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# Matt Mullenweg thinks WordPress is in decline. He may be right
- URL: https://werd.io/matt-mullenweg-thinks-wordpress-is-in-decline-he-may-be-right/
- Published: 2026-04-30T14:33:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-30T14:45:44.000Z
- Description: When open source becomes a bureaucracy, it stops being able to innovate. For a product, that can mean death.
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: Technology, Notable links

Link: [*Matt Mullenweg Says “The Wheels Have Fallen Off” in Wide-Ranging WordPress Critique, by Rae Morey in The Repository*](https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-says-the-wheels-have-fallen-off-in-wide-ranging-wordpress-critique)

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](https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213) 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](http://scripting.com/2026/04/30/125459.html): 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.