[HN Gopher] Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, ...
___________________________________________________________________
Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting
Backlash
Author : robin_reala
Score : 189 points
Date : 2025-01-12 11:01 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.therepository.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.therepository.email)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve
| asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025.
|
| When it comes to Mullenweg, I am always impressed that there is
| often some worse behaviour mentioned in the article...
| Y_Y wrote:
| > Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has described Matt
| Mullenweg's move to shut down WordPress's sustainability team as
| "bizarrely heinous behavior."
|
| Is it bizarrely heinous? Or is it just kind of bad? I enjoy
| WordPress drama, and run a couple of lazy WordPress services, but
| I don't think that this is actually worth all the spilt ink and
| tears, relative to all the other injustices a person might choose
| to concern themselves with.
| safety1st wrote:
| It sounds like you actually work for a living and aim to
| conduct your business professionally, which is probably why you
| don't understand all these people who aren't doing either of
| those things.
|
| I don't know man, I feel like the entire planet has gone mad
| over the course of about 15 years. Who am I supposed to root
| for? The executives who throw public tantrums and behave like
| children? Or the activists who try to turn the company into a
| vehicle for whatever the latest left wing cause is?
|
| How about someone in that organization gets back to actually
| building some good fucking software? Is there a connection
| between all the horsing around these people do and the fact
| that after 5+ years of development Gutenberg is still kind of a
| pile of crap? I feel like not so long ago in history it would
| have been obvious to everyone that the answer is yes, work is
| about actually working and producing things. But now
| everybody's primary job is apparently to wail on Twitter
| instead of putting butt in seat for 8 hours a day, writing
| code, and on a good day, maybe figuring out how to get a little
| better at it. Idk man. Whatever this world is I don't really
| want any part of it anymore, I want to switch to the sane
| timeline.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Is this recursive satire?
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I was more struck by the fact that the author thinks anyone
| would or should care what some random tech journalist thinks
| about something. Person has opinions, news at eleven.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I don't really think you believe that journalism shouldn't
| exist or that you don't know journalism includes opinion and
| commentary, but I don't know why this is controversial enough
| to trigger that response. What's funny, though, is that the
| trite "news at 11" catchphrase is very much also invoking
| traditional journalism.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| A "journalist" who won't talk to the principal of the story.
| Now that's bizarre behavior.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Kara Swisher is an emotional activist type of journalist and
| not to be taken seriously. It's not surprising to see
| manufactured outrage here.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I don't agree with the "manufactured outrage", but I concur
| on Swisher.
|
| Her M.O. is to take a 'hot-button' issue and simply add fuel
| to the fire with zero nuance or in-depth analysis.
|
| Not related, see the entire ReCode fiasco.
| bipson wrote:
| > "Today I learned that we have a sustainability team," Mullenweg
| said.
|
| If this is true: Is there any possible explanation for such a
| statement where leadership comes out unscathed?
| lapcat wrote:
| > If this is true
|
| It's not true. It's a blatant lie, as the embedded video in the
| article proves.
| ulfw wrote:
| He himself clearly showed it's a lie as he admitted on Threads
| that he started said team. Utterly bizarre.
| bromuro wrote:
| It looks like it was originally just a channel on Slack, that
| eventually evolved into a "team" without Mullenweg paying much
| attention to it.
|
| The Sustainability agenda , quoted by the article, appears
| excessive to me as well - and it resonates with me why
| Mullenweg is asking for a different approach.
|
| With the dramas going on, shutting down the channel was a dick
| move , though.
| bipson wrote:
| This still reflects badly on the leader:
|
| - Stuff going on you're not aware of?
|
| - Things spiraling out of control/becoming self-directed?
|
| - You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years ago,
| and getting mad on others in consequence?
|
| - Your intentions not well understood?
|
| All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for
| resignation.
|
| The _behavior_ around it is just childish IMO. I wonder how
| this affects him being able to do his job.
| matwood wrote:
| > All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for
| resignation.
|
| Bingo. If someone wants to be the leader, then they have to
| deal with leadership. That means that everything going on
| under your leadership is your responsibility. We've let
| this slide as a society, letting leaders take credit for
| successes and then blaming others for failures.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > - You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years
| ago, and getting mad on others in consequence?
|
| Forgetting? That's a lot of good faith on your part. Where
| in the time of people denying everything even with
| undeniable video/audio evidence and their target audience
| believes them. If you don't believe then you were not the
| target audience and are irrelevant
| bovermyer wrote:
| Mullenweg's behavior is poor, yes, but I wonder how much that
| will affect Wordpress's market presence. The average person who
| would use the service isn't likely to hear about any of this.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| He's making the ecosystem generally unstable and there are a
| lot of businesses that depend on that stability.
| frereubu wrote:
| I've been building websites on WordPress for 15+ years, run a
| WordPress agency and have many clients who come to us
| specifically asking for us to use WordPress. I'm seriously
| considering moving to something else because we use the WP
| Engine plugin Advanced Custom Fields (pro version) and him
| pulling the free version from the plugin repo in a hissy fit
| has made me seriously concerned about the stability of the
| ecosystem if one guy can do something like that in a fit of
| pique.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Unless you're at a theme chop shop, then you might as well
| move onto greener pastures. There are so many alternatives
| now for website control panels like Wagtail, Payload, and
| Craft CMS.
| frereubu wrote:
| No, mostly ground-up custom built themes. I've tried Craft
| and found it pretty convoluted (althought that might just
| be familiarity), but will be looking at Wagtail. Still
| hoping that WP can pull out of the tailspin because it's
| going to be a huge headache to switch.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I'm curious what you'd consider moving to. Managed
| Wix/Squarespace? Ghost, maybe? I honestly haven't dug into
| that world in many years, I don't know what it looks like
| these days.
| frereubu wrote:
| Craft and Wagtail are the two I've heard of as WordPress
| replacements. In our sector (nonprofits) Drupal has too
| much of an (mostly undeserved, now) reputation as being
| very hard to use. I found Craft a bit too convoluted (as I
| mention in another comment, perhaps just due to
| unfamiliarity). Interested in Wagtail but that would mean a
| switch from PHP to Python. Not a deal-breaker but a bit of
| a hump to get over. Wagtail also used to be a bit too
| beholden to Torchbox (a UK agency) for my tastes - I think
| they started the project - but looks like that's shifted a
| bit in terms of the core team.
| 65 wrote:
| At my job one of the sites I work on, a large government
| agency you have heard of, uses Drupal. And honestly? I
| like Drupal more than Wordpress as a developer.
|
| But, I will say, Drupal is definitely confusing at first
| with all its nodes and entities and content types and
| poor documentation and so on. But on the other hand, it
| doesn't really force you into anything. You can build
| almost anything with Drupal, which I think makes it a
| great CMS.
| tehbeard wrote:
| There is a ... version? distro? "Drupal CMS" that seems
| to be aimed at being simpler / setup out of the box than
| regular Drupal.
|
| https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms
|
| Going to look into it in the next few weeks as a possible
| alternative.
| frereubu wrote:
| I quite like Drupal too, but I know that clients find it
| confusing (or at least they used to the last time I spoke
| to an ex-Drupal client). We find people find WordPress
| much easier to reason about intitively, although that
| might well be familiarity.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Probably enough to notice, but not in a way that threatens the
| company to continue operating profitability.
| 015a wrote:
| I'm not as sure about that; products like Wordpress have an
| amplification effect with their users. The average person who
| uses Wordpress doesn't just have one Wordpress site; they have
| dozens to thousands, because they're actually an
| agency/contracting firm/whatever. Its the same, but opposite,
| reason why Microsoft can build products that piss off literally
| every corporate end-user they've got on the whole planet; they
| aren't selling to corporate end-users, they're selling to
| people with higher leverage, and they haven't pissed those
| people off.
| kopirgan wrote:
| Yet another Trump win cascade.
|
| Better to prepare for more. Some did it out of conviction. But as
| we saw with FB the ones that did for other reasons are going to
| back pedal
| ericjmorey wrote:
| When the tide goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Wordpress is more of an OS today.
|
| I took a 12 years hiatus from WP and just went back into actively
| using it since a couple of weeks now.
|
| The shift went clearly into massive plugins that frees you from
| all the grunt work that was necessary 10+ years ago.
|
| To me as someone who once wrote plugins on my own, had to develop
| themes totally by hand using the infamous WP loop etc. this is
| like going from command line to drag and drop UI.
|
| WP is a OS and Divi, ThriveTheme etc. took over.
|
| I like it, it saves a ton of time.
| n3storm wrote:
| It saves a ton of time creating. It wastes a lot of time
| maintaining and cleaning up infections and debugging poor
| performance.
|
| Is like Dreamweaver but you have to run Dreamweaver all the
| time your site has visitors and an instance of Dreamweaver for
| each visitor.
| Kye wrote:
| That's more like Frontpage with the notoriously insecure
| Frontpage extensions.
| bl4kers wrote:
| Why did you start using it again?
| LordAtlas wrote:
| The latest childish tantrum Mullenweg has thrown is this passive-
| aggressive post where, ostensibly to get a Wordpress fork off the
| ground, he's deactivated the Wordpress.org accounts of 5 people,
| including the people who just asked for a change in the
| governance model of Wordpress. That entire post is a huge ball of
| bitter passive-aggressive shit couched in "howdy" language. [1]
|
| This includes the account of someone who has not been involved
| with Wordpress development since 2020. [2] [3]
|
| [1] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
|
| [2] https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-
| stochast...
|
| [3] https://bsky.app/profile/mor10.com/post/3lfgqcge62c2d
| charlangas wrote:
| Having only been exposed to Mullenweg on the Tim Ferriss
| podcast, I perceived him as the benevolent, zen-like steward of
| one of the biggest open source projects ever. Watching this
| drama over the past few months has been... interesting. It's
| like the dude on the podcast hit his head badly and had his
| whole personality replaced.
| frankdenbow wrote:
| More likely that a podcast is a performance for marketing
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I haven't learned much in my career, (cue "burn after reading"
| clip [0]), but I do know that CEOs _hate it_ when changes in
| governance are discussed by underlings, it 's way more of a
| threat to power than any fork.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/J6VjPM5CeWs
| twasold wrote:
| TLDR; Mullenweg made a poorly received joke/trolling post on
| Reddit on Christmas. It could have been perceived as
| reconciliatory /self deprecating or trolling depending on your
| perspective. That was the straw in the camel's back that led the
| sustainability chief to resign. Mullenweg then disbanded the
| entire sustainability team which he announced by taunting them on
| slack.
| pluc wrote:
| He's been doing so much more:
| https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
|
| Again, I hold no sympathy for Silver Lake, but I hope they fuck
| him up good.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| > ...Mullenweg threatening to physically dismantle their booth
| in the middle of the show
|
| This is crazy if true.
| voakbasda wrote:
| In all seriousness, I wonder if Matt has a brain tumor. His
| behavior has gone from merely sociopathic to outright despotic,
| appearing both irrational and self-destructive.
|
| Certainly, he has single-handedly turned the entire WP
| ecosystem into a toxic cesspool. I feel sorry for everyone that
| he seems to have threatened, bullied, or outright extorted.
| Anyone aware of these shenanigans would be wise to steer clear
| of the entire mess until he is out of the picture.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > The website Plugin Vulnerabilities catches an interesting
| detail: the language related to hosting forked premium plugins
| on wordpress.org has been modified, starting on the same day
| that the ACF takeover happened.
|
| I wonder if Matty boy saw my comment, on the post here about
| the ACF takeover, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy, lol.
| GavinAnderegg wrote:
| I wrote a piece yesterday about the recent WordPress drama,
| including this bit. A fun thing I learned while digging into it
| is that Mullenweg himself requested that the Slack channel for
| this team be set up live on stage at WordCamp Europe in 2022.
| When disbanding the team, Mullenweg said, "today I learned that
| we have a sustainability team". Maybe he forgot, but setting up
| this team was -- at least in part -- his idea.
|
| https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble
| xyst wrote:
| Dude has gone full Elon at this point. Why hasn't WP 86'd this
| guy?
| raverbashing wrote:
| I think even Elon is looking more normal than Matt at this
| time
| throw16180339 wrote:
| Matt controls the WordPress foundation, owns and operates
| wordpress.org, is CEO of Automattic, and votes 84% of its
| stock (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150).
| AFAICS, there's no one who has the means to remove him.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| There's always ways to remove someone completely gone off
| the rocker. Employees or customers voting with their feet,
| some big and established name(s) forking off the project,
| getting the target arrested (if only by provoking an
| escalation), getting a judge to declare the target mentally
| unfit, and various illegal methods as well.
| Aurornis wrote:
| WordPress and Mullenweg are one and the same, despite all of
| the superficial distinctions and organizations. He controls
| it all.
|
| There is no viable way to separate without forking the
| project and using a different name. Mullenweg is already
| trying to make like difficult for anyone he suspects might be
| thinking about forking, so anyone leading a fork has to
| assume that Mullenweg is going to make their life hell. He's
| not afraid of dumping money into lawsuits to crush people, so
| forking WP is a scary proposition.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Given the risks, it would likely have to be done by a
| foundation with deep pockets and clout in the community. I
| could see an org like EFF do the work, they have the clout
| that any attacks against them would fall flat and they
| probably have deep enough pockets too.
|
| Besides an org like that that would do it for ideological
| reasons, the only other party would be some large org that
| is deeply invested in the WP ecosystem. I imagine there is
| some ecomm giant that's probably got 8 or 9 figures sunk
| into WP, for them it would be worthwhile to fork as it
| would likely be cheaper than migrating to another solution,
| but that's a hard maybe because you would need the right
| org with the right set of priorities to take on something
| like this.
|
| All of this is just pure speculation, if I'm being honest I
| find it unlikely that either scenario plays out in the real
| world.
| gizzlon wrote:
| I hope EFF have more important things to do than forking
| a php cms. It's popular but not important IMO
| wormius wrote:
| Thinking Apache, Mozilla, FSF or Linux foundation would
| be better stewards than EFF.
|
| Counting income + assets - liabilities - expenses:
|
| Mozilla ~142.7 million https://projects.propublica.org/no
| nprofits/organizations/200...
|
| Linux Foundation ~136 million https://projects.propublica
| .org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
|
| Apache has ~4.25 million based on https://projects.propub
| lica.org/nonprofits/organizations/470...
|
| FSF - 902k if I did the math right on this (ouch) https:/
| /projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/428...
|
| Not sure I'd trust FSF to steward a project. Apache could
| but it feels like they're almost a graveyard.
|
| Also not sure I'd want Linux to control it based on the
| latest Chrome/Google dealings.
|
| Not a huge fan of Mozilla, but it's somewhat in their
| wheelhouse, at least.
|
| What else is there for tech non-profits and dev
| stewardship of something like this?
| xyst wrote:
| So it's the end of Wordpress, within a decade if it
| continues at its current trajectory.
|
| Drupal community to benefit here tremendously. As well as
| consultant work to migrate away from WP
| 1shooner wrote:
| Drupal has spent at least the last ~9 months positioning
| for this with the 'Drupal CMS'/'Starshot' product
| development initiative.
| jl6 wrote:
| They're XFree86'ing him.
| mattrad wrote:
| "WordPress is in trouble" depends on what "WordPress" is.
|
| WordPress the supply chain is currently dependent on
| wordpress.org. The community is working to route around this by
| decentralising distribution - see efforts such as AspirePress.
|
| WordPress the software development project is dependent on
| wordpress.org, and there is no way to route around this unless
| Matt agrees to give up his DFL position or a fork is created.
|
| WordPress the brand is being tarnished, mostly by Matt's
| actions. wpdrama creates a riskier environment when assessing
| whether to use it as a CMS.
|
| WordPress the community is being denigrated and diminished.
| Again, I think only a change in governance can resolve that.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > "WordPress is in trouble" depends on what "WordPress" is.
|
| The one thing I've learned from all this drama is that all of
| the separated components of "WordPress", from the .com to the
| .org and from the code to the hosting, were mostly
| superficial. Mullenweg appears to be equally in control of
| all of them and throws his weight around wherever it suits
| his agenda.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Even in implementation they're pretty intertwined. The org
| version is missing a bunch of basic features that make
| com's "jetpack" plugin almost mandatory, which includes
| invasive tracking that's hard to turn off.
| prox wrote:
| The only thing I have not seen Matt do is taking even an
| ounce of accountability. It simply does not exist for him.
| Just like his professionalism that's not there.
|
| I know Matt hangs around these parts and at no turn have I
| seen him engage in curious conversation.
|
| Basically what I have seen is emotional outbursts and
| crusading against the windmills.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Embarrassing behavior for someone that became wealthy off other
| peoples' open-source contributions.
| Lammy wrote:
| That's literally every rich tech CEO though. All of the
| FAGMAN companies use hundreds of open source projects
| internally, and even when they do contribute back they end up
| driving those projects in directions that benefit their
| bottom line above all else. Presumably they wouldn't
| contribute at all if if the dollar cost of an internally-
| developed equivalent wasn't even higher than contributing to
| OSS.
|
| I don't have any stake in this drama since I haven't used
| WordPress for something like 13 years, buy to me this feels
| like crab bucket mentality, going after Mullenweg because he
| feels like a target that could actually be taken down as
| opposed to people like Zuck/Page/Brin/Nadella/etc who are
| truly untouchable. The level of vitriol just seems
| unreasonably high for something that isn't really that big of
| a deal.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Maybe if he wasn't personally and very publicly trolling an
| entire open-source community, which has created financial
| burden for users, then people in that community wouldn't be
| so upset.
| immibis wrote:
| Well, that and Mullenweg did a bunch of actually illegal
| stuff instead of just arguably immoral stuff.
| pavlov wrote:
| That's standard authoritarian gaslighting.
|
| "Why did you do this thing?"
|
| "Sir, you told us to."
|
| "Don't argue with me. You're fired"
| danieldk wrote:
| A bit of an aside, but how is that gaslighting?
| xeromal wrote:
| Gaslighting has had a lot of scope creep in the past few
| years. lol
| recursive wrote:
| It implies that the person is arguing. They are not.
| meta_x_ai wrote:
| or may be typical leaders have a better vision of what
| "sustainability" means.
|
| "Hire great engineers that have sustainability in their
| bones"
|
| Actual implementation by the grifters : Hire other grifters
| with Sustainability in their resume, whose only job is to act
| as gatekeepers with psuedo-science garbage and make this team
| as big as the Engineering Team.
|
| It's perfectly fine for the leader to look at the
| implementation and say "what's this fucking bullshit and cut
| everything".
|
| These concepts are of course completely alien to leader/rich-
| hating HN
| chris_wot wrote:
| Mullenweg has decided to pretty much shutdown development
| efforts for 6 months on WordPres? Why? Legal actions, he forced
| upon himself!
|
| I cannot understand how he is the guy in charge of all of this.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team" was,
| so I clicked the link to the linked website in this story. I was
| surprised that it was in fact an initiative to do things like
| "have a dashboard that shows the climate impact of publishing"
| and "promote static publishing over..." I assume because serving
| this content (under someone's model) uses less electricity?
|
| Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this
| direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.
| markx2 wrote:
| > Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this
| direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.
|
| This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.
|
| The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.
| lupusreal wrote:
| So then nothing was actually cut and these weird people who
| are super passionate about the climate impact of WordPress of
| all things can continue to do.. whatever it was they were
| doing, for free as they were before? If the issue is having a
| slack channel in the WordPress org, they can just make their
| own discord server. No big deal.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Mullenweg was the one who requested the creation of the
| Slack channel.
| lupusreal wrote:
| If he can make the channel, he can delete the channel. If
| the people in that channel want a new place to chat, they
| can make one. So what's the problem?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Its purpose was to be a greenwash figleaf. These
| activities are supposed to be toothless and accomplish
| nothing because that isn't why they exist.
| missinglugnut wrote:
| > This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.
|
| These were salaried employees working on the sustainability
| team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?
| aimazon wrote:
| My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over
| every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source
| project and community. He exerts that control, whether
| that's closing Slack channels or banning members.
|
| https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
| lupusreal wrote:
| He cannot control how people choose to spend their own
| free time. If these people want to have a chatroom about
| WordPress sustainability which isn't hosted by Matt,
| there's nothing Matt can do to stop them. They can easily
| do this for free.
|
| This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby
| and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's
| no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason
| for _any_ of the involved parties to not simply walk away
| and stop associating with each other.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >There's no money on the line here, so there's literally
| no reason for (...)
|
| I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team
| for free primarily care about non-monetary things.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very
| much can prevent them from contributing things.
|
| That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth
| all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for
| reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.
|
| And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks-
| if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs
| (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is
| very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to
| ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate
| solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained
| to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.
|
| Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds
| of thousand of items of content.
|
| So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these
| projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever
| and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous
| real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of
| the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| He can't stop them from doing stuff on their own as they
| like. That is true.
|
| However once the publish: He has the trademark, and
| unless this group of people was very careful in their
| wording, to only state technical facts and not opinions,
| he can sue them for perceived damages and based on recent
| action he seems to have chosen the aggressive approach,
| despites potential trouble for his company and product.
| GavinAnderegg wrote:
| No, they were all community members working for free.
|
| Check out the bios of the team reps here: https://make.word
| press.org/sustainability/2024/12/13/proposa...
|
| Here are all the contributors on the GitHub repo, also all
| volunteers: https://github.com/WordPress/sustainability/gra
| phs/contribut...
|
| Mullenweg can shut down the team because he has complete
| control over all the WordPress.org infrastructure.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed
| WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do
| is retask itself to higher impact problems.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| ... like raising public awareness about the broad issue?
|
| whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just
| commenting?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I am raising awareness around the energy wastefulness of
| LLMs.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| For every one LLM user, there are hundreds if not thousands
| of people visiting WordPress sites. WordPress is unimaginably
| ubiquitous. When you're that popular, making your software
| more energy efficient has an actual, real life impact (even
| if other things are using lots of energy). In aggregate it's
| still a massive amount of energy.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| you can say that, but are big tech building new data
| centers and contracting with nuclear energy producers to
| support WP websites?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| There are no nuclear energy producers being contracted,
| just upstarts that promise to deliver energy later, in
| exchange for a promise to buy that energy.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power
| Microsoft data centers
|
| > Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown,
| Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear
| accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power
| Microsoft's data centers
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-
| isla...
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Worth noting that they'll be using a different reactor
| than the one that melted down, and that "the worst
| commercial nuclear accident in US history" remarkably,
| thankfully, didn't result in any direct casualties. Our
| track record is pretty solid.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I'll eat my hat if that bears fruit but it's like I said,
| a power purchase agreement for a source that is slated to
| come online at a future date. (I should have been more
| specific in my assertion: no nuclear companies currently
| producing energy are being contracted)
| luckylion wrote:
| Did they do that though? I mean, there's a lot of code to
| improve in WP where you can eek out more performance (the
| default jquery with all the ie6 compatibility nonsense?
| really?). Seems like this team wasn't for that though.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team"
|
| You still don't.
| frereubu wrote:
| I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was
| done that's the issue for me.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I disagree in principle. You can call it a pro-environment
| initiative or you can call it just... promoting good
| engineering. Making code more efficient benefits literally
| everyone from the people making it to the people using it to
| the planet upon which it is used, and who's resources it is
| dependent on. I wish efficiency was a more prioritized thing
| in basically every facet of the modern tech industry which,
| at present, is addicted to an absolutely stressful number of
| libraries that cause nearly every prominent tech product to
| be ludicrously bloated.
|
| Like, it's incredibly irritating to me that mobile browsers
| are practically unusable, not because mobile design isn't
| ubiquitous, but because every website now makes my phone hot
| because it's running 800 MB of fucking JavaScript to render
| text.
| frereubu wrote:
| Perhaps we're talking about different principles. I believe
| very much in good engineering and more efficient code /
| websites to reduce resource use. I just don't think it
| should be in core WordPress code.
| immibis wrote:
| You believe core WordPress code should be poorly
| engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I found it kinda silly at first, like how would WP actually
| contribute to a reduction in climate change. But I think at the
| scale that WP is deployed at (millions upon millions of sites),
| changing something like static output by default could
| contribute to a non-negligable reduction in electricity spent
| on hosting.
| voytec wrote:
| Person exhibiting textbook traits of Narcissistic Personality
| Disorder for years goes into mental meltdown, gets sued and loses
| preliminary injunction. It's only downhill from there.
| coldpie wrote:
| > It's only downhill from there.
|
| I just hope it's over quickly and some other ownership model
| comes into place. WordPress is an impressive & important
| project, it'd be a shame to lose it because of one lunatic.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Sounds like he just created a Slack channel where people could
| chit-chat about "sustainability" much like they chat about
| football or ESports.
|
| Then he found out these guys actually spend all their working
| lives implementing plugins that do little more than display "Your
| site needed 0.04663kg of CO2 to run this year" next to a green
| leaf.
|
| Seeing how they spent 1,5 years on this and have little more to
| show than "concepts of a plan" he was right to shut this down.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| One could argue the sustainability team was disbanded in the
| name of sustainability.
| philipov wrote:
| One could argue the moon is made of cheese.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > spend all their working lives
|
| These were volunteers.
|
| > Seeing how they spent 1,5 years
|
| They didn't.
|
| > he was right to shut this down.
|
| Ignorance is a choice.
| neilv wrote:
| 1. Is Mullenweg's recent behavior as bad as it seems to those of
| us not very familiar with WordPress?
|
| 2. If the behavior _is_ as bad as it seems... Did Mullenweg
| always behave like this? (Like, hints of it, even if the
| circumstances at the time meant it wasn 't very negative?) Or did
| it increase slowly over time, or change rather abruptly?
|
| I think a national-politics-grade PR attack campaign is unlikely.
| So, if it wasn't that, I'm wondering whether the current
| character was always there, or there was some gradual or
| punctuated mental health change. That can often be helped and
| healed.
|
| Separately, in any case, the larger WordPress community will
| hopefully realize the risks of dictators and kingdoms, and move
| to be more resilient. And not make the same mistake yet again,
| just with a new overlord, like we often do in tech consumption
| (and in human history, for that matter).
| ternnoburn wrote:
| Seeing his posts here, it would appear that his behavior is
| indeed "as bad as it seems". A serial poster who cannot seem to
| disengage, took everything personally, and refused to try to
| understand other perspectives.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| I think it started with Tumblr, perhaps behind the scenes. He
| then did some stupid things under pressure and said some highly
| inappropriate things in response to criticism.
|
| Like others who faced pushback from certain communities, he
| decided to double down on the arrogance and insensitivity.
| Unlike others, he doesn't have the charisma, goodwill, or video
| podcast to pull it off.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Agreed that his bizarre Tumblr meltdown seemed to be a
| tipping point, but I still wonder what caused _that_.
| medimikka wrote:
| > Did Mullenweg always behave like this?
|
| Matt, literally (he turned 21 then), came of age in the
| 2004-2006 Silicon Valley climate of the post-Bubble
| "Trummerfrauen"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%BCmmerfrau) movements that
| brought us things such as DHH and Rails, Matt and WordPress,
| Andreessen being himself, and others, all of which are now
| considered "problematic."
|
| I don't think Matt has changed. The climate these projects
| operate in, has. To some it's an eggshell walk, to others a
| game of signaling the right virtues while acting against them
| in secret, and to some a chance to achieve relevancy or
| dominance. And for all of them, there's a day of reckoning.
| 2005s proclivities have no similarities to 2025 dogma, and why
| should they. Neither did 2005 have any with 1985. Feel old,
| yet?
|
| Matt's Matt. That Matt was what was needed to kick a
| floundering piece of software (P2) into the kind of trajectory
| that helped transform it into the absolute unit of a social and
| communications portfolio, Automattic is today.
|
| That kind of Matt is a dinosaur in 2025. As were 1985 coders
| and founders in 2005. Heck, 2005 didn't look too kindly upon
| 1999 Silicon Valley mindsets.
|
| I guess Matt's "problem" is not, that he has changed. Matt's
| difficulty is, that he hasn't, and that 2025 is nothing like
| 2005. And, like DHH or Andreessen or Brendan Eich back in 2014,
| that can ... hurt. I'm too old to care, but I'd presume today's
| "golden child" will be a very problematic person in 2045,
| unless they learn to change or hide behind signals.
| neilv wrote:
| Thanks. I'm not sure I agree with all the points, but upvoted
| for the the info and thoughtful comments.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| What did the sustainability team do? I don't mean an offense to
| the team members but sustainability for a software company is
| very niche. Unless you're a hyper scaler like public cloud
| services your impact is limited.
|
| The whole sustainability area needs a rethink. It needs to be
| linked to cost of doing business (and no - not idiotic carbon
| taxes) and I think if you're using public cloud services it
| already is. If your code is inefficient you will be hit with
| higher bills (I know I'm abstracting wildly but this is mostly
| true). If you need to lower cost/utilization write the code to do
| optimize.
|
| If you own your own data centers, now that's a very different
| proposition. Not sure whether Wordpress owns these - and I don't
| mean renting space and racks. I mean owning the entire space.
| paulcole wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Varszegi said the team's most impactful contribution to
| WordPress was the publication of the Sustainable Events
| Handbook, designed to help WordCamp organizers improve the
| sustainability of their events. The team was also developing a
| plugin to help site owners estimate the carbon footprint of
| their website.
|
| So the answer is: Not much.
| grimblee wrote:
| These people are just feeding his bad buzz by caring, just let
| him flail alone in the kid playground, don't feed him.
| lobochrome wrote:
| So what's the alternative to Wordpress? I run a few small
| business sites and I just didn't care enough. But the guy seems
| to meltdown in his own juices too much. Can't be sustainable.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| This, along with facebook cancelling DEI etc is a performative
| measure that basically means nothing, these people never cared
| about DEI or the climate, they just correctly understood the
| political zeitgeist and performed accordingly, just as they are
| doing now.
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