Comment by dofm
15 hours ago
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 why WordPress was ever taken seriously. Given the level of control he has, it was used pretty judiciously for the longest time.
I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.
But as I say, he has come unglued. I'd be surprised if he returns to the job. I wish him well as I think anyone who has made money because of WP should. Things have gone wrong but there was a long run of things going remarkably well.
I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he evidently cannot see it. I hope, but am not hopeful as it were, that he sees that this is a message from the world to change track. I would instead expect to see a bit of revenge.
> 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.)
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations.
Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.
(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)
These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.
He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.
I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
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 an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
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You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
I guess Hacker News went full Reddit, we have mentally unwell (self proclaimed mind you) commentors proclaiming other people mentally ill. The irony.
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It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
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That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.
Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai).
Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.
I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:
1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are already a beneficial part of the ecosystem.
2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.
WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.
[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit
[1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.
> WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API.
The speed with which Matt hijacked that plugin was one of the funniest parts of this saga. All while complaining they don’t contribute!
Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
I'm still wondering who's the target audience for something like Gutenberg.
- A bastardized version of React whose state is stored in...HTML comments and WordPress shortcodes. It's extremely brittle and even simply updating an article can put its content into an unrecoverable state.
- Some components are done in javascript client side, some are done PHP server side, there's virtually no clear idea when to use which.
- It's incredibly developer hostile compared to basically any existing WordPress Visual Builder. We're at version 23.9 and it still breaks its API and behavior to the point of forcing full component rewrites (see the changes between Blocks v2 and v3 in WordPress 7.0)
- Its full editor capabilities are basic at best. The default components are incredibly shallow, and to get even a somewhat decent layout you're at the mercy of third-party developers, by that point you could've avoided many issues going straight to Elementor or WP Bakery.
- It's incredibly confusing for the end-users! The default behavior of the editing tools is to appear only when a block is selected, which is kinda difficult when the blocks themselves are invisible. Also, the "everything is a component" approach means that every paragraph, every list, every heading is a standalone gutenberg component with his own properties that could affect every other block on the page. Writing something requires constantly going back and forth from the "Component Tree" view just to make sure there's no empty components floating somewhere disrupting the page when viewed on a tablet.
It's...truly the worst of every possible worlds, and much of its issues are blatantly self-inflicted. I genuinely can't think of any reason to use it compared to any other alternative.
WP Engine didn't make ACF, they acquired the company that acquired the OG creator of the plugin.
Their contribution to the plugin was a switch to a subscription-based model and they also started reaching out privately to theme authors with ambiguously-worded emails that could be interpreted as them forcing you to stop bundling the plugin with your theme (we had a lifetime license) and directing customers to their sales. Personally I chose not to engage with that communication.
The fight between Matt and WP Engine was messy and I agree with most of your points but I also do think that forking ACF into SCF was a net positive for the community.
He didn't say they made it, he said they _own_ it.
The issue was not that forking of ACF in and of itself was controversial. It was that they hijacked and repurposed the original WordPress Community page and distribution to point to their own, including any subscribers to the existing project in the name of "security".
One could argue that because WP Engine was banned from accessing the WordPress.org infrastructure, it could technically be seen as a form of supply chain attack and brought up questions about trust and possibly monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
> but I also do think that forking ACF into SCF was a net positive for the community.
I think you can make the case that in principle this fork was a good idea. (Though I personally feel ACF is architecturally bad)
What I think is unarguable is that the way that fork happened, including the commandeering of the slug to pervert the auto-update mechanism, was both improper and self-destructive, and was pretty indicative of the impairment of Matt’s decisionmaking and seriousness.
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> WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core.
Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS.
The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.
Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession.
Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here.
So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.
I am "evaluating" him as someone who feels he has come unglued in a similarly severe but less public way and recognises a fellow traveller. I'm fully entitled to say this, am I not? It's just my opinion.
I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue).
I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
"His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.
I think these responses show how much stigma is attached to mental illness, that people abhor someone placing the label on someone else. Despite the fact that, for anyone familiar with it themselves or in loved ones, it's a lot more prevalent and in many more shades and gradients than probably most people realize.
I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
> I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness.
You don't know anything about this person, and your case seems to rest on "I know because I've been through it" which assumes your experience is the same as a total stranger's.
There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole.
He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.
That is a question of interpretation. But based on my own life experiences I think there is enough evidence that he is in deep, rolling burnout.
He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he now writes emotionally in a way that seems desperate and polarising. These are the signs of a man in crisis.
No doubt he has always been a bit of an arrogant arsehole (nothing unusual in that) but mental illness is not just big splashy stuff like psychosis or full on breakdowns.
Burnout at this point is not just some occupational health thing, it’s more like a chronic disorder.