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Matt Mullenweg thinks WordPress is in decline. He may be right

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Link: Matt Mullenweg Says “The Wheels Have Fallen Off” in Wide-Ranging WordPress Critique, by Rae Morey in The Repository

I’m going to put my neck on the line on this story about Matt Mullenweg’s criticism of Wordpress’s open source release culture:

“WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has delivered a wide-ranging critique of the WordPress project, saying it has spent years doing damage to itself and calling out a release culture he says produces ‘boring or mediocre crap.’”

It goes on to describe Mullenweg’s frustrations with an open source culture that prevents anything being released without a wide-ranging discussion that brings dozens of people into the thread.

“We are not being killed by competition, I believe we have done this to ourselves. We did it by blindly following rules and ideals to a point when they became iatrogenic. […] By definition the things that will give us the biggest wins will be the most non-consensus, so we have to accept the occasional failure or mistake otherwise we will never have any wins.”

So here’s my controversial statement in 2026: on these points, Matt Mullenweg is completely right.

This bureaucratic, consensus-driven culture has also been a blight on other large open source projects, for example at Mozilla. Contributions should be made quickly, and product design should be opinionated rather than consensus-driven. The more a project seeks consensus, the less able it is to innovate.

That doesn’t mean it should be a fiefdom or a dictatorship. Governance structures have been well-established by co-operatives and similar organizations that allow people to be elected into key roles; if they underperform, the voting base can support someone else. But it’s far better to put your trust in an architect — and achieve consensus about that trust — than it is to try and reach broad consensus about every change. Otherwise it’s not just that nobody wants to try bold new ideas; they literally can’t.

This is distinct from web standards, for example, which need a consensus basis to prevent a single vendor from dominating how interoperability works. For example, Mozilla’s objection to the web Prompt API that Google proposed is good; that’s how those systems should work. But for an individual software project, moving quickly and genuinely innovating are vital.

Dave Winer has another take: that WordPress should be more of a platform and allow different people to build opinionated interfaces on top of it. I think that makes a ton of sense too; in that world, WordPress can be an ecosystem monolith, and the opinionated innovation is left to smaller entrepreneurs. That, to be honest, might work a lot better.

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When open source becomes a bureaucracy, it stops being able to innovate. For a product, that can mean death.

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When open source becomes a bureaucracy, it stops being able to innovate. For a product, that can mean death.