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WordPress Is in Trouble

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Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#331

Post by shkkmo »

gspencley wrote: post #140
beshrkayali wrote: post #64

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpr…

My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at. And this is a critical detail that I'm fuzzy on. If anyone has context (even links with further info) I'd be very much appreciative. I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and…

> So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using?

That isn't what happened. The for-profit company Automatic asked for money, and then used their CEO's exclusive control of the non-profit foundation to punish their direct competitor.

It would be an entirely different thing if this was part an initiative to charge commercial users of WordPress.org for the costs they incur the non-profit foundation to stabilize it's funding. Such a thing could have been handled professionally without threats of "nuclear" retaliation.

> But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights

Being a jerk isn't a crime, but it does broadcast a lack of professionalism and mental stability. Those aren't great traits to see in and individual who has unilateral control over infrastructure that you depend on. Those are extremely concerning traits when that individual has demonstrated a willingness to use that control to pursue personal vendettas in childish ways.

The problem the community is facing is that Matt is a weak, single point of failure. To re-establish trust given Matt's actions here, the non-profit needs to no longer be under his control, but under that of an independent board of directors.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#332

Post by pacifika »

burnte wrote: post #293
kmeisthax wrote: post #238

> Then yesterday happened. Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. This action is blamed on the “the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded by Silver Lake”, which I think is a gross mischara…

> WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now? Mullenweg stole the Custom fields plugin from WPEngine. So no, plugin development doesn't could when he can steal the plugin away from you.

You can install all plugins via GitHub if you want.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#333

Post by ismail »

jjmarr wrote: post #317
ismail wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being Jewish as per [1] claims. There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms. “You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.” Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this state…

There's no other nationality in the world where commenting in the subreddit devoted to that country results in being automatically banned from other subreddits.

I am not surprised. With the amount of misinformation that is produced and disseminated from the highest levels of israeli society. See my other posts on 1) Zionism = racist / supremacist ideology 2) misinformation 3) links to a documentary demonstrating how people are being awakened to the truth (and how they realise they have been lied to) Israelism film on YouTube 4) psyops campaigns both against their own citizens , and Americans etc.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#334

Post by throwpoaster »

kibwen wrote: post #327
satvikpendem wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.

What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.

Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#335

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

hluska wrote: post #292
harikb wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an alternate possibility 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine" 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives

3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes. To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any adults left?

Maybe the engineer was debating a LLM on the merits of pineapple on pizza and didn't clear the context history before requesting a code change.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#336

Post by amyjess »

beshrkayali wrote: post #64

I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental breakdown. It’s a sad situation and there’s a lot to learn about open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him should seriously consider an intervention. I can’t believe after two decades he’d just decide to throw it all out in a blazing fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpr…

I think "breakdown" is the wrong word: he's always been this way. I think he may have Borderline Personality Disorder. The behavior Matt is engaging in here is called "emotional dysregulation", which is characteristic of BPD, and he has a long history of doing it whenever he faces even the slightest criticism.

In 2010, he attempted to get Ben Cook fired from his day job for writing an essay criticizing his dual role as head of both Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation. Over the last few years, he has waged a disproportionate war against queer users on Tumblr for lightly criticizing his leadership.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#337

Post by wwarner »

I’m not a WP user, and I don’t want to ruffle feathers, but I can read and I think WP .com might not be getting the credit it deserves for contributing 4000+ hrs/year to WP development. Some of the contributors to WP are the very best open source developers out there; they look at kernel performance, image encoding corner cases and php, and land fixes. Not sure if Mullenweg is communicating that as clearly as he could, but it’s true. Without contributions like that, I doubt WP would be as well known as it is.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#338

Post by Implicated »

gunsle wrote: post #229
pants2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole, content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling is.

Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content

As someone who has been ingesting a high volume of reddit "content" for the better part of 3 years - the spam/bot problem is _wild_.

I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users)

And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective.

What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild.

It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#339

Post by hluska »

nightpool wrote: post #299
vasco wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you justify something like this https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this fit in?

I'll be honest: I think it's pretty funny, and I think matt probably agrees. Also, as others mention, it's much easier/faster then removing the field and column and validation, yes.

And I wouldn’t want to work with you or Matt. We can behave like adults and I don’t get paid enough to deal with this kind of immaturity.

Re: WordPress Is in Trouble

#340

Post by hluska »

ismail wrote: post #321
hluska wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Really, the H accusation card? Point noted. I should have prefixed it with zionist Israelis. There are Israelis that have been awakened to the truth (see BT Salem, Ilan Pappe milo peled etc) Also many former American Jewish Zionists [1] see Israelism film. You can also watch this to understand how these ideas and misinformation is propagated at an industrial scale. You will note I clearly specified Zionist , which is…

Yes, when you say things that sound like Hitler, I will tell you that you sound like Hitler. I’m not clicking any of your stupid links or engaging with you.

However, I know a lot of South Africans and will be sure to warn them away from your company.

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