Matt Mullenweg Overrules Core Committers; Puts Akismet on WP 7's Connector List

AlienRobot

>Automattic-sponsored core committer Jorge Costa >Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson >Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers >Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn This is a terrifying way to describe people.

drcongo

What is a "connector" in this context?

kstrauser

Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it: * The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product. * They eventually decide not to. * The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway. And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is. Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”. I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.

saghm

It says a lot about what's been going on in the Wordpress ecosystem lately that I had never heard of Mullenweg before maybe a year or two ago, and now I immediately see his name and think "What's he done this time?" Probably very frustrating for many people who actually use the platform, but as someone who doesn't, it's almost morbidly fascinating watching the continued drama and wondering if and when any of it ends up hurting the bottom line enough that something changes. I've joked to my wife before that if they end to running into issues and sell Tumblr, and it follows the trend of how much cheaper it was the second time, it might mean we could just buy it ourselves and run it.

nixosbestos

I guess I'm confused about Matt wanting to "right the ship" so to speak, while also shoving this through. (Idgaf, it's a product call ultimately) But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that? God I love this place, a simple fking question gets downvoted.

markx2

Akismet makes money for Automattic / Matt. Comment spam is terrible and will continue to get worse. Decent alternatives exist. Increasing the visibility of Akismet should help increase revenue. This is 100% a financial move.

j45

Maybe someone will put LLMs on Wordpress and make a new backwards compatible one.

0xbadcafebee

Bro really needs an assistant to write his e-mails/comments for him. Every time he talks, people like his company less. This is also more proof that open source owned by a company will never do what a community wants. Sure you can patch a bug if you fork the code, but nobody wants to do that, so it's not much different than using a proprietary product. Better to use open source not owned by a company, as the incentives are aligned with functionality rather than corporate profit.

neya

Maybe the right to time to Ask HN: are you ready for a high performance bullshit-free Wordpress replacement yet? One that has everything batteries included so you don't need plugins for the most part? I would love to hear your thoughts on what your non-negotiables are from a CMS in 2026 and what features are important to you.

themafia

> It is pathological that we keep attacking me and Automattic who have by any measure given the most. "I'm so self important I've decided I get to order you to do illogical things." Some people see leadership as a responsibility. Some people see it as a chit. I really detest the latter group.

beecasthurlbow

His explanation seems pretty reasonable, no? > He pointed out that the Connectors page featured OpenAI and Anthropic, two companies that hadn’t contributed to the WordPress project and nobody had complained about their inclusion. He said Google had contributed in the past but had stopped. > “… how ridiculous is it attacking Akismet, and Automattic, and blocking the thing the person who is our [release] lead asked for,” Mullenweg wrote.