The most pointed part of Matt Mullenweg’s recent comments on WordPress governance isn’t the criticism itself — it’s who’s making it. In a Hacker News discussion thread, Automattic‘s CEO and WordPress co-founder acknowledged that he personally designed much of the decision-making structure he now describes as dysfunctional. During a period when he stepped back from day-to-day involvement, he distributed authority, established committees, and added governance layers. The system he is calling broken is largely one he built.
Mullenweg described a culture where open-source norms — public discussion over calls, broad consensus requirements before any decision, and scheduling built around global time zones — have combined to make even minor disputes unresolvable without weeks of Slack threads and input from dozens of contributors. The comments drew sharp responses in the thread, with contributors raising both structural and personal objections.
Some commenters pointed to a case where a committee reportedly stalled on a request while a paid Automattic employee received faster approval for a comparable one — which some commenters read as evidence of structural favoritism rather than bureaucracy alone. Others made a more abstract point about how consensus-driven projects move at a fundamentally different pace than authority-driven ones, citing the terminal emulator project Ghostty as an open-source example that operates efficiently under a single decision-maker.
Consensus-based project management is around two orders of magnitude slower than authority-based project management, as currently implemented by most open-source and open-source-like projects.
a commenter on Hacker News
Not everyone in the thread was focused on governance mechanics. Several commenters were less sympathetic to Mullenweg personally, pointing to past decisions — including a checkbox added to WordPress.org login screens that, according to commenters, blocked certain businesses from working with downstream contributors — as evidence that inconsistent and sometimes unilateral leadership is the more pressing issue. The debate splits along a clear line: is WordPress too slow to decide, or too unpredictable when it does decide?
Both critiques carry weight for agencies and developers building on the platform. Whether core decisions about direction, features, and contributor access move at the speed of a committee or the speed of a product team has direct consequences for anyone whose business depends on WordPress staying coherent and forward-moving. Open-source governance structures designed to prevent any single person from making harmful decisions unilaterally tend to carry a cost: they also prevent anyone from making good decisions quickly.
No formal changes to WordPress governance have been announced. What has changed is that the person most responsible for the current structure has now said publicly that it is not working.
