some super wealthy tech bro shows his ass, so...
They most certainly did not do a lay-off. Private companies in financial trouble don't do voluntary buy-outs. The "demand for millions of dollars" also explicitly stated "or equivalent investment in WP".
I guess you shouldn't let facts get in the way when you're pushing a narrative...
If they were strapped for cash, they would’ve made the severance amount much lower.
Unless the lack of cash is expected to manifest 6 months in to a very costly and lengthy lawsuit.
All of Matt's discourse suggests that there will be no settlement because he sincerely believes (in the face of all released evidence) he's in the right, so this very well could be them preparing for the long haul.
I believe it's opposite. Matt's so rich he doesn't care.
I think this is correct. Some people were misaligned, but the majority seemed to be taking advantage of a generous severance for different personal reasons. And anyone on a pip would have a hard time turning it down.
if you've got the resources this is a great way to clear out the dead wood. Most orgs either make life so unpleasant the person leaves to escape, or do nothing and let the poison kill other parts of the company.
Yeah I would be tempted to take that offer and I like my job a lot. But I wouldn’t mind a nice long paid break either.
As entertaining as it can be to follow a public meltdown for 5 minutes, this hurts because Automattic was a company I used to look up to. I had the idea that some day I might work for them. Not sure this will still be possible. Maybe on a business unrelated to Wordpress.
> 159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!
That is an interesting (meritful, imo) way of putting it.
Yes using percentages to claim that those people never mattered to Automattic. Classy.
I’m not commenting on any other claim - I think it’s an interesting framing that 90% of the company still has its back (perhaps already yes-people? I suppose there were signs of his erratic behavior before this).
People still support others like Matt or worse so it’s not surprising.
Either the industry has changed dramatically, people have changed or there’s something truly odd going on at Automattic.
There is a Reddit user right now:
https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/
They’re making some very rude statements about the people who accepted the severance package.
Not too long ago, there was this unspoken rule amongst humans where we don’t trash a large group of former coworkers in public like that. We wouldn’t speak in absolutes about large groups of people. We had class.
And now I see this person who has trashed everyone who left. They apparently aren’t allowed to state what division they’re in. But trashing over 100 people seems to be okay. I cannot imagine a single functional organization approving of such a thing.
I haven’t used Wordpress in a very long time. But I had a lot of respect for Automattic. My hope is that I don’t have to keep the verb in the past tense.
Somewhere along the lines, we lost a lot of our humanity. It is very embarrassing to think that we traded humanity for social media likes.
I didn't realize they own Day One! That really stinks. It's a great app, but his childish antics make me question the wisdom of relying on it. I wonder if I can get a prorated refund.
I'll second that Day One is a great app... I've used it nearly every day for the past 13 years. I was afraid it would stagnate after it was acquired by Automattic, but it's only gotten better.
Day One is really nice. I actually prefer Apple's Journal app, but for some reason they don't want to put it on the iPad which makes no sense to me. IMHO, Journal should have been an iPad-first app.
Until Apple does that, I'll likely keep using Day One.
Extra odd given how much they tout the ease of having one codebase that scales from the watch to a Mac.
I was thinking more about the features unique to the iPad. With the Pencil you could sketch and doodle and hand write the entries. I think that would make it feel more personal and, if the benefits of writing by hand are true, more valuable.
TBH, I'm surprised they had almost 2000. I would've thought they'd be around the 500 mark.
As of today we are 1,733. But that may go up soon, we are hiring aggressively to fill roles of some people who left and meet increased customer demand! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
What percent of the WordPress team took the offer? ~126 departures were from WordPress, out of how many total?
From the first sentence of the article: 8.4%
So, roughly 2,000 employees?
Original post: https://ma.tt/2024/10/alignment/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726197#41726796
>8.4% of the company,
The person you are replying to is asking what percentage of the WordPress division, not the company-wide percent.
there's another comment above from someone who appears to work there, stating approx 80% of total staff work on WP and 20% on the other properties, so the percentage seems inline across the company & "divisions"
Seems rather desperate, please give this whole situation a once-over Matt
The handling of this is so bizarre it makes me want to sympathize with Matt (even though some of the information against him seems pretty damning), grab him by the shoulders and yell "please, for your sake, get offline, listen to your lawyers - this can't be healthy".
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
Maybe that's why they are hiring an "Associate General Counsel"?
That’s really not the right way to hire a lawyer you need right now.
Probably not the right way to hire a lawyer at all, frankly.
How does he expect a junior attorney to help him at all, especially one who is depending on him for his paycheck?
There's nothing to indicate that they're hiring a lawyer to deal with this situation. That was just speculation on the part of the parent comment. They probably just need to fill a vacancy in their legal division.
The job specifically asks for a JD with 8+ years of experience. The position will lead corporate, securities and governance work. This is not a junior attorney.
Here’s the job ad:
https://automattic.com/work-with-us/job/associate-general-co...
Thanks, I was going off the description from the parent poster. My bad!
> That’s really not the right way to hire a lawyer you need right now.
> Probably not the right way to hire a lawyer at all, frankly.
> How does he expect a junior attorney to help him at all, especially one who is depending on him for his paycheck?
Most large companies outsource the bigger stuff and anything non day-to-day (like trademark enforcement and litigation) to law firms.
Yup, that’s what I was referring to - but they’re already doing a lot of weird stuff, so hiring someone internally to handle litigation (or similar) would be the kind of dumb I would expect.
And, while I'm not invested in this in any aspect, I feel: About time! I appreciate an executive with the passion/guts/ignorance to push a direction that's controversial and not safe. I'm really sick of working for companies that have no opinion or passion, and do a bunch of boring things.
Where's today's DHH, Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky?
> meet increased customer demand!
I mean, you are attempting to destroy your competitors.
I support your approach here Matt. I have used WordPress forever and greatly appreciate the software.
I guess you don't host it or program for it...
I run a digital agency with hundreds of employees and thousands of clients and tens of thousands of WordPress sites we host.
While I don't deny CMSs has been a big part of my money income for decades, and CMS are a great entry both for designers, developers and business, Wordpress is probably the most horrible one. His popularity IMHO is just a matter of timing and good usability (which I won't deny), but not is not backed by a good code design and implementation behind.
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
They made several acquisitions that have nothing to do with WP which probably inflated the headcount a good bit.
For example they own Pocket Casts, a podcast application on Android (bought from NPR - I really wish NPR had decided to keep it, I feel like they would have been much better stewards).
I'm surprised more didn't take the offer. Maybe they have a better package of shares in the company that's worth the wait? Otherwise it seems like a great offer to take even if you've enjoyed working there and support Matt and his public meltdowns.
We have a special stock program called A12, and one cool feature of it is that you can still sell stock after you've left, with windows every six months. (You can only buy if you're currently employed, and it's downside protected, so you effectively have a 1x liquidation preference just like sophisticated investors.
I thought the same, but the thing to remember is that 80% of the employees who took the offer were in the WordPress part of the company. Automattic is at this point a bunch of loosely related companies, it’s understandable that the Pocket Casts team for example are probably quite disconnected from WordPress and the drama.
In other words, for those actually affected by the drama, a much higher percentage left.
Right, but I think coalface’s point is that it’s a good deal regardless of the drama. I’ve never really hated a job in my career, but if at any point I had a chance to take a paid break and then get paid two salaries for a bit, I’d probably have taken it more times than not.
It’s a tough job market, so I’m not surprised. Demand for developers/other tech roles and overall economy isn’t great right now.
And if you think that AI is going to eat away at dev jobs around the margins going forward, maybe you're thinking that you can't find another job within 6 months and even if you do it's likely to face an even more uncertain future.
This is a great offer but "a bird in the hand" etc.
Automattic is a fully remote company, getting jobs in APAC, Africa, and europe is tricky, not a lot are going to throw that away and hunt for a job for 6 months.
Stupid question but where exactly in the world is getting a remote job not tricky?
Getting remote jobs in general is tricky if you're not from certain countries. I'm from Algeria, Automattic was one of the few companies that hired there. Every other country would ask you to be in the US, or US timezone, or in a certain European country. Not all remote is built equal.
This actually makes me really suspicious about Automattic. Companies generally don't refuse to hire outside of certain countries just to be jerks, they do it because complying with international tax obligations while paying employees in dozens of countries is complex and expensive.
Given that, and the behavior we've seen from Matt and Automattic so far, what are the odds that they've actually got a bunch of really great international accountants and are doing everything correctly everywhere, versus they're just ignoring all of the tax laws and winging it, and are therefore at high risk of getting smacked down once the relevant authorities get wind of what's going on there?
Read up on employers of record: https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
(Just hiring people as contractors, as it sounds like Automattic does, is another option.)
we do this in Poland. While they're technically contractors everyone is treated like employees as much as possible. Hiring globally is really expensive, slow and risky for all but the largest companies. It's hard to be an expert in one system, let alone dozens, and that's before state/province/territory/etc differences.
My understanding is that it's a lot more work for a company to have employees across many different countries.
Things like payroll, insurance, health benefits, retirement benefits, equity, unions, etc. all need to be done differently for different countries. This means that there's a lot of "extra stuff" that's specific to each country. For example, US employees expect a 401(k) plan and health insurance. For a US company, that's par for the course, but for a French company (for example), you need local expertise to navigate all the laws and protocols.
There are middlemen like Rippling that help centralize some of those things, and paper over the differences. But it's still a lot of added complexity. Not insurmountable, but smaller companies may decide to not burden themselves with it.
It feels like you are just piling on really by engaging in such speculation. If I am wrong though please share your expertise on the difficulties of hiring remote in Algeria.
You seem to never been in that shoe (from a country no one hires from). Companies avoid that because it’s too much hassle. Automattic cares and goes through the hassle, simple as that.
You’re also talking without concrete knowledge. We work as international contractors, we handle our own local taxes. Automattic pays us the gross salary and it’s up to you.
Agree. Also I think Automattic was one of the few companies who actually paid a really good salary to even people from generally low income countries instead of paying market salaries and underpaying them.
Kudos to Matt man. Dude has actually done a lot of good stuff. Sure he has his problems. But who hasn't.
> You seem to never been in that shoe (from a country no one hires from).
Why do you say that? I do have sympathy for people in such countries and circumstances, but this isn't about that. It's about corporate compliance. For better or worse, corporations cannot just do something because it's a nice thing to do. They have to comply with the law in both the country they are based in and operate in, as well as in any country any prospective remote workers might be in.
I also never claimed to have any concrete knowledge. It's entirely possible they are doing everything correctly. I just find it odd that they are reportedly doing something that many companies do not do due to it being legally complex, and also their CEO is spouting off a bunch of unwise statements on public forums while being actively sued, which any sane corporate lawyer would strongly advise them not to do.
You can't use one or two behaviors that you disagree with and then use that to view everything the person does.
Think of the worst behaviors you have done which you are probably ashamed to even talk about.
Now imagine us using that worst behaviors to look at everything you do.
Sounds stupid right?
Exactly. That's why Christ was making a good point. Throw stones if you have not committed any sins.
I may be wrong but I understand the comment above as saying that "getting jobs" in those places is now tricky. Not "getting remote jobs", just "getting jobs". In the sense that people who got now have a remote job at Automattic would have a hard time finding another job, even a non-remote one.
I think in the US it's less tricky. There are much more openings without time zone issues.
Jurisdiction issues are also probably a big factor.
If you have employees in N jurisdictions you potentially have to deal with N different sets of laws and regulations concerning income taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, health insurance, employment contracts, layoffs, maternity/paternity leave, unions, and probably many I've overlooked.
Remote employees in the same city? Trivial.
Different cities in the same county? Possibly slightly more work.
Different counties in the state? Maybe a slight step up in work.
Different states in the same country? Could be a big step up in work.
Different countries? Likely much more work than for employees in your country. With employees in different states in your own country things will work similarly. The bureaucracy you have to deal with for an employee in Florida and for an employee in Washington, for example, will be fairly similar, and much more similar to each other than they are to the bureaucracy you'll be dealing with for your employee in say Germany.
In Ukraine.
With the current job market, I'm surprised so many took it. Some people in my Linkedin network have been searching for tech and developer jobs for over 6 months.
If it were me I would have stayed while I kept looking. It's always better to search for a job when you already have one, and you really don't know when/if the right thing will come along.
On the other hand, it's a great mini-runway for people who want to start their own company.
I was effectively forced to take a similar "offer" recently (iow laid off with six months severance), and while I did end up getting another job relatively soon it was an extremely stressful time. I do not think I would have taken it voluntarily in the current economy, even if it did happen to benefit me in the end.
Unless you have another job lined up the job market currently is not where everyone would just quit in my opinion.
Plenty of people who took the offer were on the fence already or looking to switch companies anyway, it was a good motivator for them.
Are you an employee? I’ve seen a bunch of comments like this on various forums. Is Matt telling his employees to spin the folks who left?
Edit: it seems like he is. Wow.
What’s the problem here? This is a common scenario in every company out there. I was in the same exact position myself 3 years ago.
When it happened to me I was surprised to see what was being commented. There was nothing about the actual business decisions that led to the exodus, it was just vitriol about anyone who left was an imposter and now finally the real engineers can get to work.
Well, IMO you were a big part of why the WWE was successful, and they're declining while your career in movies is really taking off, so your personal success should provide you with a lot of validation.
Yes I am. I’m not spinning anyone. Several of my friends took the offer, they were unhappy, it was great timing. I support them 100%.
if you've worked at the management level you've seen that GOOD attrition for a software company is maybe around 10% annually (we saw well above 25% coming out of Covid). There's always around this number leaving, looking to leave, or about to. If this flushed out 8.4% with very generous terms that seems low. We should watch the next 6-12 months to see if the expected level of departures continues, or there's a respite.
Of course he is.
> Mullenweg said the package offered $30,000 or six months of salary
I've really enjoyed some of the jobs I've had, but find it hard to imagine a world where I wouldn't accept a six-month payoff.
It will be interesting how many customers start flying the coop. Wordpress can be entrenching software but I have also found that a lot of the plugin heavy sites are just using plugins/customizations for trivial things you could easily eclipse. Migrating off of it is easier done than said in that case. We will be leaving WP Engine and Wordpress behind after we spend 2 months rebuilding on sensible software on a sensible host (WP engine is also terrible) this Q4.
We actually had a contingency plan to just leave WP Engine and fix our wordpress up, but in light of Matt’s nonsensical actions we have scrapped that option.
Congrats to these employees on fleeing what appears to be tyranny for the Automattic employees and the customers.
Good riddance Wordpress.
Probably not too many. The average WordPress site is run by a small business that doesn’t care the slightest bit about tech industry drama, or what open source even means.
I think these days, the average WordPress site runner is trying to find a cheap/free. Non-technical solution.
I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites.
- One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.
- Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updated"
They really just want a CMS that allows them to share announcements, post schedules and where to show up to play.
But it gets the job done, for cheap, and there is a decent community on plugins and themes.
Wordpress was originally popular because of its openness and community right? I wonder if that's still the platform it is.
No I don’t see it as an open platform with a strong community. Matt has demonstrated he will shut off features for large swaths of sites where is the openness there? The community plugins are loyal to a few popular plugins that all have pay walls if you want to do more than the basics. Any time Wordpress implements a new feature they have to do so it doesn’t completely crush the plugin community. Like site maps for example are trapped behind using a wordpress hook or using a plugin like Yoast to customize them.
I'll second the sibling poster here by saying anything useful you want to do with WordPress will probably have a non-negligible cost, and usually a subscription. WooCommerce for instance requires a subscription to add a minimum quantity to a product! I volunteer for a non-profit that uses it, and it's absolutely insane how many plugins will give you a little for free but charge $5/month or $50/year for just slightly more features.
About a decade ago, there was a huge kerfluffle about making the plugin directory include pricing and payments (like an app store). Matt was hugely against it. I think they did themselves a huge disservice. Pricing is opaque until you install the plugin, often requiring you to go "off site" to install the paid version (or it silently uses a different plugin repository). Lastly, there is no quality control or even ensuring that best/ethical practices are being followed.
So, you end up with this scummy feeling every time you install a plugin and discover its pricing.
If you were to guide them today, what would you set them up that's not WP that gives functionality similar to wp+woo?
(asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)
I would point you at headless cms software like ContentStack or Payload which are easy as pie to use and integrate with a react frontend.
Or React Bricks
Thank you!
Shopify actually might be appropriate for many of their use cases.
How is it set up though?
I feel I could battle harden a WP setup with those needs.
Disable most of the admin interface. Just let them access what they need.
Announcements, schedules, and where to play - stored as ACF records on a page/post and displayed with a custom template/loop.
Slim down the admin interface to just CRUD for those items.
> its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.
As the same for most sites hosted with WP.
Whats the alternative? Most people have just switched to Instagram or Twitter for stuff like that. Easy daily update/schedules ect.
I went with wordpress for a website for a small charity I help with, I'm not usually a web guy but I used it years ago and, hey, it's open source right?
I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS.
I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Maybe I'd feel different if I was doing this for a company, but I was doing this for free for a charity with near zero budget.
The only real competition seems to be ghost though, and it doesn't even have a real plugin system. If you want something simple like a event calendar you need to host it entirely separately.
> I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Oh gosh I had to use a blog post to even find documentation on it. It’s basically a pile of hidden legos, for a simple table with columns you have to essentially implement it yourself with a few helper methods to help out. Then there’s the new system based on react because they could that has an entirely separate implementation stack. Also for a simple table you end up implementing all the functions and JSX yourself.
> I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source.
I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.
"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.
That may be enough, the average Wordpress site probably is subsidized by the larger sites that may leave. I don’t see the amount of employees exiting as a small amount even though it’s not even 20%.
Pretty unlikely. In my experience, WordPress is basically the go-to solution for people that need a cheap website and don't want to think about it too much. Especially for non-technical people running a law firm, consultancy, etc. The technical folks that care about recent events most likely left WP years ago.
I’m not sure what’s unlikely. Customers leaving? My company is a customer, we’re leaving. Or that most free sites are subsidized by paying customers? Why is that unlikely that seems pretty par for the course for free services.
I'm saying that WordPress is incredibly widespread, far more than I think most tech industry people realize. The average WordPress site builder doesn't know or care who Matt Mullenweg is or what open source means. WordPress is just the simplest way to make a usable website – and has been for the last 20 years, almost.
Okay I get that but I’m discussing people that don’t self host or need more than the basics. Those are the users affected by Matt’s action. For example, our site repos only include the site theme we deploy to WP Engine, so our stack is essentially Wordpress, not WP Engine Wordpress. All the WP Engine stuff is handled once deployed invisible to us. So when we log in we expect Wordpress features.
Yes there are a lot of Wordpress installs, a lot of them perhaps never even updated. You can claim those as being loyal to Wordpress but if they just set it up and forget it then there’s probably no real loyalty to Automattic. If you have concerns about just setting up a site on a different platform outside of Automattic for whatever reason, why would you trust it any longer? Those people will move on to another just as easy to install cms. Wordpress hasn’t gotten easier to customize in the last x years since your 3.0 install or whatever.
Easy to install and forget isn’t a Wordpress exclusive idea. It perhaps has a lot of mind share, but this is the 2nd time Matt has taken drastic action. It’s now at historical precedent levels.
They don't need to be loyal, they just need to be lazy, lazy enough to not want to learn a new technology and spend money + time switching to it. They won't move on to another CMS, because they don't care about WordPress tech industry drama and they don't know who Matt Mullenweg is. WordPress will continue to work just fine for them and they will continue not caring about an issue that will be forgotten about in a month. The vast, vast majority of people using WordPress think of it as an old, reliable, simple way to make a website, and nothing more.
I bet they know someone who cares and all a switch takes is “hey I found this other cms just as easy as wordpress to setup and it’s less confusing to manage”. Yes there will be people who will never switch, but there are also people that do the advising to those people. If you’re not technically inclined you probably have someone you keep around that IS technically inclined, no?
In my experience, it's more that a small webdev company runs these sites and the client pays $50-200/month to maintain it, maybe do a little SEO, etc.
To recreate the site in another CMS will cost hundreds of more dollars, at minimum, (probably thousands, realistically) and even then: what CMS are they switching to that's easier to use and has as wide a variety of plugins as WordPress? Because I'm not sure that CMS exists.
So the conclusion is: why switch? WordPress is perfectly fine for these people.
Okay you seem pretty cemented in this belief. My belief is that there are plenty of CMSes available. The plugin ecosystem is a side effect of a poorly developed cms, not really a feature. You can abstract a lot of need for plugins by using a CMS that isn’t “just the basics to support a plugin culture”. If you want to lock yourself into wordpress requirements then you’ll never escape it.
I don't disagree with you that there are alternatives, I'm just saying that this requires a level of knowledge, expertise, and desire that the average WordPress user simply doesn't have. WordPress is so old and so entrenched that it will take a really big push to get them to go anywhere - and the recent debacle isn't that big enough of one.
Wordpress itself doesn’t have to be deprecated or removed. It can be around forever, but people should have agency to use something else for new projects.
Which CMS would you recommend?
I run dozens of WP sites and help others create and maintain with it, I won't be leaving it any time soon - although at times it is appropriate to change hosts or even to change to a static site.
Wordpress makes those things easy.
I always have discussions with people about possible hosting issues, and issues with licenses changing when suggesting to use or continue to use WP (or anything else you do not control)
This whole kerfuffle does not bother me, as it reminds me of the licensing issues with some of the AI models being released - if you are super big you can't use them for free.. well fine - if I get that big and my biggest worry is how to brigade online to save face while trying to save a few million - well that is .1% problems I wouldn't mind having,
seriously, at that level a person/company can make all sorts of choices, and those choices don't have to be to convince people to throw salt and shade at the sandbox you are leaving.
Well you can’t change hosts because Matt doesn’t like some of them when they don’t pad his bank account.
Never said it wasnt easy. It’s also bloated and poorly developed. It’s a bit like asking why people don’t use bricks instead of tires.
Well you can change hosts to ones Matt like and doesn't like, and I'm glad you understand how easy it is.
Most hosting companies have some sorts of limits and some have wordpress related limited specifically.
If a web host is not able to provide the connectivity to the things you want or need, just switch.
From what I understand of my limited reading about the issue, wp engine may have to change how they advertise the use of wordpress related terms and they may have the mirror the plugin and other repositories as they may not be able to pass through access to the WP servers, this is a hindrance for sure, but it's not a full stop your site can't function.
Of course it's bloated for many use cases, because it is possible to do so many things with it (many things many may never need, sure) - poorly developed is not how I would characterize the development with WP - I've certainly loudly complained about some choices over the years, but the development is pretty robust compared to similar projects I have seen over the years.
If wordpress wants to change how they allow access to their servers based upon whether a host is making millions promoting WP, it's fine with me - they would not be the first company to decide to limit access at different thresholds and ask for more money based on usage.
It may be shocking and a big change, but the individual website owners can get the wp files and plugins and deploy in thousands of places around the world, and it takes just minutes in most cases.
Matt himself suggested the exodus: fork Wordpress, call it something else, host the plugin directory yourself.
And it's not like Wordpress is known for it's phenomenal code quality or anything. This is your chance to ditch some of the bad ideas (cough Gutenberg cough) or legacy code.
> This is your chance to ditch some of the bad ideas (cough Gutenberg cough) or legacy code.
ClassicPress is already a thing:
https://www.classicpress.net
Yeah so WP Engine will just proxy the Wordpress plugin search results and cache the top plugins on their end. That’s a lose in this case for Automattic if that’s his suggestion then why even block WP Engine customers in the first place?
https://thenewstack.io/the-wordpress-saga-does-matt-mullenwe...
> “I think a fork would be amazing,” he told TNS. “They should fork WordPress, because what they offer is not actually WordPress. They call it WordPress, but they really screw it up.”
Yeah, part of the confusion here is Matt's unreliability as a narrator of his motivations. He wants WP Engine to fork, but then he asks them to pay. He wants Wordpress to grow and be open source, but suddenly he champions branding and restricting trademarks.
It's hard to know what his stated end goal in all of this is - maybe he's okay shrinking the Wordpress community so long as they control a bigger slice of it?
And WP Engine could fork and call it Wordpresss. That’s also a lose for his tirade. I bet his expensive lawyer wouldn’t tell him that though.
All I’m learning is that never elect Matt as POTUS because he always wants to go nuclear to teach a lesson to a small percentage of the population.
What did you move away to? I loved wordpress back in the 2-3.0 days lol. But all the other CMS are way too complicated for me, let alone normal people. I still have old sites stuck on relatively old versions.
We’re moving to ContentStack + react frontend. However if you want control I recommend hosting Payload.
Curious why you say WP Engine is terrible? My org has been using them for several years without issue.
They rate limit queries
So now we know the lawyers on both sides.
To recap, in the lawsuit post, someone said about the law firm WP Engine got:
> Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour.
And I noted the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian who was lead counsel for Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in search results being fair use.
Automattic chose Neal Katyal. His latest accomplishment was trying to defend Johnson & Johnson 's dicey "Texas Two-Step" and lost while billing $2,465 an hour.
A hell lot of money will be spent on this case, that's for sure.
Here is now Automattic is presenting this for an opposing view:
> Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
He's only faced Quinn Emmanuel twice...
And one of those was a motion for summary judgment that QE's client was not expected to win.
Like, I know they bill by value delivered, but would a $500/hour lawyer really be that much worse?
My guess is WPEngine looked at the amount being asked from them (the lawsuit says "tens of millions of dollars" based on public posts indeed it seems above thirty million a year), divided it by the hourly rate of the best legal representation they thought they can get and decided it's cheaper. They wanted to take no risks. From the other side, after you are sued by Rachel Kassabian you really have no choice but get the best you can find and they thought a former (Acting) Solicitor General of the United States is it. As they say, that escalated quickly.
There's not really a measure to say how much worse an $1000 or $500 per hour lawyer would be but no one is taking chances when you have this much money on the line.
I mean, presumably you can look at a history of wins in similar cases instead of hourly rate or reputation?
The case could go to trial but most cases are settled outside of court. You need to ensure the other side sees how much they have to lose should the case proceed to trial. In many ways this is a game of chicken.
This isn't like a football match where the variables are well-known.
Lawsuits are decided on facts if they end up going to court, and every case is unique even if they follow similar fact patterns.
If you are saying it’s essentially random, why would you go with an expensive lawyer when you can hire basically anyone (competent). Is it just virtue signalling?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41741183
2. If it does go to court presentation will matter an awful lot. There are really technical topics involved which for us are easy to understand but not so much for a jury of peers. Translating well the facts for the jury involves experience, a very good team and talent.
Do you know the phenomenon of "Tournament wages"? Very prevalent in sports, it's why Ronaldo is worth a billion dollars. Because the lawyer's work is only valuable if they actually win, it's a very binary payout, and that drives up competition for "the best".
I can think of very few jobs where I wouldn’t take this offer immediately and have a few month sabbatical.
A university in Pennsylvania made a similar offer this summer. 40% of the employees accepted it, including the president.
May I ask which university?
Penn State.
https://www.psu.edu/news/administration/story/penn-state-off...
Yes. The campus I was referring to specifically was New Kensington. Here's the president that took the buyout: https://www.psu.edu/news/new-kensington/story/penn-state-new...
20% of the employees across all campuses took the buyout. The percentage of staff (not faculty) that accepted it varied across campuses from 8% to 41%.
Fun part, Automattic already gives you 3 months sabbatical every 5 years. For the people who were going to take sabbatical, they got those 3 months off.
Paid or unpaid sabbatical?
Paid: https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/
>Matt Mullenweg is returning from his 3 month sabbatical, dubbed “Samattical”, which kicked off February 1, 2024.
No matter how the court case goes, there's enough goodwill destroyed that he could rename himself Hazmatt by now.
So whoever is good enough to land a job in this crappy market got a sweet payday and the moat will stay in the company. What a brilliant move!
I think these people really overestimate how much people give a shit about their company and what they are doing. Automattic is a sweet remote first shop which pays well - albeit I've heard you have to drink plenty of BS in day to day job.
Attacking WP Engine and preventing them to access OSS (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like) was moronic enough, but this tops that.
I wonder who the hell advises these people - or maybe they're rich enough they just don't listen to anyone.
> (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like)
You're hallucinating that part of OSS. There's no requirement in any open-source software to interact with people you'd rather not interact with, for whatever reason you have, and there are extremely low limits to your continuing obligations for past interactions if you decide to "ban" them. (I'm using my non-lawyer understanding/memory on OSI-approved licenses, but I'd appreciate counter-examples to what I'm saying here if anyone knows of them.)
The Open Source Definition is only about copyright licensing, but it does mention "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups".
https://opensource.org/osd/
Technically you can of course discriminate in other ways and remain Open Source, like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective, for eg when there are multiple download mirrors that don't have the same bans as you, or people use Tor etc. Some of these sorts of bans don't seem to be in the spirit of the FLOSS movement though.
> ...like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective [including because the folks you banned can interact with an intermediary]
You miss the point. I'm not sure if this will help, but I'll see if I can expand and reiterate. Seeing this whole reply now, I apologize for the length. You might go back up to the parent comment and re-read what I was addressing: the claim that one's ability to "ban" is "not even OSS". Regarding ban evasion through Tor or similar, that plays into whether a ban is technologically feasible -- rather than about ability and freedom to make your choice in the first place -- and I won't address it further here.
If I don't want to interact with someone, I make that choice for myself. No open source license prevents me from making and implementing my choice for myself. If I previously chose to interact with someone and am now no longer willing to do so, then open source licenses have either no continuing obligations (eg BSD) or extremely low continuing obligations (eg GPL).
(If someone knows of a license that meets the Open Source Definition, to use a handy threshold, which does in fact require me to interact when I would prefer not to, then I would appreciate the counter-example. In fact, when I wrote "low" in my parent comment, I was thinking specifically and only about the GPL's requirement to provide source code for 3 years after interacting with a party, so I'd appreciate any counter-example that requires more than that.)
If others choose to interact with that same someone, then that is their choice, not mine. I am not a party to their interaction with that same someone. I may even choose to now include them in the list of people with whom I will no longer interact -- but that only goes forwards and does not change prior interactions -- and whether I even desire to make that choice is now getting far away from the topic of ability to make that choice.
My choices not affecting other people is very much in the spirit of open source and FLOSS, as I understand them.
The part that you quoted from the Open Source Definition is that the license cannot have discrimination terms. That has nothing to do with whether I choose to interact with anyone else on any basis that I choose, regardless of whether that basis is socially acceptable or not.
What that OSD requirement does do, however, is prevent my interaction choices from affecting others when I use an open source license. You might imagine a hypothetical license that discriminates against particular nationalities or industries, and contrast that with someone who uses open source licenses while still refusing to interact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or North Korea, to use two current, real-world examples.
Its everyones freedom to build a parallel open-source eco-system, that cooperations can not legally leech on.
That wouldn't be Open Source. There is an alternative movement called "Fair Source" though:
https://fair.io/
Why the source is open- you can get all the ideas and copy it one way just like open source. Its differs from other "One-way-street-source" only by ownership of the public rights.
They’ll need to start from a new code base that isn’t GPL, then.
Job market is very bad for programmers. Strange time to quit.
photomatt made a smart move to incentivize the exit of employees who disagreed with him on this important issue (as it would have festered in the company), but I think he offered them too much money.
I agree - he's facing a lot of criticism for reducing diversity or difference of opinion, but you don't promote this in context of your core values and conceptual integrity. You have private debate, reach a decision and then everyone publicly supports the direction. If you don't believe in the decision or can't support it, you need to leave.
WP engine should raise and hire these people.
>So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
Mullenweg doesn't explain when the offer was announced, but the earliest I can imagine is the Monday after he blocked WPE customers from accessing wordpress.org, which would mean employees had a max of four days to consider this deal. If it was after the WPE lawsuit, then employees had less than a day to consider it.
For comparison, when Basecamp did this in 2021, they originally had a deadline for the offer but extended it indefinitely.[0]
It's interesting to compare the way DHH presents the buyouts to the way Mullenweg does. Here's DHH[1]:
>Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.
DHH's explanation of the buyout feels gracious and that he genuinely wished well to the employees who accepted the buyout.
Mullenweg explaining his buyout just feels like a petty tyrant purging anyone who won't pledge loyalty to him. He highlights the tight deadline and the immediate shunning of employees who take the deal. He uses the word "enticing" as if the employees who accept the deal are the weak-willed ones who succumbed to temptation.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
The offer had no limits (someone who was at the company for 2 days took it). Matt was also willing to continue sponsoring visa for the 6 months for whoever is on an work visa.
This was a very distracting 4 days, I'm glad it ended quickly, the dust is settling now, and we're slowly going back to work.
I think it's incredibly naïve to think that it's over now. The legal ramifications of what Automattic has done have not even started to set in motion.
Also, as a longtime WP user, my understanding of the product is... pretty different now to say the least.
The whole drama is not done, but the colleagues and friends leaving all at once is done, and that was stressful, you don't know who's leaving next until you see their name.
To OP's point, I don't think the provided buyout window was long enough to determine that. If a bunch of other shoes drop, like more stuff comes out of discovery with the WP Engine lawsuit, knowing that you only had 4 days to accept or GTFO might still leave a bunch of on the fence employees.
This was more generous than both the Basecamp and Coinbase buyout offers, I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant. I can be a little ASD so sometimes my written communication doesn't come through the best.
>I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant.
For the reasons I gave in that same paragraph.
I agree that you made more lucrative offers than Basecamp, but they presented their offers (publicly, at least) in a way that feels more professional and respectful of their employees.
So what you're saying is that Matt is a tyrant because he isn't as an effective communicator as DHH is? That's quite an unusual take on tyranny.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
I said that Mullenweg's explanation of the buyout makes him come across as a petty tyrant.
I didn't say that poor communication is what qualifies someone as a tyrant.
There is no objective measure of what makes a tyrant. If one comes across as a tyrant, they are a tyrant!
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
It feels like you're bending over backwards to misinterpret what I said, so I'm going to stop engaging with you.
I appreciate your interpretation. I too am a poor communicator, so I had no expectation of you interpreting it in line with my intent, but I am a bit saddened that I did such a poor job that it seems you didn't even begin to pick up the main point of the folly of trying to interpret statements absent of full context.
But perhaps you did and that realization frightens you. That would explain why you have decided to tell us that you are running away now. Logically, if you were just bored of the conversation you'd simply stop replying. Clearly something has gone haywire in your thought process for you to think it is necessary to share that you are going to stop.
Or maybe I'm just not grasping what you are trying to say. Such is the risk of dealing with those who are not good communicators.
They stopped engaging because you seem either unwilling or incapable of understanding the difference between personal attacks and criticism of an artifact.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
What personal attacks are you referring to? There are no personal attacks found anywhere in this thread, nor would there be any logical reason to bring emotions into it at all.
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
The whole point of this thread is that you're defending what you perceived to be a personal attack against Matt (calling him a tyrant) and the other poster was trying to explain that it was not, in fact, a personal attack.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
I made no suggestion that calling Matt a tyrant was a personal attack. Nor would I ever consider it to be. It is nothing more than a relaying of information about the state of the universe. There is no conceivable situation where pointing out that someone is a tyrant is an attack. That makes absolutely no sense.
But that's not what we were talking about anyway. The entire discussion has been about how communication is hard. Which I guess is what you have set out to prove by showing us that you have no clue as to what is going on around you. But I already established that communication is hard right from the very first comment, so what, exactly, do you think you are giving us by this live demonstration of what we already know?
Matt, I’ve had a lot of respect for you for a long time. But you have an employee on Reddit trashing every single person who left en masse.
https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
My guy, I know lots of autistic people. You're not coming across as autistic, you're giving straight up Napoleon marching into Russia with this one.
Thank you for the feedback. I'll try to do better.
Start now.
Start last week, last month, or even years ago.
It looks to me like passive aggressive lynch mobbing. Putting the issues aside, you seem to be doing a good job not letting the comments that charge you with medical and psychological issues get to you.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
“passive aggressive lynch mobbing” maybe, just maybe, you are overstating
I don't care about wordpress or this situation. I may be, just maybe, being too generous. Somehow people feel it's proper to question someone's sanity, provide armchair legal advice, and even suggest carbon monoxide intake is involved. Maybe people should be a little self aware of their critiques of others. Maybe.
Being made to make that kind of decision in such a short time clearly isn't fair.
In many jurisdictions it would be an unfair contract.
To then say "Look at how many people didn't take up the offer so they clearly support us" despite such a short notice on the offer makes a mockery of the company and it's leadership.
> In many jurisdictions it would be an unfair contract.
Can you talk more about this? What jurisdictions? Is an unfair contract a legal term?
I'm not a lawyer, but there is the concept in English law of duress which can invalidate contracts that had undue pressure.
My point was a broader one not a legal one, that the company is acting in a manner that is hostile to a good work environment, putting up this kind of life-changing decision with only a few days to decide and then trying to paint decisions to stay as being a champion of the current direction.
That's treating your workforce with contempt.
Make the same offer with 30 days notice and see how many stay.
It was posted on September 30 ~10pm UTC, so people had about 4 days to decide.
If it was posted Monday, September 30 at 22:00 UTC and the deadline was Thursday, October 3 at 20:00 UTC, that's less than three days.
It's 2 days, 22 hours.
He’s a PHP dev, you can’t honestly expect him to be able to count.
6 months salary offer means people will take this whether they agree or not
Especially if they were already looking for a way out / unsure if they want to stay.
And the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior... Bravo, that's efficiency.
> And the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior...
I would expect you have to have been there for X months or Y years already in order to be given the deal. Unless Mullenweg is really that desperate to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with his hissy fit.
I don't love the way the dude handled it, but what is preventing you from even considering that it is a genuine gesture to his employees?
He mentions someone taking it had joined only a few days earlier.
> Unless Mullenweg is really that desperate to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with his hissy fit.
Given his quite emotional outbursts, this does not seem that unlikely.
Seems like another CEO/lawyer misstep. Why offer the same package for someone who started 2 days ago? Someone could've made "Length worked at company" as a factor in the maths.
A 30K budget would make a very nice 6 months vacation indeed...
It would be hilarious of someone started 2 days ago, took the money left and went to WP Engine.
The offer probably come with some sort of a non-compete clause. Otherwise WPE could pull a Pressable by offering to secure a job for everyone who leaves A8C.
Probably still had another offer
I would assume most Automattic employees are paid substantially more than $60k / year, so few people will be getting only 30k.
At least in big American cities, $60k is a bus driver's salary.
Our current average salary is 149k USD, median is 134k USD.
That’s quite a lot. I imagine you’d be happy if you could get a little more than half as much in Europe.
It's an exaggeration. Starting salary in LA for a bus driver is $53k/year; NYC is $61k. Atlanta is $42k; Seattle $69k; Dallas $48k; Miami $43k. It's really only a very limited amount of cities that have $60k salaries for bus drivers.. and they're all cities where $60k doesn't get you that far.
For a comparison, starting salary for a bus driver in Paris is 30k euros (with no prerequisites, they will send you to learn how to drive a bus). I'd imagine the conditions are much better (a lot more time off, lower working hours), and the cost of living is lower, so those compensate for some of the difference.
Automattic is headquartered in San Francisco, where $60k is a bus driver's salary.
So there are probably very few employees whose 6-month salary would only equal $30k. Most people leaving will be getting a lot more.
Netherlands is around €37k/year, and a minimum of 41 holidays xD
While you are learning it’s only €22k though.
I guess the fact you get free insurance helps, and it’s not quite as bad as I thought, but with an income like that you can get a mortgage of around 170k, which will net you around 40% of a house.
How much after income taxes, though? I recently learned that after taxes, my salary in Eastern Europe is around average salary in a few US states, although on paper (pre-tax) it looks like the US is 4 times richer.
> $60k is a bus driver's salary.
...yearly salary
Right. Which is twice the 6-month minimum value (aka a yearly salary) Automattic is giving people if they want to leave.
I dunno, some-one who started 2 days ago may take just as long, or longer, to find their next employer as some-one with years of employment/experience.
If you've just started a job you've probably got an up to date CV, perhaps even some other job offers you turned down.
I’m not sure. The market is still pretty rough.
Then again I’m only speaking from my experience. Fewer companies are interested in interviewing and hiring me than ever in my career right now. If I had a job, I wouldn’t be leaving it.
Maybe other people are having an easier time. I hope so!
But they have a job, they're not being compensated for being let go, they're being compensated for voluntarily leaving.
Usually the only thing that can be done during job verification is:
- did they work there?
- can they be rehired?
If the second is a "no" it usually isn't good news (usually, that only happens when you're fired 'for cause', at least in the US).
So, it isn't as pretty as an offer as you'd think.
If somebody started mere days ago, they can simply omit this job from their CV entirely and nobody would notice the gap.
I assure you that this was considered. People are much smarter than you give them credit for. There’ll be a reason, you just don’t know what it is.
Ah yes, this chap is tanking his company into the ground for Reasons! Like feelings! No one in the entire history of the world has been on a coke bender and made bad life choices!
If you're rich enough or have enough of a cult following, every bad decision is really the work of a genius playing four-dimensional chess.
8.4% or 159 employees is a lot of people, this will be long-remember at this company.
On the other hand, most companies easily have at least 20% headcount overhead, so it'll be okay.
twitter fired a lot more % and it's still working
By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired. It was growing in revenues and profit and since then has shrunk drastically in both measures.
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.
People were claiming at the time that twitter would shutdown and close shop.
The people who said that had no idea what extent the Twitter tech team had gone to to build a robust application that wouldn't fall over. The fact it withstood 75% of the staff being removed is a testament to the good work they did, not a sign that they weren't needed in the first place.
>By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired.
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
> By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse
> And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data support that claim
So, only the data supporting your point of view is reliable?
> However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
No, if you want to establish correlation or causation, you have to prove it. Don't have access to the data to prove something? Sucks, but then you can't draw that conclusion, at least not definitively.
I can believe, though, that you're at least somewhat correct that the mass firings were responsible for Twitter's decline. But it's plausible that other things are also to blame, and possibly even primarily to blame: questionable product decisions made post-acquisition (Twitter Blue, lax moderation, requiring logins to view, ...), the volatility and offensiveness of the new owner causing advertisers to leave, etc.
From the 2019 annual report (one of the only years where Twitter posted any net profit):
> We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to maintain profitability. Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2018, we had an accumulated deficit of $1.45 billion. Our revenue has grown from $664.9 million in 2013 to $3.04 billion in 2018. While we were profitable on a GAAP basis in 2018, we believe that our future revenue growth and our ability to maintain profitability will depend on, among other factors, our ability to attract new users, increase user engagement and ad engagement, increase our brand awareness, compete effectively, maximize our sales efforts, demonstrate a positive return on investment for advertisers, and successfully develop new products and services. *Accordingly, you should not rely on the revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance.*
This is standard boilerplate that every public company puts in their official statements to pre-empt any shareholder lawsuits in case something goes wrong.
Imagine if a company told its investors: “Our growth is guaranteed! Nothing can affect our revenue and margins.” The only companies that give that kind of promises are ponzis (and to-the-moon cryptocurrency projects, which is not categorically too different).
It is actually quite remarkable that Twitter has kept functioning at a technical level. A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
On a technical level, I tend to agree. Never underestimate the skill of the employees to save their boss from horrible decisions.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
That might be true about the traffic, but twitter wasn’t open before the musk purchase either, it would stop you from seeing posts if you weren’t logged in if you tried to scroll more than a few times. Its current behavior of showing just a few posts sorta, uh, randomly selected might be easier on the server, idk.
For most of its life, Twitter was completely open. You could see any tweet or user page with the URL, whether or not you were logged in. The only exception was if someone had “protected” their account.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Do you know when they stopped being frictionlessly open? I’m curious when they started doing the to continue you have to log in pop overs. It preceded musk, as I said. I think every link still worked, but scrolling and navigating twitter like a typical website instead of typing in a link had log in gates.
That is NOT true. As a Twitter addict, I know that was not the case.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
As someone who wasn’t a twitter addict, I know it was true because people would link me to twitter, I would see the tweet but attempting to scroll too much would result in a log in popover years before the musk buyout.
I'm skeptical, honestly. Within the first few months of the acquisition, it seemed pretty clear to my tech-friend group that Twitter was on its way out and was going to fail. But it's been 2 years, and many of those same people still use Twitter quite a lot. Maybe it'll still fail, of course... it'll just take longer than anyone expected.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
My friends who were passing around twitter links still seem to do it. And the content of those links hasn't changed (random nature/technical info that geeks like) so the twitter posters haven't left either.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
I don't expect it to "fail" in a financial way because Elon Musk can just bankroll his political addiction.
I don't get why whole developer circles didn't leave the platform yet. You can't ask people something via DMs without paying for the blue checkmark and it's totally unhelpful, plus it sends the message you care not enough about the right wing messaging that is send by the platform now. Or these people are just ok with that, I don't know.
They have. Lots and lots of developers are now on the Fediverse. But there's a cultural schism between the types of developers that frequent Silicon Valley cafes and the ones that frequent the Chaos Computer Club.
Network effects are a hell of a drug.
It's not network effect. There is nothing valuable that happens on twitter that doesn't make it's way out of twitter to the rest of the internet and reality. Avoiding twitter is actually a great way to filter out literal nation-state produced misinfo and propaganda that doesn't pass the smell test, but seems rampant on twitter.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
Software can work for a very long time with minimal maintenance. A different question is if it can keep making revenue without investing.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
> A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
When SWEs in tech want to flex, they code Twitter on a whiteboard as an interview question. Major respect for the the work they're doing at xAI, but the hardest challenges building Twitter itself are social.
Either Joel or Jeff wrote about this in the context of Stack Overflow. A developer who thinks of making Stack Overflow imagines writing SQL:
create table users (id integer autoincrement primary key, username varchar(32), password_hash varbinary(32)); create table questions (id integer autoincrement primary key, user integer references users(id), title varchar(256), body bigtext); create table answers (id integer autoincrement primary key, question integer references questions(id), user integer references users(id), body bigtext);
but actually that's just a tiny fraction of actually making Stack Overflow.
Uh, it has doomed them. Have you not heard about their massive drop in revenue as advertisers leave?
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.
Twitter revenue is down 84% and is continuing to collapse every month. If that is "Working", then I'd love to laugh at your definition of failing :D
The revenue problem is mostly because of Twitter's new leadership, on the technical side the few people that remained have managed to keep the platform running quite well.
Sure, it has been plagued by the occasional random errors and downtime ever since Musk came in, but I don't expect most companies to remain operational on a technical level when 80% leaves.
An important lesson for tech companies: hire strategic H1B employees throughout your company so when times are real tough, you're sure you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave.
> hire strategic H1B employees [so that] you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave
In other words: slavery has only upsides for slaveowners.
Twitter was profitable just before Elon purchased it and gutted it. So far his plan is not working.
I was curious if this is true or not. Found this: https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/twitter-facts-s... which came from before Twitter went private. It's technically correct that they did make a profit (e.g. 2022 Q1), but also made a lot of loss (e.g. 2022 Q2).
Comparatively, it's hard to find information about Twitter now. Most news articles mocks the revenue, but has no information about profit. However, given that Elon said Twitter "will be" profitable in 2024, I think it's safe to assume it isn't profitable yet?
This surprises me, I thought it became profitable from cutting expenses, but the truth is complicated. It used to be both profitable and not profitable at the same time (see the first link), but now it's mostly not profitable.
The massive debt Elon has set Twitter up with is probably driving their current losses. Advertisers wanting nothing to do with him after telling them to fuck off is one thing, but the interest on those billions of borrowed money aren't cheap to hold on to.
What also doesn't help Twitter's case is that employees are still fighting to get paid their severance fees. That's a couple hundred million dollars that Elon probably assumes he doesn't need to pay. Other fees on the order of tens of millions of dollars also include the rent that Elon decided he doesn't need to pay, as well as a bunch of other bunch of unpaid stuff.
My guess is that Twitter is banking on not having to pay all of its debts at once, slowly building up a profit and regaining its value so it can have the cashflow to pay back its arrears later, but that's a risky move that may lead to a debt spiral or bankruptcy.
Elon made substantial cuts but he has debt servicing that itself is a very large cost.
Working in the sense that the app is still up and running, sure.
Working in the sense of being a successful purchase that's making a good return on Elon's investment by growing and profiting, not so much apparently.
The spam filtering system sure as shit isn't working. The amount of spam DMs I get is crazy. The trends section has also been busted for ages. Click on the "Show more" link and it shows you less.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-...
I assume that firing was a bit more selective in who they wanted to keep.
Yeah. It works
- Scrolling after a while, the sound of a video doesn't stop anymore => force close
- A lot of violence, literally. I keep on blocking them ( recently logged in with another account due to a new phone and I had to do it again). It's nuts how much violence it promotes recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people who got fired did censorship and I miss it.
Define working.
It's is currently on a path of slow but steady decline. It is no longer useful for breaking news and it is full with Only Fans tweets.
However, if you want to read about Elon Musk or are into right wing conspiracy theories, it is still perfect.
Unless onlyfans has changed, there seems to plenty to enjoy outside of musk / the right wing.
It just makes the site NSFW.
If I want to enjoy Only Fans, I know where to find it.
> In a blog post, Mullenweg said the package offered $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher, but the employees who took it would not be eligible to be re-hired by Automattic.
Like never eligible? That seems kind of petty. I would understand some timeframe, like "not eligible for 3/4/5 years", but a permanent ban seems weird.
Why would you want to go back there anyway?
The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
I completely agree it’s petty, but it’s entirely in line with their behavior over the past few weeks.
I guess at least it’s better than Musk?
> The whole reason you are leaving
I imagine for at least some people "$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher" was the main motivator, and may have stayed otherwise.
> The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
30k probably has something to do with it.
> The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
That doesn't make sense to me. People stay in jobs they don't like all the time, with leadership they don't agree with all the time. Here's the reason: it's because they pay you to go to work. Like, money. If everyone just pulled up stakes every time the thought occurred to them that their CEO might be a petty tyrant, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through every Slack channel in the world.
Just for the money? Why else?
AFAIK this kind of permanent shitlist is common practice in American tech companies, including the MAANG.
They may call it “non-regretted attrition” or something similar, but the purpose is the same.
Serious question: What is the percentage of people intending to get re-hired at a previous place? Or at least definitely not rejecting that idea?
Personally, i have never done so, be it because was always leaving by a "voluntary" "termination agreement", and the employers involved being either not attractive, not existent, or plainly incompetent. If you are residing in a major city, there are always other options.
And given 100% remote seems to be a must for many people, even more so.
Looks like the 2021 situation at 37signals.
That was peak tech idiocy. If I remember correctly nearly half the company took the severance package? Generous of them to offer all that free money, but a crazy business decision.
I’m not saying DHH is a great company leader (I don’t know!). But did the business do worse afterwards? Having too many employees can hinder the business, even if they are great people.
The founders Jason and David talked about this in a recent podcast two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d39Q48KPV4
They say that before the layoff in 2021 they had been trying to grow aggressively. And since the layoff they have decided to stay small and not rehire. They say they were 83 and now they are 60. Specifically they have not hired anyone to be a full time manager since. Now everyone works on non-managerial tasks. Management is only part of your work.
I did see David post that they had 1500 applicants for a recent job posting. They offer extremely good pay for remote jobs outside SF and the US so it makes sense that lots of people are interested.
I am a bit out of the loop does any one have a summary of what is happening with automattic and wpengine ?
This covers all the major events up to today:
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
This is the best explanation I know of:
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Since then, WPE filed a lawsuit against Automattic.
We have no idea, really.
Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.
Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-mul...
This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer. He did this without any notice to WPEngine. Dragging users into this seriously and negatively impacts WordPress itself and calls have mounted for a WordPress governance overhaul eg https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/1839340016738480226
That he is not acting rationally was crystal clear when the lawsuit got filed because he came to this very place and started commenting on it while multiple people begged him to just stop because he is digging himself deeper into a hole. Everyone knows you shut up the moment you are sued.
And after that he cut off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin team who is employed by WPEngine from wordpress.org. This plugin has a few million users. https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355
My personal take on this is obviously not positive. This entire debacle hurts open source itself. Mind you: I do not know whether Matt is right or not but there was no need for any of this. If Matt thinks WPEngine violated his trademarks? Asking for a license fee, sending a C&D and suing them are what a trademark holder normally does. Indeed, it might even be beneficial for us all to get judicial review on trademark usage like this, mostly these open source trademarks operate on "gentleman's agreements", I don't think they have ever been tested in court. If Matt has a beef with WPEngine using too much wordpress.org resources? 1) he could've announced that in say three months there will be a cutoff so WPEngine can implement a proxy 2) either fastly or cloudflare would've been happy to take that traffic off his hands (indeed, Matt said after the cutoff both reached out to him). For both of them a thriving web ecosystem means more business and it has a nice marketing value too. Finally, if he has a problem with the amount WPEngine contributes? That's a very hard problem, some ideas are at https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem but inconveniencing countless sites because you have a beef with their hosting company is not going to help that's for sure.
Reading WPEngine's legal complaint https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP... they sound like cuckoos. My best guess is WPE's WordPress hosting business grew larger than Automattic and they're lashing out to survive. For example, WPE has 1000 employees and Automattic has 1700, but Automattic has their attention divided on 20 other products too, which left them blindsided when WPE forked their product, made it their core focus, outcompeted them on rizz alone, and cut them out of the profits without contributing to the costs. At that point Automattic is de facto unpaid employees of WPE and they're probably not happy about that. Their WordPress division is either going to be destroyed or have to use its guns. They chose the latter and many of their employees were angry because they signed up to be benevolent open source people. Unfortunately that's only really practical for a business when it possesses great advantage i.e. not being laid low by private equity. We should worry about Automattic's because if WordPress crumbles, Tumblr and a lot of other stuff may too.
Whether the factual claims of WPEngine are true is the matter of the lawsuit but it's incredibly well put together. What have you found illogical in there? Your tone doesn't fit at all a serious discussion. "rizz" "cuckoo" , I detest your garbage is posted as an answer to my rather detailed post.
Did WPE fork WordPress though? They clearly claim in their legal filing that the WordPress installs they use come directly from the official sources. I don't use WordPress or WPE, but I would (perhaps naively) assume that if they are making a clear statement of fact in a court filing that they are not lying about that fact.
They forked their business, which is WordPress hosting. In the complaint they brag about how they haven't changed a single line of code in WordPress itself. That's way more adversarial than forking the codebase, since the GPL ensures people still give back when they go their own way.
> forked their business
... is that even a thing? How is WPE the bad guy even if it is when there are NUMEROUS other wordpress hosting companies?
> GPL
The GPL specifically allows you to even SELL the GPL'd code to people, so I don't see how they are even violating the _spirit_ of the license.
More to the point, it's not like WPE is a black hole. They _are_ engaging and spending money on the community from what their court filing claims. Is it all self serving? Of course it is! A for-profit corporate entity rarely (never?) does things not in it's self interest.
I will freely admin I'm not a part of the WP community and have zero investment on either side of this fight. I will also say that just from reading what has been posted by all parties, I feel really strongly that Matt needs to stop talking/acting and let the lawyers sort things out at this point.
As an aside, as I was thinking about it this morning, Matt claims that WPE is causing him personally due to excessive usage of wordpress.org, right? But, if WPE goes away today, all those sites they were hosting are suddenly going to other hosting companies and the SAME amount of traffic will still hit the wordpress.org site. Trying to claim that WPE is causing undue traffic is just saying the WP as a whole causes too much traffic. So, are ANY hosting companies beyond Matt/Automattic funding the wordpress.org website? It's clear from the WPF financial filings that they don't contribute to funding that critical resource. And it's clear from Matt's posts that he prefer that every WP install uses those resources as he's expressly questioned why he would make it easy to point to another resource.
Every dollar WPE makes is a dollar Automattic doesn't. If you're David, and Goliath wants to use your platform and trademark to make you poorer, would you let him? All the stuff you're talking about is a distraction, because this is an unnatural relationship, and they're going to come up with whatever excuses they can to rectify that.
If you are saying this is just Automattic being mad that WPE is making money and they want some of it, that's a major concern for any professional services company in the WP space. Once they are done with WPE, who's next on the list? This is not hyperbole. Any company that is a similar line of business would be foolish not to asses this as a high risk.
Being mad that someone is using the open source software EXACTLY as the license allows them to is indicative of very poor planning. If you didn't want anyone else to make money off the software, then why open source it in the first place?
They can claim all day long that WPE was misusing the WordPress marks and the courts will resolve that complaint. Their use of WP was expressly allowed as WordPress expressly disclaimed WP as a trademark.
They can cry about WPE's usage of the wordpress.org services and say they are abusing them. Until they change the code and make the update URL configurable, they are being highly disingenuous. Considering that Cloudflare has offered to provide free CDN services to WPF for this, it seems like the best solution for the community would be for Matt to give wordpress.org to the foundation and let them use the freely offered services.
As I don't know you personally Justine and just go on what I've seen you contribute to the world, I must say I'm actually surprised at your apparent hard line on this. As I have said a few times, I have zero involvement in this debacle and I think both parties are likely bad actors. But what I've seen Matt post during this would make me 100% never get involved with him in any kind of business. He's displayed a shocking lack of self-restraint and level of malice towards those he feels have wronged him or are in his way.
The world needs Matt and Automattic. It doesn't need WPE. The WordPress community should be more worried about what'll happen to them when no one is developing WordPress anymore, than what'll happen if Matt goes to war with everyone else too. He's so self-sacrificing that he didn't fight back against WPE until WPE alone was threating his survival. Apple would have never let someone in their App Store in the first place who directly competes with them, and Matt looked the other way for ten years. Matt is obviously guileless considering how he behaves. That would make me not very afraid of him if I were a business in this space. The fact is though that Matt is one of the people who gives to the community more than he's taking, and WPE is the opposite. You won't have a community anymore if the takers demoralize and alienate all the helpers. What's happening now is completely WPE's fault. As the most profitable entity in the WordPress space, they have a duty to help lead the community and fund its development. Asking for 8% isn't unreasonable.
> The world needs Matt
Is the Wordpress community so weak that after all these years they couldn't weather Matt retiring?
And if Automattic is such a business which can only exist as a monopoly then it shouldn't exist. Because that's what you are implying.
Once again: if WP Engine misuses trademarks which Matt holds then by all means send a C&D to them and if they resist then sue them. That's a completely normal business behavior. What's happening here is lunacy.
> Every dollar WPE makes is a dollar Automattic doesn't.
This is the same fallacy as "immigrants are taking our jobs".
No, this is not true. The market can expand, competition spurs innovation, they put in marketing and so forth. The income of Automattic in a world where WPE doesn't exist is less , likely much less than the income of real Automattic plus WPE.
You have been posting nonsense ever since you started, just stop.
> They forked their business, which is WordPress hosting.
You are constantly talking nonsense. This is simply not a thing. Much as "rizz" and "cuckoo" is not in this context.
Oh, finally a summary of the whole thing I understand.
Someone posts literal garbage filled with nonsense words and that's what you understand? What's going on here?
Wow I don't think I've ever made someone on Hacker News this upset before. If it makes you feel better, I chose to reply to your comment because you put the most effort into your analysis, and your comment contributed actual information, unlike a lot of the other low effort stuff.
Well you didn't reply to mine. You replied to meaningless word salad.
Word salad. Detailed post. Which is it boykie?
boykie? cookoo, rizz so you are answering to yourself as a sock puppet. People don't talk like this especially not here.
And once again which one it is: you didn't answer me. If you think you did that's because you forgot to switch accounts. https://i.imgur.com/LeF241n.png
Lol, are you on drugs? That's probably what is going on here. I'd chill a bit before continuing to comment.
I finally have an analogy for the "Open Source company":
A company creates a free buffet and sells seats at a table. They hope a competitor doesn't come and take the free food, slather it in hot sauce, and sell it at their own restaurant, because that would be rude.
> This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer.
This is the big one. I believe his argument was that when WPE customers updated they were using WP.org bandwidth for free.
That's a reasonable point.
But...doesn't that also apply to nearly everyone else who is running WP somewhere other than via a paid plan on WP.com?
If I download the install zip from WP.org and install WP on my own server, won't it get updates from WP.org?
If I get shared hosting at one of the zillion shared hosting companies that include cPanel or something similar, and click the button to set up WP, won't that then get its updates from WP.org?
What about if I use the Wordpress docker image from docker.com? That comes configured by default to just do the initial install from the WP that is included in the image and then update that as needed, so it seems that if I go that way and don't explicitly change it to be static (and then do updates by redeploy when new images are available) I'm going to be hitting WP.org.
Do I need to be worrying that if I use WP in any of those ways I'm going to be cut off from updates because WP.org isn't getting paid when I update?
Wow, blocking ACF is quite the move. All serious WP instances I know make heavy use of that.
Matt Mullenweg is as mad as a hatter. Unfortunately that means that it is long term unsafe to use WordPress until he is removed, if he can be.
I hope the legal team isn't included as part of that 159 employees, because god forbid they'll be needed.
Generally the "real work" is outsourced (briefed out), in house legal only manages the work. In house lawyers don't have the day to day experience of dedicated trial lawyers.
Any professional outsourced lawyer would be telling the client to shut up on talking about the case on a public forum and incriminating themselves.
The professional lawyer telling the client to do so doesn't mean the client will. See the case of SBF for the most in-your-face example.
Based on yesterday’s thread where Matt started answering questions about the lawsuit here on HN, I doubt losing half of the legal team would make any difference.
>we called it an Alignment Offer.”
That sounds bad
I'm really surprised that we don't have term limits for CEO's of companies. Since they occupy power positions, all top power positions should have term limits. That would fix a lot of problems in our societies.
The CEOs/Corpos have way more representative power than any real person these days since bribery is legal. I'm surprised this isn't a common issue being raised all the time; well besides the lack of civics education in general.
TIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?
A competing product would have to at least be on par in terms of quality, licensing, UI/UX, app availability, sync, web interface. They'd have to start sacrificing living animals before I'd consider switching.
They're even still honoring lifelong premium access for first purchases of their apps.
We have such different experiences. Pocket Casts works, but I find nothing about it amazing. Too much Apple-like simplification in managing my queue.
I found Podcast Addict to be significantly superior.
I've checked it out here and there. UI is way too convoluted for my taste and the legacy Android UI elements shine through way too often. Looks like Material Design on a pig. If it works for you, all good though.
While not necessary, especially because of the proprietary sync stuff you can't self host, Pocket Cast is open source.
Without knowing why you consider overcast a disaster, no
What features are you looking for? What features are you avoiding?
Overcast had an update earlier this year which made it completely unusable (for my use case, at least). The developer's reaction to feedback from and apparent contempt of users was so poor that I wouldn't use a product they created again.
Not sure what you're looking for wrt features, but I've been happy with Podcast Addict for years
Just keep using Pocket Casts rather than being buffeted on the winds of the news cycle.
This particular matter also affects me professionally (although not directly, but by precedent), so as a matter of principle, I'll find another solution.
What is bad about overcast?
Hard to say now but I was coming from AntennaPod on Android, and when I switched to iPhone I needed a new podcast app, and Overcast was different in annoying ways and with Pocket Casts I was able to change some settings to get it to be more like AntennaPod. I think part of it was having a download button on each episode in the list.
Could be the redesign that was launched a couple of months ago that still some folks seem to dislike.
there are a few choices that were made that are very odd. Like the old interface where you could swipe on the 'poster' to get the episode info was nice, they switched it to a button, but it looks like the recently undid that one and it's back to swipe.
Yeah TIL and now I’m done with that
Overcast is at least independent, so I’ll go back to them for now.
It's obvious that you're somehow personally involved in this situation, since you have filled this thread with multiple comments which range from dismissive to plain rude. And the whole thread reeks of comments who just try to frame company's CEO as irrational, which contribute next to nothing to understanding the two companies' dispute, while raising some disbelief for their motive in the first place.