this is not why I left WordPress
I have spent my last two lunch breaks, and periodic chunks of my afternoons, on two things:
Reading Josh Collinsworth's exhaustive explanation of the WordPress meltdown, and
Trying to articulate why I deleted every commercial Web 2.0-style site and profile I had - after 20 years of use, in some cases - in favor of a "code it yourself or know the first name of the human who did" approach to the Web.
"Why I left WordPress" has already taken up four single-spaced notebook pages, and that's just the outline. Tl;dr there is a LOT there, ranging from "how I felt the first time I made "10 PRINT "HELLO MOLLY I AM THE COMPUTER" work correctly" to "here's my take on the sexual harassers who made me quit computers for 20 years guess what it is not charitable" to "I can't believe I let myself become exactly the sort of plastic product I was selling."
There's so much it won't fit in one blog post. So much that I'm still teasing it all out, putting it into topics that maybe will fit into single blog posts. So much my therapist will hear long before anyone else does.
But I can name one thing that did not contribute to my decision to delete my personal and business WordPress accounts: Matt Mullenweg's meltdown.
I'm not saying Matt Mullenweg's recent behavior wouldn't have driven me away from WordPress. It is certainly causing me to email clients who are still using .com or .org and asking them if they'll let me migrate them to a new, Automattic-free setup. But Mullenweg's recent behavior didn't drive me personally from WordPress. I'd already made the decision to leave before I learned what was going on.
My rediscovered standard for the software, platforms, tools, and devices I use is that they must "just work." Both those terms carry equal weight.
An item must just work. It must do what I need it to do.
An item must just work. It must do only what I need it to do.
WordPress - whether dot com or dot org - has never "just worked." It's always been somehow both bloated with features I don't need and short on features I do. Most of the things that would make WordPress truly useful as a CMS exist in the form of plugins, which are locked behind paywalls - either the paywall of a "business" .com account or the paywall of hosting costs and using .org.
I tried both with my personal and business sites over the past fifteen years. Neither ever paid for itself. I do have clients who seem to recoup the costs of either a business .com or a .org setup, but it's not all my clients. It's maybe 10% of all the clients whose sites I have ever managed. The rest? Just pay.
Given the current state of the corporate Web, I see Mullenweg's behavior as more of a symptom than a cause. Sure, he's causing a lot of damage to WordPress users, to WP Engine, to the team at Automattic, and most of all to himself. But he's not doing anything unusual or unpredictable. Irrational? Yeah. Unpredictable? No.
Mullenweg is acting like any other spoiled tech billionaire, except he hasn't quite got the billions to back him up. He's playing a role - one every person in his position seems to end up in eventually.
And that's the corporate Web 2.0. It's not people; it's roles. It's not humanity; it's metrics. It's not conversation; it's "engagement." It's not problem-solving; it is, if anything, problem perpetuating, because problems drive engagement.
I left WordPress because I spent so many years swimming in that stuff that I developed a sudden and violent allergy to it. The Matt Mullenweg debacle just reaffirms what I already know: there's no there there.