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.
I dont know any clinical information, but some (many, in fact) people assume mental illness when someone behaves in such a way that they believe their world view and mental model is absolute and fight to the last tooth and nail against any opposing view points (to the detriment of their own well being and others).
Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.
if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
> founding fathers of the United States
that may in fact, be the case, but chances are someone today of similar disposition would not be able to do the same.
> if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal.
(Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]
If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name.
A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...
It's quite apt that you mentioned Jobs, given that many former admirers have reconsidered their admiration for him in the light of his often being an inconsiderate jerk. One can be a winner as far as technical and business achievements are concerned, but ultimately a loser due to how they generally treat other people.
In my case, I'll take Woz over Jobs any day. Steve Jobs is not my hero.
Matt, for clarity, if you see this, since this is a thread I kicked off perhaps by being imprecise and certainly by being somewhat critical:
I am full of admiration for what you have achieved, I believe you should feel proud of it, and I think we in the wider WP and web world have benefited greatly from your assertiveness and confidence for literally decades. I think perhaps the tech industry has taken for granted what WP represents and what it has held at bay.
I also see that things are going badly wrong, and having experienced a couple of years of severe burnout where I too came fully unglued and have not exactly covered myself in glory, I worry.
As I have said elsewhere, I think there is a future where a lot of real differences and temporary difficulties are in the past.
I hope for you that you get to that place, and I think stepping back from the things you built that can look after themselves, and focussing your energies on your health and the broader things that have mattered to you is the way forward.
I can see people have taken issue with me saying “mentally ill” when I might have said “unwell”. But I say this because I think I think you are burned out while unable to take your hand off the tiller, that burnout is real illness, not just a series of bad days at work, and because I think it’s disingenuous to use euphemisms that diminish seriousness.
I think that you should sit back, let them take your hand off the tiller, and take the time to look at what you have accomplished and see what it will look like going forward.
“Cause I can see the future, and it's a place / About seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter”
My best wishes again and my apologies if this thread has been especially annoying.
>We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.
I strongly disagree with the premise.
Aside from that, "WordPress" is 100% controlled by one guy. A guy who has repeatedly demonstrated total and complete disregard for the community. Ergo "we" don't "have" WordPress; It's something we're allowed to use (until Matt decides to ban us for an arbitrary, petty reason that doesn't even require articulation).
That's not something that belongs to a proverbial "we". That's the point.
Dinosaur is often used to describe someone who has grown out-of-touch with their industry. It aptly describes the technical skills Matt was just breathlessly boasting about.
In case you missed it, Matt's boast was part of his attack on people like me who disagree with him ("stupid people swayed by bots") and his direct personal attack on YouTuber Theo Browne, whom he described as having "two brain cells".
In the context Matt established himself, "dinosaur" is pretty tame, no?
Yes, two wrongs don't make a right. I'll tone it down. But if you're going to police the comments, kindly consider applying the policing equally. Just because someone is a quasi-famous tech celebrity, it shouldn't give their behaviour a pass.
Edit: I just noticed that elsewhere in this thread he calls his opponents (myself included) "idiots", yet there's no policing on that comment. Apparently, it's only "dinosaur" that crosses your red line.
It's not the pattern, it's the fact he suddenly had a change in personality in 2024 causing him to destroy the community he created for no obvious reason. Then ignored basically everyone around him and doomspiralled until he got fired.
Not just the WPEngine stuff, but he went on a sabbatical at the start of 2024, got in a fight with the trans community (death sentence in tech), starts posting to WPDrama's subreddit asking what drama he should start in 2025, randomly fires people on the company Slack, etc.
I've never seen someone gleefully torch their relationships and career like this unless they were undergoing a mental health crisis.
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.
People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness.
I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way.
That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it.
WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his.
WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery?
Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other?
Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit.
Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them.
Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants?
Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".
An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.
To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception.
There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc.
(I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)
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.