Category: Uncategorized

Matt Mullenweg is probably the ideal web company CEO

Automattic has been running for 17 years. The company is home to nearly two dozen brands and products powering or leveraging the web, including WordPress, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Day One, PocketCasts, and Tumblr.

When Automattic purchased Tumblr, they somehow managed to pay just $3 million from Verizon who got it as part of its acquisition of Yahoo. Tumblr was a billion dollar company at one point and since 2019 it belongs to a multibillion dollar company.

The transaction cost for us buying Tumblr was de minimis. But it was a deal in which we took on all of its liabilities and all of its legal cases, we kept all the employees and all the costs to run it. Tumblr was, and still is, burning quite a bit of cash.

Matt said Automattic was prepared to pay $100 million but they managed to only spend $3 million. Sounds like a steal? Well, in the three years since the acquisition Tumblr was being cleaned up from the inside. 85% of the team joined after the acquisition and he’s had to reorganize the company to reassign staff because Tumblr has to downsize to 50-60 people to match their revenue before they can go up again.

From the interview it sounded like he didn’t let people go but reassigned them to the other products under Automattic.

Matt understands that the web is a decentralized network built on protocols. He also understands talent is also decentralized. Automattic allows its staff to work from anywhere and no longer has a physical office since shutting down its headquarters in 2017. Everyone who works at WordPress (even Matt) has to spend time handling customer support to understand their pain points.

Understanding what decentralized entails is core to Matt’s goals for the web. It’s why the idea of federating Tumblr and WordPress sites and pages and allow those sites and pages to be connected to join the federated network and become the social web is one of the company’s top priorities and when you run a social web company, content moderation is key.

I would say that it is about 20 percent pruning out the bad stuff as if you’re weeding a garden and about 80 percent encouraging the things that you want to grow. It definitely needs to be a long-term thing. You need to water it every day, but the results are going to happen over months or years.

Tumblr recently reopened itself to adult content but it’s doing so in a more careful and controlled manner to accommodate the needs of those working or with interest in the adult industry and those wishing to keep their neighborhood safe for children and acceptable at work.

Tumblr, WordPress, and Automattic may not be as glitzy and glamorous as other major web companies but more than 40% of websites run on WordPress today and they’re quietly marching towards 80% by embracing openness and decentralization.

When TechCrunch interviewed Matt as the new CEO of Automattic in 2014, he said, “The power of the web is not in centralization, it’s not in closed systems or anything like that. It’s in its open nature and that’s what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years”

Someone wake Instagram’s Twitter admin up. They haven’t posted in days.

The suspensions of journalists from Twitter should have been a wake up call for media organizations 

There were just too many things going on about Twitter over the past week and all of them absurd. I’m happy that John Gruber took the time to summarize it all and even added the parts about Tesla and Jack Dorsey that I might not have touched on. 

I was in the Spaces discussion hosted by Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos but left just before Elon joined. At that point I was too upset at Jason Calacanis insisting on hypotheticals and the journalists refusing to answer one question so the discussion could move forward. Had I stayed I might have caught Elon rage quitting mid question.

This should have been a moment in which media companies realized and took a stand for their social presence instead of hoping or demanding that the suspension of their reporters’ accounts be lifted. The CNN statement is stronger but only by a smidgen.

This is an opportunity for media outlets to take control of their own social presence and join the fediverse. I touched on the issue last month in my post about the need for identity authentication but by hosting their own social presence, not only will companies be hosting their own and their own staff’s posts, they are not beholden to the rules, limitations, issues, or restrictions of other people’s platforms. 

The online social presence of media companies or any organization in general doesn’t even have to take the form of established platforms. They can create and design their own and still be connected to the federated network thanks to ActivityPub, the protocol that allows such things to happen.

Imagine Washington Post’s website address looking like washingtonpost dot wordpress dot com or their work emails looking like jbezos at gmail. Of course they have their own website and email with official corporate addresses.

For organizations with a half decent tech team, setting up and managing a fediverse presence is trivial. It’s time for them to take control of their own social presence.

Expanding Twitter’s Character Limit. Again.

The point of Twitter was its brevity. The need to conform to SMS standards was why it was limited to 140 characters with 20 set aside for the username. Five years ago they raised it to 280 long after it no longer needed to match SMS and now they apparently want to raise it again to 4,000. 

Some time after Twitter allowed people post up to 280 characters they said the majority of tweets don’t reach the limit but they never said how popular threads were and how long was the average thread. Twitter has always been more suited for story tellers so it makes sense to let people write longer posts.

Twitter’s reach and discoverability was a major selling point to bloggers and journalists to share their thought streams and link to their work. It’s why they were among the early adopters of Twitter alongside the startup crowd.

Letting people post long tweets is basically coopting the blogging experience, essentially telling people that they can just post everything there, not bothering with links. Most people don’t blog anymore so that’s moot but people do share stories and they make long Twitter threads, which means threads are going to go away. 

Twitter’s plan to release Notes (Twitter Write) was in early stages before the takeover and it was a full blogging experience with embedded images, captions, and titles but they were going to be separate from the regular tweets, a lot like Instagram’s Guide, which was likely inspired by Twitter Moments. Curious how they’re going to roll it out now after the people who worked on it are no longer around. 

It would be relatively easy to just expand the character limit but it’s also lazy. Turning Twitter into a full blown story telling or blogging platform would make more sense and it may serve to head off the migration to other platforms like Tumblr or Mastodon (face it, Google’s Blogger just isn’t a thing anymore) but that’s only looking at it from a product perspective. 

The return and increase of right wing political radicals on Twitter is a major turn off for many people and many have jumped over to other platforms. However there are crowds that are not affected directly by these groups, can’t afford to switch platforms for whatever reason, or simply chose to stay. They may still stick around, oblivious or dismissive to what’s happening, and most likely be taking advantage of the new features instead of jumping to another platform. 

Change is challenging and it’s not just about features or environment. Leaving your playground or asking people to move to a new one is not easy. The push factors need to be stronger than the pull factors and if people don’t feel the need to move, they won’t, no matter how much you try to convince them. Letting people write even longer tweets could be a reason for people to stay.

What if we reintroduce the old social network model?

Twitter isn’t worse today just because its owner is an attention seeking manbaby with no self control or maturity of mind when he tweets, Twitter is worse because its owner allows, enables, empowers, and creates targets for malicious individuals to attack and harass, based on misconceptions, misperceptions, and misunderstanding of what matters. 

On top of that, he is part of the malicious individuals himself. People often talk about those who want to watch the world burn, this guy is the mascot and leader of that group.

People used to have to post their content on their own websites or blogs and often they include a blog roll or links to other blogs or sites they like to help with discovery. 

Social media made all that so much easier but it also enables malicious individuals and content to roam much more freely. Reintroducing that control over what people are willing to see and deal with in a much more deliberate and comprehensive way may be the necessary element to reduce the amount of toxicity that’s being spread around.

Mastodon’s federated nature gives people that level of control. If you’re savvy enough you can host and manage your own server/instance/domain, but if you’re not, there are thousands of servers managed by various kinds of people, many of whom may share the same views and interests with you. You can choose to be an island or be in a city or town or your choosing. Your level of interaction is up to you.

Or you can return to old school blogging.

Nice, France

I just can’t leave this alone. Detik grabbed a list of cities that exceed tourist expectations as well as those that underwhelm. The lists are supposed to have been taken from TripAdvisor and Escape but I can’t find the original.

What I can’t believe is how they translated Nice, France, into Bagus, Prancis. NICE. THAT FRENCH CITY, NICE. COME ON, THAT’S NOT NICE!

Not only did the Detik article made it past the editor(s?) if they even have one, the Popsi IG account didn’t even do their own fact check to catch the problem.

I just told ChatGPT to write a poem about TikTok in the style of Chairil Anwar. It’s definitely a poem.

Transformers Rise of the Beasts trailer is out

I’m a huge fan of Beast Wars. That 3D animated Transformers series from the mid 90s where everyone is an animal was more than just a fresh take on the concept. Never mind that even back then it looked kind of cheesy, but the writing was superb, it had strong characters, substantial storylines, all of which made the series a prime example that a reboot or sequel can equal or surpass the original.

In this trailer (people these days make such a huge fuss about the difference between teasers and trailers, this is a trailer being headlined by a truck) you see both Optimus Prime and Optimus Primal meet for the first time and eventually work together to fight a common enemy. Primal’s Maximals get introduced and we get a glimpse of the Predacons. 

Best part, we get to see G1 Prime again as the Freightliner truck instead of the newer Peterbilt one.

When the CEO of multiple major companies failed to understand corporate communications and resort to inciting public outrage 

Just a couple of days ago Elon Musk was threatening a war with Apple after the Cupertino company’s App Review team sent feedback about an update to the Twitter app with standard fare language that failure to comply with content moderation guidelines and expectations may lead to app updates being withheld and the app being potentially removed from the store.

Twitter had been down this road before as the company’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth acknowledged as much in his NY Times opinion article recently.

Like any experienced and reasonable company executive, Apple CEO Tim Cook invited Elon to Cupertino for a chat. That angry canine quickly reverted to a pup and deleted the tweet about going to war with Apple

Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer is very likely accurate in her assessment.

San Francisco’s robot dogs won’t be equipped with guns after all. They may have explosives instead

The other day we saw news reports of San Francisco police being given authorization to deploy killer robot dogs. The city’s board of supervisors voted 8-3 in favor of the motion despite heated debates about safety and potential abuse.

The police denied claims that they will arm their robot dogs with guns but according to AP, they could be armed with explosives. How is that any better? 

the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.

At least they said the use will be limited to extreme situations and require authorization from high ranking officers.  We know how restraint police officers of all ranks can be in the United States, don’t we?

Supervisors amended the proposal Tuesday to specify that officers could use robots only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. Only a limited number of high-ranking officers could authorize use of robots as a deadly force option.

San Francisco’s authorities can’t seem to restrain themselves from being swept  along by the American trend of increased militarization of their law enforcement forces. From military grade weapons, armor, vehicles, and now exploding robot dogs.

Meanwhile across the bay in Oakland, the city’s police department backed down from a similar proposal after a massive public backlash.

That Black Mirror episode, Metalhead, from season 4, immediately comes to mind.