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

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

#391
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're a dinosaur Why is this necessary?!

Dinosaur is often used to describe someone who has grown out-of-touch with their industry. It aptly describes the technical skills Matt was just breathlessly boasting about. In case you missed it, Matt's boast was part of his attack on people like me who disagree with him ("stupid people swayed by bots") and his direct personal attack on YouTuber Theo Browne, whom he described as having "two brain cells". In the cont…

> yet there's no policing on that comment

I flagged his comment.

I think your comment was stronger without the personal insult. So I engaged.

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

#392
post #142
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.)

Similarly I've stopped saying "It's crazy that..." and changed it to "It's wild that ..."

What do you call it when tamer words are more impactful? Example: I've found "Dum-dums" > "stupid idiots". Is it because they're less triggering for emotional responses to the words themselves?

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of…

If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name. A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...

Matt, for clarity, if you see this, since this is a thread I kicked off perhaps by being imprecise and certainly by being somewhat critical:

I am full of admiration for what you have achieved, I believe you should feel proud of it, and I think we in the wider WP and web world have benefited greatly from your assertiveness and confidence for literally decades. I think perhaps the tech industry has taken for granted what WP represents and what it has held at bay.

I also see that things are going badly wrong, and having experienced a couple of years of severe burnout where I too came fully unglued and have not exactly covered myself in glory, I worry.

As I have said elsewhere, I think there is a future where a lot of real differences and temporary difficulties are in the past.

I hope for you that you get to that place, and I think stepping back from the things you built that can look after themselves, and focussing your energies on your health and the broader things that have mattered to you is the way forward.

I can see people have taken issue with me saying “mentally ill” when I might have said “unwell”. But I say this because I think I think you are burned out while unable to take your hand off the tiller, that burnout is real illness, not just a series of bad days at work, and because I think it’s disingenuous to use euphemisms that diminish seriousness.

I think that you should sit back, let them take your hand off the tiller, and take the time to look at what you have accomplished and see what it will look like going forward.

“Cause I can see the future, and it's a place / About seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter”

My best wishes again and my apologies if this thread has been especially annoying.

P.S. I quite like Gutenberg!

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

#394
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name. A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...

[flagged]

This is rude and plainly horseshit.

We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.

I have been critical and I dunno, maybe I spoke fully out of turn, though it was from real concern.

But reading this makes me regret saying anything.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill? I don't understand it. I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness? I don't disagree that there might be more subtle cases that are hard to tell by a lay person. But Matt is not lik…

Because some people would go insane without having an external authority to appeal to; the extant systems of academia and qualification create an "objective" truth these peoples' psyches can cling to.

because it contributes to stereotypes and increases stigma around mental health. this leads to even more social isolation and self-doubt for people with those disorders which worsens their quality of life, something that is already much lower on average than those without

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-disc...

it's the same idea as not calling people the 'r' word and why that word itself is no longer used in official diagnoses. it's a boundary condition grounded in compassion. advocating for using a new word doesn't need some soapbox tantrum about the fatuousness of the modern world a la Ignatius J. Reilly

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

#396
post #394
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is rude and plainly horseshit. We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress. I have been critical and I dunno, maybe I spoke fully out of turn, though it was from real concern. But reading this makes me regret saying anything.

> This is rude and plainly horseshit

It's rude but...the Steve Jobs self-insert stage entrance is straight out of The Onion.

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because some people would go insane without having an external authority to appeal to; the extant systems of academia and qualification create an "objective" truth these peoples' psyches can cling to.

because it contributes to stereotypes and increases stigma around mental health. this leads to even more social isolation and self-doubt for people with those disorders which worsens their quality of life, something that is already much lower on average than those without https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-disc... it's the same idea as not calling people the 'r' word and why that word itself is n…

There is nothing more stigmatizing and dehumanizing than the idea that there is a class of human condition that is taboo to describe in words.
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