wordpress
Sauce, goose, gander
Regarding our Cease and Desist letter to Automattic | WP Fusion:
The events of the past month have made me realize a few things: I don’t trust Matt. Matt doesn’t appear to be taking advice from legal counsel. Always defend your trademarks.
With those points in mind we sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic and WordPress.com on October 12th, asking for WP Fusion Lite to be removed from WordPress.com due to the potential for confusion regarding the affiliation of the WP Fusion brand.
It is absolutely hilarious that in its letter, Automattic dispute what is a very clear trademark violation, given its history of weaponising trademarks.
On Safari (Matt Mullenweg edition)
Samantha Cole at 404 Media – Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos:
In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.
I cannot understand how any manager, any leader, can get themselves into a position where they believe they should redirect employee email to themselves in order to monitor who is signing up for a site of any kind. What’s almost worse is that to anyone with half an idea about human beings, it should be obvious this would do more harm than good:
One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it’s ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I’ve never questioned an employer’s judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),”
What Mullenweg – like all insecure leaders – appears to be craving isn’t an effective team, but a monoculture of people who believe in him, personally, and his vision.
“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt’s actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can’t relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.
Companies that have this level of leader cult fanaticism inevitably fail. And what this monoculture entails is a situation where “the emperor’s new clothes” becomes a leadership manual, not a warning:
A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant."
Ten Blue Links "my god, what have I done?" edition
1. Well who could possibly have seen this coming?
I wrote a while ago that the era of major levels of affiliate revenue for publishers was going to come to an end within the next three to five years. Generative AI writing means both that Google is likely to become a sea of slop, and that anyone with a search engine – especially Google – is going to cream off the best quality search results for itself.Amazon is taking this a step further by using generative AI to do product recommendations on site. Given that a large number of searches for products begin on Amazon anyway, this is more bad news for anyone who makes money from sending traffic towards the Seattle company. And as users get more and more exposed to using conversation to hone down what they want, this is going to get worse for publishers who focus on “an article” as the canonical way of recommending products.
The truth is that articles have never been brilliant at recommending the right solution for any individual. For example, the answer to “what car is right for me” has always depended on your use of it. Conversational agents using good quality data will be a better solution in the long run.
2. Turkeys, meet Christmas
Yes, I know that advertising revenue is toast, but if you are a major publisher and you’re giving OpenAI the rights to mine your content, you are silly. The sum of money they’re paying is never going to go up: and when your licensing deal ends, they will have used everything you have ever done to train a model which can recreate your style of content in seconds. Golf, as they say, clap.3. Possible sign of the end times: I agree with DHH
David Heinemeier Hansson is not on my Christmas card list. He’s one of those techbros for whom the phrase “arrogant asshat” is entirely appropriate. But for once, I’m going to agree wholeheartedly with something he wrote: Automattic demanding a tithe from WP Engine is a violation of the ideals of open source software, reduces trust in it, and in my view shows that Matt Mullenweg’s “principles” begin and end at maintaining control over WordPress.4. Where all the Chief Metaverse Officers gone?
Good question. My bet is the B Ark.5. Oh boy, Roblox is toast
Where “toast” means “full of child grooming”. Ouch.6. Quote of the week
The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth. John Gruber, “Why Is Jack Smith’s Unsealed Motion, Outlining Trump’s Criminal Actions to Overturn the 2020 Election, Not the Top Story?”
7. Elon, phone home (from Mars)
I increasingly wonder why Elon Musk is bothering trying to establish himself on Mars, and not just because it looks like a complete dump up there. (Seriously, if you think that’s beautiful, I have around a hundred thousand disused quarries I’d love to show you right here on Earth.) The ever-wonderful Marina Hyde, wondering what reality Musk occupies.
8. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that lovely Google would do this
Yeah no of course I’m not. Turns out that Google Pixel phones give it your location, email address and more every fifteen minutes, without consent. And no, before you say something, using an iPhone isn’t much a miracle cure.9. This stuff matters
I could have written a WordPress special edition this time out. But I wondered if that would be too “insider baseball” for most people.But a big chunk of the internet runs on WordPress. Publishers use it a lot. It’s become the IBM of web servers: “no one ever got fired for recommending WordPress”. And the hold-outs in the publishing space who have had their own bespoke software or used something else appear to be dwindling every year.
So WordPress matters, to a degree that few other software platforms do. It became popular in part because it was open source, so anyone could customize it and bend it to their will, and because so many people used it that it was easy to support and find developers for. It saw off semi-forgotten closed source rivals.
If you want a summary then Mathew Ingram’s article is a good place to go. Mathew has written something which encapsulates the feeling that I think many people have: profound disappointment in Mat Mullenweg’s behaviour, in his refusal to understand that being both the CEO of WordPress.com and the effective owner of WordPress.org places him in a position which needs to be handled sensitively. Using WordPress.org to attack a commercial rival of his company means it “now looks like the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation is using his control of a theoretically open-source foundation to extort money from a competitor.” That is unacceptable.