Pod Insights Decoder Why Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg went to war over WordPress About this episode Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic and the public face of WordPress. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine, and there’s been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.
It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down.
Links:
The messy WordPress drama, explained | Verge
Celebrating 20 Years of Automattic | Automattic
Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ | Verge
Automattic offered employees another chance to quit over | Verge
WordPress owner Automattic is laying off 16 percent of workers | Verge
Tumblr will move all of its blogs to WordPress | Verge
Beeper was just acquired by Automattic | Verge
Automattic acquires relationship manager Clay | TechCrunch
How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird | Decoder
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg | Decoder
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 13,817 words · 5 speakers
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0:28 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and a whole host of other products, like the new cross-platform messaging service Beeper. This is Matt's third time on Decoder. Back in 2022, we had him on twice, first to talk about Automattic and WordPress broadly, and then to talk about Tumblr and the future of social networking. He's back now because Automattic just turned 20, and I really wanted to talk about what the next 20 years of running one of the most dominant platforms in the web might look like, as changes to search and AI threaten to change everything in their wake, and various lawsuits threaten to change the nature of WordPress itself.
1:12 Speaker 01 And make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not the most dominant. Something like 43% of websites run on WordPress in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge. The backend of our website is WordPress hosted by WordPress VIP. This might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, I'm Matt's customer, and like any good customer, I made specific feature requests. A big reason for WordPress's dominance is that it's open source. And like so many open source projects, WordPress has a very complex structure. There's the nonprofit WordPress Foundation that owns the WordPress trademark. There's WordPress.org, from which the open source project is managed by Matt himself. And then there's Automattic, the for-profit company that offers its own site hosting and
1:54 Speaker 01 enterprise services on top of the core WordPress technology, and which contributes an enormous amount of code back to the open source WordPress project. That structure is complicated, but understanding it is really important because there's been a lot of drama in the world of WordPress recently. Last year, Matt essentially went to war publicly and in the courts against a hosting company that competes with Automattic called WP Engine. Matt said WP Engine wasn't operating in the spirit of open source because he felt it was contributing way too little back to the open source WordPress codebase. So Matt threatened the company with legal action and revoked its access to core WordPress technologies. A lot of people felt that this was incredibly out of bounds for Matt and a violation of his position as a central steward of the WordPress project.
2:37 Speaker 01 There's been significant fallout at Automattic and in the broader WordPress community. It's been a long, drawn-out saga. WP Engine responded with a lawsuit and Automattic was forced to reverse some of its retaliatory efforts against the company, but the legal battle is far from resolved. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of his thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down. Matt and I also talked about the future of the web and how he's thinking about the changes we're seeing to search and website sustainability as the generative AI boom continues to upend how people use the internet. Matt is notably a lot more optimistic about this than many of the website owners we hear from regularly here at The Verge, and he's not convinced AI is going to wreck the web. We also talked about Beeper, the cross-platform messaging service Automattic acquired last
3:22 Speaker 01 year. Beeper got into some hot water with Apple last year when it tried and ultimately failed to bring iMessage to Android, but Matt is really excited about Beeper's core technology, and he's acquired a couple of other startups and effectively combined them all together to try and supercharge Beeper's growth in the coming months and years. There's a lot in this conversation, and Matt is as candid and sincere as ever. I think you're gonna like it. Okay, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, here we go.
4:01 Speaker 01 Matt Mullenweg, you're the co-founder and CEO of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress and many other things. Welcome back to Decoder.
4:07 Speaker 02 Thank you so much. Man, the world has changed. So much has been going on since I was last on. It's great to catch up.
4:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel like we had you on twice in one year, and that was three years ago. And then we, I've been, there are many things have happened, and I've been dying to talk to you about updates to the stuff we talked about the last time you were on, and then a bunch of new things, including some very dramatic new things that have occurred since last.
4:28 Speaker 02 And some cool acquisitions and launches coming up. So yeah, a lot to cover.
4:31 Speaker 01 Let's start there. People are obviously familiar with WordPress. I imagine people are familiar with Tumblr, which is another thing that you are technically the CEO of, I believe. But since then, you've acquired things. You've acquired things like Beeper, some other stuff. What do you think of this Automattic today? What's the thesis of the company?
4:46 Speaker 02 I know you love talking about org charts and organizational structures. So it's interesting because the WordPress side of the business, we call ecosystem. It's like gardening. And there's the vast number of players, and that's really kind of what we're best known for. I mean, been doing WordPress now for 22 years, starting when I was 19. And that's wordpress.com. It's VIP, which we're very proud to have Vox as a customer.
5:09 Speaker 01 Oh, wait, I need to disclose this. This is our first ever reverse disclosure, I think, on The Verge or Decoder. Usually I disclose when there's a business relationship, but in this case, we are your client. The Verge runs on WordPress.
5:22 Speaker 02 Yep.
5:23 Speaker 01 So the conflict is in the other way. You gotta keep me as a customer.
5:28 Speaker 02 Well, I'll do my best on this. And yeah, that's actually the thrill of it, too, is seeing publications you follow and things like that use the software. It's very rewarding. Now, the other side of Automattic, we call Cosmos, and that's the apps. And that's been a very exciting place to work in the past few years. Now, you mentioned Beeper, which is actually doing its big public launch in July in New York. So hope to get you there. You know, we did two acquisitions, Text and Beeper. We combined them. Very excited. I was actually just with that team a little bit earlier today. And the other one, just last week, is Klay. So if you aren't familiar, Klay is this personal CRM that one of the top requests we heard from Beeper users is like, okay, I've got all my messaging apps. I should probably say what Beeper is.
6:15 Speaker 02 You have probably more than one messaging platform you use regularly, right?
6:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:20 Speaker 02 So cool thing about Beeper is it can bring them all in one. So WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, all of that. The other cool thing it does is it can only use multiple accounts of those. So you can have multiple Signal accounts, multiple WordPress accounts, all on one device. And you can have it on your desktop, mobile, everything. And it does it all securely. That's, that's the new stuff is we figured out how to make this all run locally to your device. And so it's just as secure as using one of these native apps. But what we heard is like, people are like, well, now I got too much stuff going on. Like who's important? What do I do? And that's where the CRM comes in. CRM is like a customer relationship management, usually stuff like Salesforce, but this is a personal one that's like pretty slick.
6:54 Speaker 01 When you say personal CRM, you know, it's interesting that the through line for a lot of what you are doing is that small businesses, businesses of all kinds use WordPress there on the web. A lot of what the web is used for lately is a small business storefront or a business storefront or some commercial enterprise. Things like a CRM, a text messaging platform, all of that, it connects very deeply to just e-commerce in general. But you're talking about personal CRM. What's the split for you between WordPress as an enterprise e-commerce company? And WordPress, the purveyor of consumer products?
7:26 Speaker 02 You know, I'd say we're very lucky to be part of the generation that was, they called the consumerization of IT. You know, led by folks like Slack that came in and said, hey, we're just going to make a great user experience. And it's going to be quirky. It's going to be fun. It's not going to be boring. It's going to be colorful. And we're going to build the business features. So it scales and it does that sort of stuff. But we're going to start from that great user experience. There's some enterprise software historically that didn't start there. You know, if you're on like an old SAP install or something like that, no one's waking up and like, yeah, I gotta get in there.
7:57 Speaker 01 Slack notably now owned by Salesforce, which is fascinating, right? Like that's this two sides of that equation coming together.
8:04 Speaker 02 Well, and I think these companies, including Salesforce, have been doing a lot to like reinvest in their interfaces and everything. So with Clay and the Euros, clay地earth. Unfortunately, there's another big company called Clay. It does more like enterprise stuff, but so if you go to clay地earth, it'll be the personal one. Well, so what makes it personal versus enterprise? We start from things that are on your computer, like your address book. We hook in social networks. So you can put in all your social networks. We kind of dedupit. You know, we emphasize things like birthdays. It brings your calendar and iMessage and WhatsApp right now. That's kind of what Clay was doing before. And what we're going to be building now is like, it'll just plug into Beeper. And then whatever you have plugged into Beeper, however many networks, whatever you're doing there, it'll bring all those messages in and it can start to, for example,
8:46 Speaker 02 do fun stuff like sort of organize your contacts by how close your relationship is, which it can do clever things, like not just look at how often you contact them, but is it who's sending more messages which way? Or is it weekdays or weekends? There's a lot of, you can kind of infer by, once you have communication. And yeah, I'm very excited to see where that goes.
9:06 Speaker 01 I would understand, if you were saying this was an enterprise product, I would completely understand why you've invested in Beeper and texts, why you've invested in something like Clay, right? You're, you're starting a website, you're going to do some e-commerce, you need an outbound messaging platform, you need a customer relationship management tool. You want to know who your best customers are. This is all just value adds to the commerce platform. What's the revenue model for these as consumer products, pay in charge form?
9:31 Speaker 02 Yeah. So we'll definitely cross from both this stuff. But like what you just said, like who are your best customers that's reporting? That's just all built into WooCommerce and WordPress. So you don't need to go between apps. The revenue models we're imagining, so Clay already has a Clay for Teams. So your entire team can share contacts, share updates. So you can use it in a team like fashion and they've got a pricing model there. And they're making revenue. So that was nice to acquire a company that already had a revenue model. With Beeper, we're still figuring out, but what I suspect is there'll be two things. Like it'll be free up to a certain number of accounts. And if you want to, if you're a superpower user, you want to connect more, that could be a monthly charge. The other thing is there's might be certain connections that are always paid. So let's say you want to connect your Bloomberg Terminal chat.
10:15 Speaker 02 You're, we're probably going to charge you for that. So you're more of a business user. Also, a lot of the messaging platforms support business features now. WhatsApp for business is even iMessage for business. I don't know if you've ever seen this.
10:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:26 Speaker 02 But famously iMessage, which previously was like, no APIs, anything, we're going to crush Beeper in a previous iteration, now has a whole integration system for it. So as we support more and more of these bridges to different networks, I think there's a lot of opportunities there.
10:39 Speaker 01 Is the Beeper architecture still, we're running an instance of your messaging apps in the cloud on your behalf and relaying them to you? Or are you, are you more integrated now?
10:47 Speaker 02 There's still two cloud bridges, but part of what we're relaunching is we've rearched the whole thing with a text technology. So it all goes local now.
10:54 Speaker 01 So iMessage is coming locally to your phone through Beeper?
10:57 Speaker 02 iMessage is the one that we do not support on mobile. It is supported on desktop, just like text did through this sort of way that Apple said or indicated they were okay with. But yeah, we're not going to fight that fight again. Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, not touching that with a hundred foot pole.
11:12 Speaker 01 And so is the, is the goal here that these should be revenue generating consumer products? Or is it, they're good additions to the enterprise stack that also might have consumer elements?
11:21 Speaker 02 I'm thinking of a hundred percent by creating something consumer first, actually, that then has sort of paths, if you're a power user, to do more team like collaborative or business like things on it. But first and foremost is, you know, I want to get this to a hundred million users. I feel it's actually sort of the first product from Automattic that has the potential to actually be really, really large, because it's, it's usage is kind of a superset of every messaging network. The power users are most frequent users on each of those.
11:48 Speaker 01 You know, right now it's relatively small. No one feels that threatened. If you get to a hundred million users and the primary interface to WhatsApp and Signal and iMessage is actually Beeper, they will feel threatened, right? There's nothing keeping them from saying, you've taken our customer away. We're, we're shutting you down. Have you had those conversations yet?
12:06 Speaker 02 Well, I think the difference is we're not trying to take the customer away. We're trying to give them. An interface where they can use the network even more, connect with more people, use the business features. If they have any way to monetize, we're just going to link to it. We're not trying to, we're not trying to avoid that. So we want to support each of these networks, which by the way, are investing huge amounts to run everything. So we're trying to be
12:26 Speaker 01 Because they want to, they want to be the app on your phone through which you do many, many other things.
12:31 Speaker 02 The model that we see people use Beeper as is they don't get rid of the native app. They keep it. Because it's always going to be something there. That's like a functionality or something that you're going to want the app for. And Beeper is for more like, like managing lots of messages, getting the local LLMs, giving you intelligence across networks. Like the things that, yeah, it is a power user feature, but I think there's a lot of power users. A strange thing is happening where Beeper is now, France is the number one country. And there's just been, it's started to go viral in certain ways. And some of that is, people want to be able to check their messages without necessarily getting too distracted. So they call it like friends without feeds, but they still go back to the feeds. They're doing just fine. It just sometimes like if you're in a meeting or something, like you just want to take a quick look.
13:16 Speaker 02 That sort of distraction free mode is really nice.
13:18 Speaker 01 That's really interesting. One of the reasons that I'm pushing on this is as we're speaking, I think you're days away from automatic turning 20 as a company. And automatic WordPress, these other apps, they're all part of the fabric of the web. Right? Broadly speaking, you know, it's 43% of the web runs on WordPress. Some of these fights that Beeper has had in the past is like, how do we build open architectures out of services that are fundamentally closed? And use, use web technologies to pass that stuff to people and what kind of fights we have there. There's the open source fight in WordPress that I want to talk about in depth. But it feels like here at 20, the web is changing in meaningful ways. And the web as an enterprise platform might be headed towards ever higher heights.
14:01 Speaker 01 And as a consumer media platform might be headed towards ever lower lows. And I'm wondering, as you think about these investments and these tools and you know, the apps versus the ecosystem, whether you feel that tension playing out.
14:14 Speaker 02 No, so I'm actually going to ask you to expand a little on what you see as these lower lows. Because it feels like, you know, as we get more compute at the edge, as the devices become more powerful, broadband becomes ever more ubiquitous. You can't escape it anywhere now with Starlink.
14:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, that there's a bit of a sort of swinging back towards these apps and sort of user centric things that, yeah, even the regulatory environment is, is very friendly.
14:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's what I would pull apart as an application platform. The web is, I think, at its peak and maybe with higher highs to come. Right? Web apps are the most interesting they've ever been. Every powerful AI application is mostly expressed as a web app, especially on desktop. Google is literally demonstrating like VO3 is a web app. Sundar Pichai is like, I'm drawing people to desktop web to use these applications on in Chrome on the web. Figma exists, right? It's like the one of the most powerful design tools and it's a web app. As an application platform, the highest it's ever been. Some of the regulatory changes, the Fortnite lawsuit. As a transaction platform, the web is hitting, gonna hit higher highs. Cause we're gonna see more transactions pushed to the web. Something else I want to talk to you about.
15:22 Speaker 01 I'm saying as a media platform, as a document viewer, right? My, the question I've been asking sort of every web CEO is why would I start a website today? Like I would start a TikTok channel. I would start a YouTube channel. That's how you go reach consumers with media. The web as a media platform seems to be at its most perilous moment. And that, that's really the split I'm talking about. Applications, transactions, the web very clearly at a peak and with potentially higher highs to come. Media platform, you know, media companies are going out of business on the web basically every day.
15:54 Speaker 02 There's a lot in there, right? Cause you kind of hit like the creator thing. We hit social networks. I'll start with your, your question. Why, you know, if I'm popular on TikTok, why would I start a website? Well, one, so you're not a one hit wonder. And I, and I think we've seen even some of the biggest creators on a certain platform often have trouble getting as popular on another one. So you need to develop a direct relationship with your audience. Cause as long as your audience is fully mediated by this thing you don't control, YouTube, TikTok, Reels, whatever it is, you'll have a run. But these things change, right? Generationally, sometimes, yeah. People move from one to the other. The business models change, what they emphasize change. You know, if you're a creator, that was just all it on Facebook 10 years ago.
16:38 Speaker 02 Because nothing's ever gonna replace Facebook. You might be facing some of the same things that these media companies are facing that haven't adapted and really embraced their users. I think that the media thing is also kind of complex because we had a real degradation of the user experience and sort of the speed of sites, the way advertising would work and slow down your browser and everything, present company excluded, but some other media sites, like you'd load it and you're almost like it's having trouble, it's hard to read the article because it keeps moving around, right, as the ads load. And so it was, I felt like that was a death spiral for some of these sites that might have over monetized. And then at the, I'm going to go all the way now to like
17:18 Speaker 01 Wait, can I actually just, can I just like push on over monetized for one second?
17:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:23 Speaker 01 Over monetized, you can read that in several ways. I'm, I think what you mean is they put too much shit on the page and then the user experience was degraded and nobody ever wants to go to a local news site again. The other way to read it is they had no distribution except for Google or maybe Twitter and every page view was so scarce that they needed to eke out every single penny they possibly could because that visitor was never coming back. And that's the distribution that's going away. And that's why I'm saying that as a media platform, the web is at a low because all of the audience is on somebody else's distribution, which are by and large closed platforms.
17:58 Speaker 02 I think there's also an aspect that you're competing to be the best in the world. And so as audiences become more discerning, as you know, there's sort of this global competition to raise the discourse and have the best analysis or whatever. I mean, in some ways we see like single person newsletters killing it in some places, right? As well as media organizations, everything like that, but many others have struggled. That's why I was going to say the local because it's a great example of where we had like thousands of local newspapers historically in the US. It's sort of geographic monopoly type of thing. Many of them have gone. I'm going to go back to the ecosystem side of Automattic. One of our most exciting sort of mini companies inside is called Newspack. We have this fantastic leader, Kenzie Wilson, who used to be chief digital at New York Times, who's sort of
18:43 Speaker 02 taken everything he learned there and is bringing that to these small newspapers with this product called Newspack, which is think of like a distribution for WordPress. So it's WordPress plus hosting plus a bundle of plugins that sort of enable all the things that these small town papers need, classifieds, all that sort of stuff. And the fun thing about it is they're learning from all of them and sort of sharing the business best practices. So sort of porous paywalls or, or, you know, I mentioned classifieds already, but like People really love local news. It just the it couldn't support some of the old business models. Now, the sad thing is some publications that switched the news pack actually save hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there were some of these legacy software companies that were just charging way too much. And it has a whole print component and everything like that.
19:28 Speaker 02 So you can still print it out and distribute it at the local coffee shop and everything. But I'm far more excited about actually growing their revenue through, you know, new things that are allowed, paid newsletters, you know, sports scores, like all this sort of things that you can, when you go ultra local, you can support, you know, three, five, 10 journalists to cover a small area, which I think is important for democracy.
19:50 Speaker 01 We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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20:34 Speaker 01 We're back with Automatics CEO Matt Mullenweg. Before the break, Matt and I were discussing the application side of Automatics business and his ambitions for the products he's acquired like Beeper. We also started to dive in the state of the open web and why it feels like the web as a media platform is in decline, even though it's at an all time high as an application platform. But now I wanted to talk about the really big disruptive force in the web right now, AI. And specifically, the ways that Google, as the dominant search engine on the internet, is deploying AI in ways that could affect the hundreds of millions of websites powered by WordPress.
21:06 Speaker 01 How do you think about the distribution of that? If I was to compare you to, I don't know, Ghost or Beehive or Substack? You know, fundamentally, what Substack is selling to a large number of its top newsletter authors is growing their audience, right? If you're Heather Cox Richardson, you're the most popular Substacker out there. It is crazy that she is paying 10% of her revenue to send emails, right? Like mathematically, she could get her better deal to send emails than what Substack is offering her based on that cut. But, you know, I think what Substack would say, what I've heard them say to others is, we will generate you new subscribers. Our network will provide distribution that will get you new customers. This is a cheaper way to get new customers than if you move to some other standard email service and you have to do your own marketing, your own customer acquisition.
21:51 Speaker 01 That's the distribution puzzle that they're solving that, you know, appears to be worth it for some people. As Google goes away and other places stop linking, how are you thinking about solving that problem for like the news pack customer? Are you going to move people around an ecosystem? Are you going to build other distribution?
22:07 Speaker 02 You said it like it was a set thing that Google's going away and no one's going to link to websites anymore. I think what we're seeing aggregate across everything is there is a lot more traffic being driven by the Open AIs and the perplexes of the world. This also fills in early days of that. I don't know, maybe if LLMs never hallucinate again, people will stop visiting links. But for now, I actually find myself sometimes clicking on three or four things, even from like the Google summaries that they put at the top of. So I'm probably clicking on more things than I used to. When I just had the Tim Blue links of the old Google, I would kind of pick one of them and then spend time on that webpage. And now, you know, there's a summary, it links to three different things. I find myself exploring a little bit more.
22:47 Speaker 02 And what we're seeing aggregate in traffic is that what happened in 2020 to 2022 is actually worse than what's happening now. So things are actually starting to come back a bit. I don't know, have you seen that with your traffic?
22:59 Speaker 01 I think broadly what we see is the same thing as everyone else, which is the shape of Google traffic is changing. And some Google surfaces are sending more traffic and some are sending less and they only just started saying what traffic comes from AI mode and search console. So I can't actually tell you that this is like, as we're speaking, I believe this happened yesterday, that they started breaking out AI mode and search console. So it's too early to say. But we have reported on website after website that has just disappeared. The Daily Dot, it went from millions of Google referrals to thousands and then the business was over and that's the end of the Daily Dot and it doesn't exist anymore.
23:34 Speaker 02 Well, if you remember back in the day, Jason Calcanis had Mahalo, right?
23:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
23:37 Speaker 02 So, Google has always been mercurial, especially if you optimized your business around that. So imagine that, like one of these creators who was only on one network. You want to have many paths to the ocean. And so that's what I'd recommend for any business, really, right? You don't want to stake everything on just one partner.
23:54 Speaker 01 I think the question I'm asking you is, there are very vanishingly few paths left to the web. There are lots of paths to the web as applications. I think there's going to be an increasing number of paths to the web from iOS apps looking to escape transaction fees by doing commerce on the web. The paths to the web is media, they're obviously changing. And it's, it sounds like you're saying you are actually seeing more traffic from the AI search engines than people expect.
24:20 Speaker 02 It goes to different people. In aggregate, I am optimistic. In the short term, I think there'll, there'll be a changing of the guard perhaps, or maybe it'll reward different sites. And I think particularly, again, one of the things that I think hurt some of these media sites that we talked about before, with the too many ads, Google started taking in site performance as part of its ranking. So if you had a pop up there or something like that, they would start to de-rank you a little bit. So what do you think of the incentive of these engines? They want you to, the user, to have the best possible experience.
24:49 Speaker 01 I mean, WordPress is 43% of the websites out there. I'm assuming that you can see-
24:53 Speaker 02 We see a lot, yes.
24:54 Speaker 01 You can see a lot. Are you seeing more or less traffic from Google than a year ago?
24:58 Speaker 02 I don't know off the top of my head, but it's not, I think it was like flattish to some and then up for others.
25:04 Speaker 01 But you haven't seen these dramatic declines that are wiping some publishers?
25:07 Speaker 02 Not in the past year, no. We saw some like four years ago.
25:10 Speaker 01 Interesting. And so you think it's the same amount of traffic, which is expressed differently across your network?
25:15 Speaker 02 That's my, yeah, and more starting to be driven by the LLMs.
25:19 Speaker 01 That's really interesting because Google will happily tell you the same thing. And then I, we get website owners in our inbox saying they took all our traffic away.
25:26 Speaker 02 And you, I believe you hear that across the board, like Business Insider just had layoffs because their Google traffic went away.
25:31 Speaker 01 And that is seems like the dynamic where maybe there are going to be a bunch of new media websites that have a bunch of traffic driven into them by engines. But to your point, what's going to be the backstop against that, right? There's only one referral source left of huge value and it's Google. Maybe these new LLM companies and these search engines will drive some traffic over time. But there isn't another user behavior that drives a lot of traffic to the web in that way, right? There's search and search like things and chatbot like search. But there isn't, you know, there used to be a Twitter, which would drive a lot of traffic to some websites. Facebook used to drive a lot of traffic to some websites. Those other things have faded away. Do you see something else coming up that might balance out the incredible search dependency?
26:16 Speaker 02 You know what people sleep on is the Google articles? I don't know what they call it. It's not Google News, but that's that thing that if you scroll to the left on a, on a Android or you open the Google app.
26:25 Speaker 01 Discover, I know entire media companies whose business is Google Discover, like just programming Google Discover, which to me feels the most brittle of all because it's a total.
26:36 Speaker 02 I actually dream of a day when Twitter doesn't de-emphasize links again. So who knows? There's a lot more sort of niche social networks. So for example, if you're an engineer, like Hacker News was always big for my combinator.
26:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:49 Speaker 02 But there's like one called Lobsters, which can have like cool little spikes. And honestly, I, I think like the video stuff actually can drive really great web traffic still. You know, people allow links now in them. They talk or they just say something and people click on it. It's like this thing we saw for Beeper, you know, the French usage surpassed English just off this one viral reel. So that was people going to a website.
27:13 Speaker 01 Fair enough. I want to get to the decoder questions because I want to talk about the other side of the web, which is the open web and the open source nature of a lot of the stuff you work on at Automattic and WordPress. You described your org chart as ecosystem and Cosmos. Cosmos is the app. Ecosystem is the core technologies you're building. You've had a bunch of buyouts and layoffs this year. How big is WordPress today?
27:37 Speaker 02 We're about 1,500 people.
27:38 Speaker 01 And is that substantially smaller than it was at the top of the year?
27:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, like most tech companies, we hired a lot in kind of 2020, 2021 range. And like most tech companies, we found we can be more efficient and move a little bit faster with smaller teams. I don't love that, but it is a business reality.
28:00 Speaker 01 Did anything about your leadership structure change? Did any of your org chart change? Or is it still the two main groups?
28:05 Speaker 02 Well, internally, we actually did just did a big switch where we have traditionally been sort of like independent product silos with their own engineering, marketing, everything. And we just did a huge centralization effort. So product, engineering, design, all centralized and some new leaders there as well. Your colleague, Niamh Padraim, who was at Apple for 15 years at the App Store, Airbnb. So he's helped us really reimagine sort of how we think about products, which I'd say historically, we've really, because my proclivity is very much on the engineering side. So that's been really nice and really exciting. So yeah, it is actually a very different organizational structure. I think I said this last time, but I feel like all org structures are just a series of trade offs. And sometimes you
28:50 Speaker 02 just need to make the other trade off for a while. So if you've been in one place for too long or doing things one way, you kind of need to do the opposite to break out of whatever rut you found yourself in. And it could just be like how you're thinking.
29:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's a real pendulum between centralization and decentralization at most companies, especially 20 year old companies. Was this really the decision? We just, we've been doing it this way for a while. We're just going to swing the pendulum the other way and see what happens?
29:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:16 Speaker 02 I mean, I mean, that wasn't just it. It's not like, oh, it just swing the other way. It was, uh, it was really like, hey, what are, what are some of our issues here? Uh, we're not having some global quality, like we're getting some local maximums in certain areas. Performance management across all of this can be inconsistent. We need like, let's try one roadmap for the whole company and see what that looks like. Should we try this every six months thing that a lot of companies are doing? We kind of examined all of that and then looked at how that fit with our, what we're hearing from the customers, what sort of our, what's happening with the business and the environment, what we're really excited about. And, uh, yeah, this is what we ended up with. We're only like two months into it. So there's a lot of changes, the first kind of three, four months of the year. And it's kind of been baking the last two months.
29:59 Speaker 02 And to be honest, I, I won't be able to tell you if it worked until probably towards the end of the year.
30:03 Speaker 01 What are you hoping to get out of it?
30:04 Speaker 02 All the things a business wants. So I want, uh, your colleagues, I want better business results. I want, you know, better retention and acquisition. I want deeper to a hundred million users. Like we, we have our ambitions. Ultimately, you know, I want to solve open source for publishing. Come on, like this is my life goal and all, everything in the between is a means to an end. And so I try not to be overly attached to almost anything to see what happens. So much so, I'll tell you something a little wild, which is that we are famously like the most remote distributed company, whatever. There's many others, but like we were pretty early and pretty, and I advocate for it quite heavily. I've actually been exploring whether we should bring a team entirely to like New York for six months to do like a sprint.
30:47 Speaker 02 So essentially that co-locates to the opposite of the remote to see what, what happened.
30:53 Speaker 01 I'm actually, um, I love the idea of co-working weeks, maybe not co-working six months, but co-working weeks. You know, we're pretty remote and I always think, well, we can get together for an offsite, but then the offsite is its own process. But actually I just need everyone to work in the same room for a while. And like, do like be in the office together, like the show, the office, not the office, the office, like goof around and, and like tell jokes and like just watch each other doing the actual job, not the job of like making decisions at an offsite. Let me know how that goes. I'm very curious. We haven't done it yet, but I've been thinking about it a lot. And that to me is like, a lot of, I think what's happening at WordPress in the community is kind of a reflection of. Boy, like being virtual all the time kind of breaks some trust, right?
31:38 Speaker 01 Like that, it feels like there's, there's some trust issues with WordPress and the larger WordPress community that you might have to work through. Do you think any of that, any of this restructure, any working together will help you through that?
31:51 Speaker 02 It was tough during COVID because, you know, the secret ingredient for Automattic has always been our meetups. And the secret ingredient for WordPress was these WordCamps and also meetups with meetup.com or the traditional meetup.com thing. And when that sort of went to zero, and the pandemic, we all know about it, but I think that there's still echoes of that period of time, which stay with us today. I'm so excited it's back. Like I just was at a, part of the reason I'm on this other world is that I was at WordCamp Europe. You know, it's a couple thousand folks. It's, we had a lot of new folks coming. There's a, it really energizes everything. Our contributor day had like six, 700 people at it. Those things are really sort of the gateway drug, if you will, to open source participation.
32:34 Speaker 01 The last time you were on the show, you told me, I asked you about your decision making frameworks to track everybody and you said your goal was to push as many decisions down as fast as you could and that you documented everything across WordPress. There was an internal blog system that you guys use. Is that still the case? Is that still your style of decision making?
32:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. I would say the main thing that's changed is we started doing, you know, some of these product reviews. So on a periodic basis, I'll go to basically every product in the company. And yeah, we do presentations, the feedback, sort of, again, not something new, something many other companies have done for a long time. But you know, the thing that actually maybe no, we really needed to change is, you know, last year I took a sabbatical for three months, which is a benefit Automattic offers. Every five years you get three months off. I had never done it. So I was setting a bad example. So I'm like, I'm finally going to do this. And that was interesting, also just to get a little space. But then when I came back, I was like, okay, what can I do different to sort of come back? And I did 100 days of support.
33:37 Speaker 02 So with all of our different products, like shadowing people, talking to customers, and I came out of it with a real sense for where we had accumulated technical debt, where we'd accumulated cultural debts, where we had golden handcuffs in our business model, which I think is one of the most dangerous things because it's not the business going down, but you can kind of like, oh, if we just stay in this forever, you know, it's not a good look five years from now or 10 years from now. So that was part of why I started recruiting some of the new executives we brought in and thinking about more drastic changes to how we worked.
34:12 Speaker 01 Well, what are some of the golden handcuffs you had in the business?
34:14 Speaker 02 Well, just to give an example that you mentioned, like our enterprise business is incredibly strong with media. And media is, in some ways, we're almost reaching a saturation point because not that many great publications left that we could bring on, and some of those publications are feeling a squeeze. So just industrially, from an industry point of view, there is currently, although I think this will come back, secular headwinds to that business. So if we were all media, that would be trouble. But of course, we have other things, finance, a lot of startups, Facebook uses it, all these other things. But is the product as well suited? So that's something we have to think about.
34:52 Speaker 01 We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
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35:36 Speaker 01 We're back with Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg. Before the break, we were diving into the Decoder questions with Matt and also exploring some of the tough decisions he's had to make these past few years, including making Automattic smaller through layoffs and buyouts. But now I really wanted to get to the heart of the conversation. The big controversy that's loomed large over Automattic and the broader WordPress community for the past year. The WP Engine lawsuit and the fallout that's happened since. All right, let me ask you about the big decision. You decided that WP Engine, which was a rival WordPress host, was pre-writing and open source. You decided that you were going to cut them off. Many, many things happened. I just want to start at the very beginning of this. Your decision-making process is it's all team decisions, everything is pushed down, everything is documented. Was the decision to take the fight to WP Engine, was that a team decision or a Matt decision?
36:22 Speaker 02 That was team and a lot of community feedback.
36:26 Speaker 01 Walk me through that specific decision. We're going to go put a lot of pressure on this rival hosting company.
36:33 Speaker 02 I don't know if I can right now. I think there's a period in the future when we can dive a lot more deeply into this. But, well, you're a lawyer, right?
36:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, my job is to get you to talk. I was a horrible lawyer.
36:46 Speaker 02 And I think something I've learned in this process is to not talk as much while it's going on. So we're very much deep, you know, where both sides are spending millions of dollars a month on lawyers. And I think that there's a, there will be things that play out, but the legal system moves a lot slower than I would like. So we're a little bit in the middle of it right now.
37:07 Speaker 01 But you did put a lot of pressure on this company, right? You, you cut off some of their access, you changed some code in different ways to further cut off their access. A lot of people saw you making unilateral decisions in a, in a way that didn't feel compatible with open source. Were those just Matt decisions or were those also team decisions?
37:28 Speaker 02 You know, I take full responsibility for it all. So ultimately, yes, if people are unhappy with it, they shall hold me to account.
37:34 Speaker 01 One of the ways people held you to account inside of Automatic was you said, if you don't like it, you can leave. And a bunch of people took buyouts and left.
37:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, we did a very generous six months and a nine month buyout offer. We got an alignment offer. So at that point, we were at our very peak, around 2,100 people. And actually, we'd already started coming down. But yeah, it was clear that there were some folks who just didn't more in line with where the business was going. Or anyway, some folks who were like, already had another job. They just wanted to, you know, it was a sort of mix of everything in there.
38:07 Speaker 01 So the way I read it from the outside was Automatic is a very idealistic company. You are a very idealistic person after all the times we've talked. That's my impression of you is that you are very idealistic company. WordPress, Automatic, very idealistic projects, particularly ecosystem side, the open source side of WordPress. And here is Matt, the benevolent dictator for life of WordPress, saying, I'm going to squeeze this player out of the ecosystem in a way that read against the ideals of open source itself. And some people at your company were so incensed about this that you said, you can walk, I'll pay you to leave.
38:41 Speaker 02 That's not how fully characteristic characterize it. So first and foremost, I will say that it is true that my bias is towards optimism and radical openness. Right? That's my whole career. The downside of that, and this is not the first time this has happened in WordPress's history, is that that can be taken advantage of. And this is probably the fourth big time there's been a controversy like this in WordPress. It's the first time in this sort of media landscape or when we're this big. But there have been similar things in the past where as a community, we had to say, by the way, not all the community, but a good portion of it to say, hey, There's something that's not okay here. And if we don't stand up to it,
39:26 Speaker 02 it could threaten the future of us existing at all. So that is, I believe this was one of those decisions, or one of those situations, rather. I'm sure with the benefit of hindsight, there could be things that were done differently, probably on all sides. And there's a lot that we're doing to make sure this particular thing doesn't happen again. So we'll only make new mistakes. And I will say that nothing like this has quite happened in the past, and I hope it never happens again in the future. Now, a lot of these folks-
39:56 Speaker 01 Wait, can you be specific about what you think happened that you need to prevent from ever happening again?
40:01 Speaker 02 Let me think about how to put this.
40:05 Speaker 02 I think where WordPress has had the greatest success is when we can get everyone around the table. You know, the commercial folks, the agencies, the developers, the geeks, the anarchists, and get us all around the table and say, "Well, what are our shared goals? And how will we achieve it?" Even the most rampant capitalist knows that there's, you can over-squeeze that limit. And you don't have to look far at other open-source projects that, where the commercial interest sucked the life out of the project. And that could be talent. It could even be as simple as, now I'll give one example of, you know, something people have criticized us for, and we get a lot of pushback on it. It's like, "How come the WordPress.org directory,
40:47 Speaker 02 the App Store, if you will, doesn't allow you to buy stuff? We allow commercial things, but you have to go buy it from the developer directly. We don't have sort of the one-click type thing." And it's actually a very complex sort of incentives answer, which is, as we saw other open-source projects do that, and some of them did it kind of early. What it shifted in that community was sort of a collaborative nature, both for the core software and for add-ons, to sort of every person for themselves. So imagine you and I were both plugin developers, and I created a better, you know, widget, and you had another widget. Now-
41:24 Speaker 02 Well, often what happens in WordPress is I say, hey, what you have is cool. Let's combine that and we'll just combine the plugin. Or say, hey, this should be in core. Let's build it. Let's submit it. Let's get this so everyone has it. Now, if you and I are both selling that, we might each be making 20K a year or something like this. And so there's a local incentive for us not to open source it to the core or to work with each other. And if you play that out over years, what happens is probably what happened in Joomla, where users felt nickel and dimes with every single feature, the core software can actually feed because all the sort of like best development went into these extensions and hollowed out a bit. It's my view from the outside.
42:04 Speaker 01 You said "we" when you talk about WordPress.org. I think one of the things that a lot of people realize throughout this entire saga of WP Engine is a quote from you, is that you control WordPress.org. This is a quote that you gave to us. "WordPress.org just belongs to me personally," said Matt Mullenweg in an interview with The Verge.
42:23 Speaker 02 So that's been taken out of context so many times. I regret ever saying that. It's the worst thing ever.
42:30 Speaker 01 So is that, you're saying that's not true?
42:31 Speaker 02 You were asking about like specific ownership, like, okay, what entity? I think you even said like, what entity is it that owns this? Which is very different from how the site runs and how decisions are made and how the code works and everything like that.
42:45 Speaker 01 So why doesn't Automatic own WordPress.org?
42:49 Speaker 02 Why doesn't Automatic own WordPress.org?
42:53 Speaker 02 Because I wanted to keep it separate, especially in the early days of Automatic. It was controlled by investors. And so I wanted this balance of power. WordPress predates Automatic, by the way, that there was sort of a thing which was not just the C corp working for the fiduciary responsibility of shareholders, but there's something that, yes, I kept separate and technically just, you know, I support, but I'm one of many, many people that support it. And if you look at it, how WordPress.org is run, where... Just how everything works. It is the result and the sort of fruits of clearly tens of thousands of people and hundreds that work on it daily. And so I was very sad that it got mischaracterized.
43:38 Speaker 02 It's just like me making all the decisions, me making, you know, just being the thing that belongs to me. So I do regret that a lot. I will say that.
43:46 Speaker 01 I appreciate that you regret it. I just, I'm going to push back on the fact that we're mischaracterizing you saying the following, in my role.
43:54 Speaker 02 I didn't say you mischaracterized it.
43:55 Speaker 01 Sure.
43:56 Speaker 02 I said a lot of other people now like sort of take it out of context and be like, ah, we can't have, you know, this thing rely on someone's personal website.
44:05 Speaker 01 And but that is, that is an outgrowth of this quote in this fight, right? Is I've seen others say there's a supply chain weakness if you are, have a WordPress dependency where Matt Mullenweg owns.org, which is the plugin repository and the update repository. And if he gets mad at you, he can cut you off, which is what happened to WP Engine, right?
44:28 Speaker 02 And was reversed.
44:30 Speaker 01 Well, sure.
44:30 Speaker 02 So my ability to do it at the long term is apparently not that big.
44:34 Speaker 01 But you had a commercial dispute and because you are just in control of this, you were able to cut off their access. And I think a lot of people.
44:40 Speaker 02 Moral dispute, actually. That in turn, yeah, it's a moral dispute as well as a commercial dispute.
44:45 Speaker 01 If they had paid the money, I don't think you would have had a moral dispute, right? If they had said, we commit this many engineers to the open source project, would you have still had a moral dispute?
44:52 Speaker 02 I don't know if I can comment there.
44:58 Speaker 01 Well, I'm just, I'm asking because to me, the dispute read as this is the classic open source freerider problem. There's a big vibrant open source ecosystem. Someone's just gonna take it, run the software, sell the hosting. Maybe they provide a better level of customer support. They're not going to pay into the project. Now they're freeriding on what should be the margin that funds the project as a whole. That in the abstract has happened all the time throughout the open source community. And usually, the answer is, well, that's just the price you pay for open source. Like, that's, this is a thing that happens. This is a thing the licenses enable. But the point of open source is eventually the free rider will get far enough away from the thing that they will feel required to pay back into it to do what their customers want, right? This is a self correcting mechanism.
45:44 Speaker 01 And it sounds like you just didn't see that happening, or you felt that was never going to happen?
45:47 Speaker 02 I think there's definitely, by the way, there's, there's. Probably $10 billion of hosting companies that I don't feel like are a threat or harm to the future of WordPress. And so I think that's, you know, you can say I'm crazier off my rocker or whatever, but I would like to point to a long career with very few things like this happening. And so know that not everything is public. And if I really felt like it was that much of a threat to the community, yes, I'm going to stand up. But we try to run things in a way that that happens very rarely or not at all.
46:27 Speaker 01 Do you think that a good solution here is for you to cede more control of wordpress.org back to some sort of central body? Because that feels like one of the main criticisms of this entire situation is that you personally have control of what feels like a very centralized dependency for the WordPress ecosystem.
46:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I can see why people see that because I'm really the spokesperson for a lot of these things.
46:51 Speaker 01 Well, again, I know you feel this quote is mischaracterized. I'm just saying I'm looking at a quote from you to us that says, "In my role as owning wordpress.org, I don't want to promote a company which is legally threatening me and using WordPress trademark. That's why we cut off access from the servers." To me, I don't, I just, we quoted it. That's, I don't feel like we're mischaracterizing it. But that's you saying, "I have an enormous amount of power here and I will use it."
47:13 Speaker 02 I feel like I have an enormous responsibility to the, you know, tens of thousands of people who contribute to wordpress.org and WordPress on a regular basis. Feel like I have a responsibility and to be the focal point for the arrows and the hate to, so, you know, developers that are actually writing all the code for WordPress and people who might not feel comfortable being the face of some of these objections don't have to be. And so I, I'm happy to do that for them.
47:50 Speaker 01 You're 20 years into it. Open source projects rely on characters like you a lot. Linus Torvalds, I think, is the most famous example of, literally, they call it benevolent dictators for life, right? Like, at the end of the day, you can have all the hippie ideals you want, and then you need one person to take the arrows, right? That's, that's what you're describing. One person to make some decisions and hold the value. Again, this is a pattern that repeats in many, many, many open source projects.
48:16 Speaker 02 And sometimes that might be representing a minority.
48:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:20 Speaker 02 In many of these fights, it might not be the most popular thing to do. You really have to believe it's the right thing to do, though. And history will show whether you're you're on the right side of it.
48:29 Speaker 01 How long do you think until this dispute is resolved? Is it just gonna happen in the courts? Are you gonna settle?
48:34 Speaker 02 That's a good question. I wish I could answer that. I really, really wanna get back to the most collaborative version of WordPress possible. And I think, you know, the compliment WP Engine, they have an incredible set of talent. They have a lot of customers that are happy. And I think they have a lot they can give back to and can and sort of to do to grow WordPress and their use of it. So I, yeah, I'm optimistic. I'm generally a free optimist. There have been times I wasn't, though. And I will say that, you know, that the legal system and the whole law thing is incredibly challenging. If you're an entrepreneur listening to this, I would say avoid it as much as possible. And, you know, we're lucky to work with incredible, credible lawyers.
49:17 Speaker 02 But I think my disposition is much more on the the product and engineering side. And so I, you know, I remember Steve Jobs quotes where he said, like, look at how you're spending your day and like how you feel at the end of the day and everything. That's definitely, I wanna get back to where that's where I'm spending the vast majority of my time.
49:33 Speaker 01 I just wanna go through some of the moves here, and then I promise, I wanna talk about Tumblr to wrap this up. Like, mostly, I just wanna talk about Tumblr with you, but I just wanna go through some, some of the moves here, right? You you cut off their access to that or you rewrote some plugins in a way that I think people felt was way over the line. You you called them a cancer. You automatic stopped contributing to WordPress core. You ramped it down, you've ramped it back up. Do you think that you were too aggressive? Do you think you went over the line? A lot of those moves, you've walked back.
50:00 Speaker 02 I don't know yet. We'll see.
50:02 Speaker 01 Why'd you walk them back? Like, for example, not contributing to WordPress anymore. You you walked that back. Why'd you walk that back?
50:08 Speaker 02 So remember, I said you sometimes have to try the opposite?
50:13 Speaker 02 I mean, you know, then 20 years of automatic, there's basically not a day, including weekends, that we haven't done some work on core WordPress or other open source projects. And again, not just me. When you've devoted so much of your life to giving back to something, and it's a very, very small group, but there's some of that that's just attacking you, everything you do, you sometimes need a little break. So think of that almost like automatic sabbatical. Just like a person might need a sabbatical. What I was really hearing internally is that people want to regroup. It's also a good opportunity because we're making some of these other big changes to, you know, bring some, for example, core WordPress engineers over
50:54 Speaker 02 to wordpress.com and say like, hey, what can we do? What could make this a better sort of WordPress experience? So it was also an opportunity to reboot some of our development efforts that I'm glad we did, actually. But we missed it.
51:06 Speaker 01 You missed it.
51:07 Speaker 02 We can't quit it. Like, honestly, like, I think I'm gonna have to do open source the rest of my life. I just can't. It was, it was torture for me. And like, there was like, you know, because we're like, okay, now I guess we need to like, not do any more relief. We don't have enough stuff for a release. And so we're gonna have to push that. That broke my heart. And then I just couldn't stop thinking about like, because we, we kept developing technology. And one thing we do is like, automatic, like, we'll develop it sometimes on the automatic side, and then we bring it to the open source. So we had all this stuff developing, and there's like, real time co-editing, and like, really exciting stuff. And like, I gotta get this out there.
51:41 Speaker 01 I'm gonna tell you right now, the entire Verge team just heard you say real time co-editing. When are you shipping simultaneous editing? As you know, when, when Vox Media moved to WordPress, this is the only thing I asked you for. And you told me it was coming. When is it coming?
51:52 Speaker 02 I'm excited about it. And, yeah.
51:54 Speaker 01 Is it this year?
51:56 Speaker 02 That's a this year thing.
51:57 Speaker 01 It's this year?
51:57 Speaker 02 Murphy willing. Yeah.
51:59 Speaker 01 All right. And we're gonna hold you to that. By the way, you mentioned automatic sabbatical. I connected your sabbatical to this fight, right? There was a lot of hostility, a lot of back and forth, a lot of just pent up anger, whatever it was. And then you took a sabbatical. Was it?
52:15 Speaker 02 No, that was like, like eight months away or something. Yeah.
52:19 Speaker 01 Wasn't that close? All right. Let's talk about Tumblr. You bought Tumblr ages ago from Verizon for some reason.
52:27 Speaker 02 I actually just rented the Hans at a, at a, at an event.
52:30 Speaker 01 I don't mean you bought it for some reason. What I meant is Verizon owned it for some reason. And the idea that you bought it from Verizon is still very funny to me. Because why, why did they ever own Tumblr? You migrated the entire backend of Tumblr to WordPress. You and I have talked about things like the Fed.
52:44 Speaker 02 No, no, we have not. We put that project on hold.
52:48 Speaker 01 I swear I read a press release.
52:49 Speaker 02 We announced that we were starting work on it.
52:52 Speaker 01 Is that still not going to happen? Or why did you stop it?
52:55 Speaker 02 What we decided is we want to focus in as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users than the users are asking for. This is more like an infrastructure thing, kind of like any big re-architecture. I still want to do it. It's just cleaner, but right now, not working on it.
53:14 Speaker 01 One of the reasons that you wanted to do that back then, or at least when we first talked about the, the very idea of doing this, was you saw some opportunity for Activity Pub. And there's an Activity Pub plugin in WordPress. You bought the plugin from the developer and hired the developer. I've met, I've met him. He's lovely. You can see, oh, that would really work for Tumblr. You move Tumblr to this backend, you have this plugin. Now you've got Fediverse Tumblr. Do you still see that as an opportunity?
53:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, so that would have been a for free way to get it. And so that was one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress. Still going to do it someday. But in the meantime, I think if we, if there was a big push to implement Fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr codebase.
53:51 Speaker 01 Is there, is Tumblr growing? What, what are the user numbers there right now?
53:54 Speaker 02 I'd say Tumblr has like a passionate, never going to give you up cohort of users, and it still acquires users at the young end. I'll also say that elements of the, how it works, I think are very confusing if you're new to it. And so one thing we're thinking about is how we can make it a bit more accessible. And also, you know, the constant thing you deal with at any social network is how do you keep it friendly? So we want to be someplace you can go on the internet and leave refreshed, interact with art and artists or friends. And the, uh, these networks, you have to do a lot, a lot of work to keep out the spam and the bullies.
54:36 Speaker 01 You've personally waded into some Tumblr content moderation controversies.
54:41 Speaker 02 Oh, my goodness.
54:41 Speaker 01 Trans people. It's a very bad time for trans people in America right now. Is that something you still want to be the face of? Or are you? There's a lot of pressure on that community and that community is very, very focused on Tumblr.
54:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, and so what I learned from that is that
55:01 Speaker 02 I jumped in because it's a community I care about deeply and want to show support for. But everything I did to try to show that this wasn't like dirty, then got kind of twisted or turned around or a lot of misinformation. And so the learning is, and by the way, many other people would have told you this, is just don't comment on content moderation decisions.
55:23 Speaker 02 You know, just point all that to the, to the Terms of Service and the team and everything like that. More explanation does not make it better. So again, probably one other lesson from 2024 is particularly in open source, like often we talk through it, we post through it, and we have these vigorous debates and you come out the other side, often with a consensus or at least a shared view of reality. And in the media landscape of today, that doesn't happen, sometimes ever. And so it's just better to not try to engage with everything. And as an early internet person, this, this drives me crazy sometimes, but I, I think I've learned that lesson.
56:03 Speaker 01 One of the reasons I'm asking about this, again, this is just a bad time for a lot of marginalized communities in America. I think of Tumblr, I think of young people, I think of queer people, I think of people of color. A lot of the culture begins on Tumblr from those communities. It is not clear to me that the big platforms are committed at all to making those communities feel safe any longer. They might have been. What'd you say? There was a time when, performatively, these platforms wanted these communities to feel safe. I think Instagram is deeply aware that Instagram is not the same without gay people and white people on it. Like, they know, they just know, but they are playing a different game with the Trump administration. Tumblr is sort of out of the limelight. Are you going to do anything to try to make those communities feel safer there? Because it feels like an opportunity.
56:50 Speaker 01 Right, to take people from the big platforms and put them in a place where creativity and free expression is more valued in that specific way.
56:56 Speaker 02 I know there's a narrative that these bigger platforms are, have sort of changed their mind there. I would challenge that. They might be doing things performatively there, but I bet if you went to, you know, the on-the-ground person that does the very, very tough job of looking at the worst stuff on the internet to protect the rest of us, that's someone like a firefighter or a police officer, I think we will appreciate that job so much more in the future because they're essentially sacrificing some of their mental health to protect the rest of us. And I would, with very, very few outliers who get weeded out and fired immediately, they are, you know, for all the communities you spoke about,
57:37 Speaker 02 and driven by a sense of that, trying to protect and, you know, help safety. On Tumblr, it's the work we do every day, and I want us to be, again, judged by the results and the actions. It doesn't mean that there will never be a mistake. And in fact, we've actually had to let someone go before because they weren't operating in line with the values that we have as a company, or that we, you know, in our Terms of Service and everything like that. But, um, yeah, that is the exception that proves the rule, I believe. It's hard to see that from the outside, though, because you don't see the hundreds of thousands or millions of things that are moderated every day. You see the one time it messes up.
58:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I understand broadly, I think, across the industry. And I certainly understand that content moderators, no matter where they work, have horrible jobs. I'm just saying, I look at Meta, which is saying, very publicly, we're shutting some of this moderation down, and we're going to do community notes, and Mark Zuckerberg is going to be in the White House. And I think, well, there's a whole community there that feels under attack by just the gestalt of that. Just the way that feels is bad. And Tumblr exists, and Tumblr has always been the place for those communities to go. It is what makes Tumblr Tumblr. And I'm just wondering if you see it as an opportunity to claw back some share from the, you know, the billionaire-owned, like, big platform companies that feel like they're playing a vastly more political game?
59:01 Speaker 02 Yes, and we do see waves of people come over when these incidents happen in various places. I think what we have to do now is is retain those folks because the app needs to be super fast and performing. The ads need to be good. By the way, some of the criticism on made up media things, you can make about some of the advertising we have in the Tumblr app today. It's not not not all the ads are to the standard that I think we should be held to. And the app needs to just be more intuitive than I think it currently is. There's there's certain, I think what happened is that Tumblr invented so much stuff. It was like the pioneer that, you know, had images on posts, things like this before
59:43 Speaker 02 any other social network did, that we got kind of attached as a team to some of the the different ways we did things. Now, in the meantime, across every social media platform, there's almost like a set of primitives that are universal, like the platonic ideal of certain interaction modes or how things should work. You know, replying, commenting, liking, you know, liking something versus viewing the likes, like there's sort of affordances in the interface for so many of these things. And when you drift too far from that, it it just creates a lot of mental friction when you use it. So what we have to navigate is maintaining the character of Tumblr and everything that people love about it, while also not frustrating you when you go between different apps or different experiences.
1:00:26 Speaker 01 Everything is turning into a TikTok? Do you think Tumblr needs to turn into a TikTok?
1:00:31 Speaker 02 No, I don't think so. And there's definitely ways I want to evolve the business model. You know, we've messed a lot in subscriptions and things like that, self-serve, you know, first-party advertising, which we've kind of gamified. You can like advertise someone else's thing. So I think those models at scale could be a non-TikTok incentive, like, be smaller than TikTok forever, but it could create sort of different incentives in the business model that I I feel pretty good about.
1:00:59 Speaker 01 Is Tumblr sustainable today?
1:01:00 Speaker 02 It is still not profitable, so we're still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automattic.
1:01:07 Speaker 01 How much runway do you want to give it?
1:01:08 Speaker 02 Everything.
1:01:11 Speaker 02 Like, obviously, we've invested a ton in Tumblr. I'm a believer in its future. And so that's part of why I want to make it sustainable. Because that means it doesn't have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else. It can stand on its own.
1:01:26 Speaker 01 There is a report last year from, uh, we're just friends at 404 Media that part of the revenue model would be to sell Tumblr data to Midjourney, OpenAI for training purposes. Is that true? Is that, is that going to be part of the revenue mix?
1:01:37 Speaker 02 Gosh, where are content licensing things? Um, so Automattic has done content licensing deals in the past. Often it's things that people already had because, you know, it was on the web. So it was already part of indexes and other stuff like that. I don't think that's going to be a big part of the revenue model going forward. And the whole AI content thing, fair use, everything is, um, is like the question that will work itself out in the legal system over the next five to 10 years.
1:02:04 Speaker 01 Do you have a licensing deal for OpenAI to train on Tumblr data?
1:02:08 Speaker 02 I don't think I can comment on like which deals we have or which we don't. But I will speak more generally to just like the AI content licensing thing feels very much up in the air.
1:02:18 Speaker 01 Do you, do you want to have those deals?
1:02:20 Speaker 02 I want creators to get paid for their creative work. Absolutely.
1:02:25 Speaker 01 So if you had that deal, you would pass the revenue through to Tumblr creators?
1:02:28 Speaker 02 Well, uh, passing revenue through, you have to have a certain threshold of revenue. You have to know your customer. You have to get tax information. So there's, there's thresholds at which I think we need to get to where this can become part of what contributes to creatives. I don't see a path for that right now, but it's definitely something I know at least some people at the AI companies are thinking about. And that's, um, I'm hopeful for it, something there. But I don't know what it'll be. I don't think it's going to be micropayments. I don't think it's going to be crypto. We'll see.
1:03:02 Speaker 01 I want to end by just talking about kind of the future of the web and really just about the open protocols, Activity Pub, App Protocol and Blue Sky. The last time we spoke, Activity Pub felt like it was going to be the winner, just sort of by default. You know, Threads had adopted it. Everyone was talking about it. There were a lot of services being built on it. You were really high on it. And then Blue Sky showed up and all the people are sort of on App Protocol, right? Like Threads is obviously a big player and they've launched a bunch of Fediverse features with Activity Pub, but it's not driving adoption, maybe the way that Blue Sky's community might drive a bunch of adoption of App Protocol. There's stuff that bridges them together, but we're having a protocol fight. Like, here we are, having an open interoperable protocol fight. This is some Matt Mullenweg stuff. How do you think that's gonna play out?
1:03:49 Speaker 02 Ah, that's a good question.
1:03:52 Speaker 02 I think the failure mode of internet idealist is that protocol-first thinking. So what I would love, sort of, what I would love to do, actually, maybe I should host this, is like a summit where we get together and don't argue about how the servers are talking to each other, but what our current and potential, like, audience, the customers, the users, wants the most, and how are they not being served by the competition? Because that's the other thing we do, is we say, "Ah, we just make this network, the people will come." And miss all the network effects and the lock-in effects of these social networks with billions of people on them. So it's tricky.
1:04:35 Speaker 02 Even email, sort of the most famously open thing that's still running, is effectively closed down for, like, most people. Like, if you run your own email server, most of your email's gonna go to spam, to whoever you send it to, on Gmail and stuff like that. So we've had sort of a recentralization of a decentralized protocol. This is the kind of thing that can happen if you don't have the right incentive structures in place for something that is very, very open. This is kind of like a version of the problem that I'm trying to avoid in the WordPress community and the open source projects that we support. So I wish I had an easy answer for you. I think the best way that we'll get there is with sort of relentless focus on the design,
1:05:17 Speaker 02 the user interface, and iterating as fast as possible, and not getting sort of locked in these local maximums of what your existing user base might be. Sometimes you have to do something incredibly unpopular with your existing user base to get to that next level, to unlock, you know, the order of magnitude growth that's the billions of people who don't use you yet. Another mistake we make in open source is like, you know, we talk about, you know, the community wants this, or, you know, the users want this, and, but we have to account for the voices of the 7.9 billion people that don't use WordPress yet. And that's tricky.
1:05:50 Speaker 01 I was really high on interoperable social networking, interoperable sites using a two-to-five app protocol. It doesn't matter to me, actually. At the end of the day, I just want to see more interoperability of these networks. Do you still think that's gonna happen?
1:06:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, if I had a bet online, actually, you know what I would bet on is I'd bet on Matrix. The dark horse in the corner.
1:06:11 Speaker 01 A third one out of nowhere. What would just briefly explain what that is and why?
1:06:15 Speaker 02 Matrix is taking more of a messaging-first approach. So think of it kind of like an open source Slack, but that can also, it was what Beeper actually used as a backend in its sort of cloud version. There's also cool extensions to it that can do things like peer-to-peer. That feels like a disruptive technology that if I had to just like, you know, put five, a bet for five bucks on it, a long-term call option or something, I would maybe put on that one.
1:06:42 Speaker 01 All right, Matt, this has been great. You're gonna have to come back again sooner than three years. I feel like I have a million more questions for you, but this is so great. Thank you for all the time.
1:06:50 Speaker 02 Well, maybe we'll celebrate the co-editing.
1:06:53 Speaker 01 The day you launch it, I'll give you a full day, a 24-hour live stream decoder the day you launch co-editing.
1:06:59 Speaker 02 Awesome. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking. And thank you so much for what you do and also advocating for the open web, the open protocols. Really appreciate it.
1:07:06 Speaker 01 We run the last website on earth, Matt. You know how it goes.
1:07:13 Speaker 01 I'd like to thank Matt Mollwack for taking the time to join Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. You can check them out. They're at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Decoder is a production of Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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