Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 316 posts

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#261

Post by chuckadams »

keybits wrote: post #180
Volundr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I looking at the right thing? https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash > EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins. Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on prett…

It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/ Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.

The sandboxing requires CF workers though, as it depends on V8 isolates. Seems fair enough, but it'd be nice to see easily deployable cross-platform support someday for isolates or something similar, and not just for emdash.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#262

Post by kjksf »

joelanman wrote: post #181
dofm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Simplenote.

Which is no longer in active development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093

They clearly changed their mind.

That "no longer developed" note is from September 2025.

They made a bunch of non-trivial improvements in 2026: https://simplenote.com/blog/

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#263

Post by dayvid »

kmeisthax wrote: post #67
dofm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons: 1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies…

Wordpress dropped the ball on hosting. Their offering was mediocre and barely used by businesses. They were more focused on adding features to the core product than a Business friendly hosting solution. WPEngine isn't even that amazing. It's common sense features that most people running Wordpress wouldn't do at a high premium(regular backups, forced updates, etc.). If he put 10-20% of the effort into offering plain solutions for businesses they wouldn't be in the position they're in

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#264

Post by elevation »

flomo wrote: post #142
dofm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes. We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!" (of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)

> it is super-reddit to diagnose

If I see a person with a broken bone protruding from their arm, I don't need an undergrad med-terms class to know "this person needs medical attention" even if I am not qualified to render it.

Similarly, there are certain thresholds of human behavior that indicate mental illness -- you don't have to be licensed to treat it in order to recognize that there is a serious problem.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#265

Post by [deleted] »

monkey_monkey wrote: post #251
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's different types of mental illness. For example, don't you think a person with depression would be better at diagnosing depression in others, than someone who has never experienced it?

No, absolutely not.

[deleted]

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#266

Post by burkaman »

solarkraft wrote: post #23
gkoberger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.

Wow I had no idea Pocket Casts was open source now. I still have a subscription because it's a perfect app I use every day.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#267

Post by dayvid »

Wordpress was an amazing piece of software. They could have a future in the AI era which has a similar issue in standardizing content managing platforms, but what a fumble. And over something with such a small moat as a hosting platform for businesses.

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#268

Post by hzwanip »

prox wrote: post #203
throwup238 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man. Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.

I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.

unregulated compared to what, you?

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#269

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #42
0xDEADBEEFCAFE wrote: post #33

Anyone could have forked WordPress at any time or spun up their own multi tenant instances if they were truly concerned, this just seems personal. It’s a bad day for founders IMO.

The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.

[deleted]

Re: Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

#270

Post by [deleted] »

Mooty wrote: post #193
dofm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai). Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN