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

Posted by mooreds 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

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.

Comment by AnonEM00se 1 day ago

Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.

Comment by qingcharles 1 day ago

They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.

Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg 1 day ago

Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

> Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict

This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.

However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by luckylion 1 day ago

Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project.

Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.

Comment by graemep 1 day ago

This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.

This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

I don't think anyone but Matt is missing the significance of that.

Comment by graemep 1 day ago

People do not know about it. Look at the current top rated comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824925

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

I wrote that comment.

Comment by graemep 1 day ago

Oops, sorry, did not notice.

Were you aware of it and its relevance to this decision at the time you wrote the comment? My interpretation of your defence of it as just the CEO making a product decision was that you did not know. If you did know it seems to miss the point which is that he made a decision that was better for his company but worse for Wordpress.

It would be fine if Wordpress was developed by Automattic, but its not.

Comment by kstrauser 20 hours ago

I was aware of it, but as an outsider, this actually seemed like a reasonable decision. Wordpress sites that allow external comments need some kind of comment moderation, lest they become instant spam cesspits. The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum, that looks fine to me. I'd rather see them emphasizing comment moderation than talking up a commercial add-on. Sure, this is a subscription they sell to businesses, so it's not a charitable work. It's one of the more defensible subscriptions I can think of, though.

And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.

To be super clear, I am far, far from a Matt/Automattic (same thing) fanboy. I think this was a good decision in spite of my opinion of him, not because of it.

Comment by graemep 42 minutes ago

> The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum

The lead developer of a not for profit project said lets favour the anti-spam plugin that is provided by the company I am CEO of. Is that an entirely impartial decision?

> And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.

All the Wordpress core committers apart from the two that work for Automattic disagree with you as far as I can tell.

Comment by Arnt 1 day ago

Some people have a view of open source contributors as some sort of amorphous mass of strangers, and that leads to unrealistic suppositions. The contributors aren't really amorphous, they exist, they're knowable, they have personalities and jobs.

A project such as wordpress(.org) depends very strongly on those who do the work. And in the case of Wordpress, that's some spare-time volunteers, some employees of other companies, but the biggest group is Automattic employees. If you do most of the work, as Automattic does, the project depends on you and you get to call the shots.

Comment by luckylion 22 hours ago

I understand that point, but I disagree. Automattic controls the process, which keeps a lot of initiatives out because there's no reasonable expectation of improvement unless it aligns with Automattic.

I don't believe the project would fold were Automattic to quit -- there's a lot activity outside of the core that is alienated by Matt's behavior. Might well be an improvement if the focus of .org isn't about what .com needs, but about what .org wants to offer to users.

Comment by stackghost 1 day ago

>Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.

This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering".

When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.

Comment by mooreds 1 day ago

> most software development is not "real engineering".

Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference.

Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it.

A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.

Comment by stackghost 1 day ago

Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft.

But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.

Comment by kelnos 1 day ago

That's not what being a professional means at all.

You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.

You're using "cutting corners" as a pejorative, but ultimately if the stakes are low, you may -- perfectly reasonably -- decide to allocate less time/resources to particular activities, and more to others. You can call that "cutting corners", and you'd be right, but there's nothing necessarily wrong about that: it depends on the circumstances. And there's certainly nothing "unprofessional" about it.

For the mostly-vibe-coded script to reencode a bunch of my own video files to save disk space, I skimmed the result to make sure that it wasn't going to overwrite or delete anything it shouldn't. Cutting corners? Absolutely. Perfectly fine and sufficient? Absolutely.

For the software that I write that I intend to distribute to others, that could cause data loss or other unpleasant problems for them if I get it wrong, I write the code myself, I understand how it works, and I might write tests and/or get someone else to review it, depending on my own judgment of what needs to be done.

Recognizing the difference between the the situations in the prior two paragraphs is what it means to be a professional.

Comment by stackghost 1 day ago

>You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.

At no time have I suggested that one cannot adjust one's approach. That's a straw man you invented.

I'm refuting the point that business considerations should always trump engineering considerations because profit.

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

Sure, but in this case, the engineering consideration was whether a specific plugin should be added to the list of other suggested plugins. It was literally just a business decision of whether to configure it to be one of the featured options users might want to install.

Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg 1 day ago

> But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low.

Not the way I understand "being a professional." All engineering, and all professions, entail the balancing of interests. There are some hard and fast rules*, like "don't do things that will kill your users." And there are some other things that are more guidelines than absolutes, such as "we don't ship feature changes in release candidates." Serious organizations understand that sometimes guidelines like the latter need to be violated for overriding business purposes.

*Even the "don't kill your users" thing is not an absolute. No car is perfectly safe, for example. We could add three more feet of crumple zone to the front and the back, but we don't, because even in safety tradeoffs have to be considered.

Comment by tomnipotent 1 day ago

What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.

Comment by zephen 1 day ago

> But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low.

Being a professional means that you adjust what things you do according to the stakes.

For example, in software dev, you usually have tests for the code. Do you have tests for the tests? No? Why not? Why aren't you doing "the thing?"

In chip development, I usually had tests for the tests, because the stakes were higher. But I didn't usually have tests for the tests for the tests.

Comment by brobinson 1 day ago

"died in a blogging accident"

Comment by zephen 1 day ago

Although humorous, this also leads to a provocatively interesting line of thought which is completely tangential to the engineering discussion.

Blogging accidents, usually involving tik-tok videos, selfie sticks, and rugged terrain or wild predators, get all the attention, but probably pale in comparison to medical or mental health issues faced by the average blogger.

For comparison, studies of police officers in the US have found that heart disease, cancer, and suicide are the leading causes of deaths.

Comment by balamatom 1 day ago

RIP American democracy, we hardly knew ye.

Comment by graemep 1 day ago

What you are missing here is that Matt (in his role running the project for the non-profit Wordpress Foundation) made a decision to overrule everyone else and favour a product from Automattic (CEO, Matt).

Comment by gmays 1 day ago

Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable).

But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do.

Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.

Comment by ookblah 1 day ago

goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

Notice the distinct lack of me sticking up for him outside this very specific case.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by saghm 1 day ago

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.

Comment by kstrauser 1 day ago

Same here. I had no idea who he was before the WP Engine debacle. He’s been fascinating to watch for someone who enjoys the occasional low stakes, high drama public spat.

Comment by AlienRobot 1 day ago

But what did he do this time, though? I don't understand it very well, but it sounds like they made an anti-spam solution the default? That is good, right? WP gets a lot of spam.

Comment by saghm 1 day ago

This one certainly does seem to require a bit more direct knowledge of WP to interpret than I have compared to some of the others. It sounds like the strongest argument against it that is that he previously has been against plugins being listed in the default page and that he doesn't seem particularly open to having published guidelines for what merits being there by default, which means that what belongs there essentially is left up to whatever he decides with no one else having a clear picture of it.

In a vacuum, probably not a huge deal, and maybe for people who actually use WP the idea that this is basically something up to a judgment call makes sense. At least from my outside perspective, it sounds a bit like what's on the default page is basically being left up to the whim of the CEO without any real concrete explanation, which would be mildly concerning even if the CEO wasn't someone who's been making the news a lot the past couple years from getting into pissing matches with competitors, causing 8.4% of his employees to take a blanket offer to leave: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/automattic-workers-quit-...

Comment by luckylion 1 day ago

I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.

His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.

Comment by saghm 1 day ago

Fair point, although I'd also add that preferential treatment for first-party products is sadly not that surprising when it comes to open source from for-profit companies. It's something that would be disappointing but probably not enough to make me able to recognize this guy's name if he hadn't already been going even further in trying to directly control the ecosystem than this (and causing a bunch of employees to leave in the process)

Comment by markx2 1 day ago

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.

Comment by stevoski 1 day ago

What are those decent alternatives to Akismet?

I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.

Comment by markx2 1 day ago

Look at WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/honeypot/

/r/wordpress will probably have others.

Comment by altairprime 1 day ago

Requiring moderation of all comments remains effective.

Comment by onara 1 day ago

Oopspam

Comment by beecasthurlbow 1 day ago

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.

Comment by 0xbadcafebee 1 day ago

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.

Comment by neya 1 day ago

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.

Comment by fontain 1 day ago

There are endless examples of very good CMS software out there already. WordPress is the plugins, WordPress is a website builder that is ubiquitous because of the plugins.

If you don’t need WordPress, you can choose from thousands of other options.

Comment by j45 1 day ago

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

Comment by lukevp 1 day ago

Cloudflare already did that and it’s available now[1], although it’s billed as a “spiritual successor” and not a literal one (so probably not backwards compatible).

1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/

Comment by drcongo 1 day ago

What is a "connector" in this context?

Comment by textrunmax 1 day ago

The Connectors API is a framework for managing connections to services like AI, anti-spam, etc. It was introduced on March 18, 2026 with WordPress 7.0 at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/03/18/introducing-the-c... and the PR at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/75833.

It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible.

See image https://developer.wordpress.org/news/files/2026/03/image-1.j..., which is the second image on "What’s new for developers?" at https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/03/whats-new-for-d...

Comment by AlienRobot 1 day ago

>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.

Comment by mooreds 1 day ago

It does make the implicit explicit though, right? Each of these folks have a personal viewpoint but also represent a corporate viewpoint.

Comment by kelnos 1 day ago

In a vacuum, yes, that seems weird. But in this context I think it's important to disclose who writes their paychecks so it's easier to understand what their biases might be.

Comment by nixosbestos 1 day ago

Why? People are referred to as committers everywhere. I like the transparency and credit this gives to the ecosystem users helping fund development.

When I did OSS work paid for by my employer, I was careful to note and credit who paid for the PR.

Comment by micromacrofoot 1 day ago

At a dinner party, sure, but if anything we should be this transparent in business and political contexts more often. Who's paying your bills is often very important when outsiders are weighing our choices.

Comment by renewiltord 1 day ago

People on the Internet are just so dramatic. "Terrifying". Yes, indeed, this induces "terror", abject fear. Give me a break. At worst it's slightly cringe-worthy. This treadmill of dysphemisms is honestly annoying. At this point, all actions are described in extreme terms as if they're life changing when they're only mildly quirky.

Comment by themafia 1 day ago

> 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.

Comment by nixosbestos 1 day ago

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.