The saga of Photomatt, the man who tilts at digital windmills

What's the deal with Photomatt? Well, it's kind of a long story

Where it started

So, my familiarity with Photomatt, or Matt Mullenweg was when he decided to buy out Tumblr from it's previous owners (Yahoo!) through Automattic. It was truly a breath of fresh air. Mostly because especially towards the end it was not being managed well, and for a while it was all pretty good. The one thing that irked me was how quick Matt and Automattic was to monetize tumblr memes.

It is an old fashioned -ism I got from being on the internet in the 2000s, but my opinion is that a Meme dies when a corporation monetizes it in any way (some people draw the line at getting monetized period but I am okay with indie people monetizing their memes, it's only when corproations get involved that it really sucks the fun out of the meme). So, it put a bad taste in my mouth but I let it slide. The implementation of subscriptions and ways to pay for tumblr was controversial (I stood staunch on my stance of "I'm not buying these monetized memes that's a kind of selling out that I don't condone even if it's going to the costs of managing the website, and on top of that the people who made the memes probably aren't seeing this money).

I get that for a website to work you do have to pay for it somehow, but it was hard to consider paying tumblr for it's services when it had a bad track record of handling things and then monetizing memes on top of that.

His history prior to this is interesting in of itself given the acquisition of Wordpress.com (put a pin in this the .com will come back later) and the other affairs of Automattic, but that's for another time later.

Red Flags and Thrown Hammers

Now, why did I title this "the guy who tilts at digital windmills"?

Because the guy needs better PR and has a tendency to lose it rather quickly.

In February of 2024, Trans Tumblr user Predstrogen made some remarks. It was worded perhaps like how a threat could be worded, but the nature of the threat itself was such that it didn't bear having to be taken seriously.

To quote

"I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere"

Due to the consistent history of people abusing the mass-report function on tumblr in a bid to remove this trans user from the website (Tumblr has an unfortunately bold and terribly large amount of TERFS or Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists, and it is a very common tactic that they will try to get trans users banned through mass-report exploiting where they will use their numbers and bot accounts to all send maliciously false reports en masse to force the system to ban the targeted person after reaching a specific threshold), and shortly after this statement it was the one to get Predstrogen permanently banned. When asked later about it during a Q&A session, Matt cited a "serious death threat" among a history of bad behaviors.

To quote the Knowyourmeme article "Mullenweg also acknowledged that his sharing one example of Predstrogen's 'multiple threats of violence' may have confused readers and that he considers the phrase 'I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death' a 'very scary thing to read.' ".

As the article points out, this didn't help the sneaking suspicion by trans users of tumblr that there was a strong anti-trans rhetoric on the site that seemed to be either encouraged or enabled by staff members and moderators.

It also became apparent that either Matt or someone rather convincingly posing as him was also starting to debate and defend his reasoning for banning Predstrogen, as this was a very unpopular move.

The article "Tumblr CEO publicly spars with trans user over account ban, revealing private account names in the process" by Amanda Silberling is a very good article on this.

Partially because Matt got so tilted he started flaming Predstrogen on other websites.

One can say that it's not professional as a CEO to engage in flame wars with it's userbase. It is worse that this guy followed Predstrogen onto another social media platform and had been trying to get Predstrogen banned on other websites on top of Tumblr itself.

Much like Vivziepop, Matt is rather terminally online in a bad way.

The thing with Vivziepop could be it's own little write up tangent but I digress.

The kicker? He was supposed to be on a Three-month sabbatical and was spending his time flaming people.

While eventually it seems like what was going on had hit competent people's ears, as it was rather quickly handled on tumblr, but I imagine it was after the legal team saw an actual news article reporting on Matt getting so tilted over this.

The article by Amanda points out that he leaked a bunch of Predstrogen's private tumblrs, trying to indicate that those were for inappropriate use when in reality it was empty blogs used only to squat on URL's.

It also came out that by Matt's own admission and as the article reports,

"We did have an external contract moderator last year that was making transphobic moderation (and also selling moderation, criminally)," Mullenweg wrote on his blog. "As soon as we were aware that person was fired, and we later terminated the entire relationship with that contracting firm and have brought almost everything in-house (at great cost)."

Whis did not help many people's concerns that staff and moderators are transphobic. To quote a reddit comment I saw floating around.

it really doesn't help that he (photomatt) says in a later post that "no no tumblr staff isn't transphobic, we got rid of a 'rogue' contractor moderator who was transphobic and taking bribes to perma ban people, we can't possibly be transphobic now"

like the dude's either lying to save face and trying to play it down via scapegoating a convenient outside contracted moderator who was let go, or worse that it did in fact happen and that firing that moderator did not in fact solve the other implied issues (whether other moderators are transphobic / being biased, whether or not in-house moderators are also taking bribes to ban people, etc).

regardless of the stance about whether that one ban was justified or not, tumblr really ought to be investing in a better PR team if the CEO's getting so heated that they gotta start flaming people. Like it's really not a good look.

So it can be said that while the guy does make a lot of money and is quite charismatic at times, the guy's got a serious problem in both attitude and the ability to just leave things alone.

Where it is now

Why I'm writing this up now is that this is all kind of indicative of a larger behavior pattern, which we’re now seeing play out and getting more readily reported.

Simply, the guy tilts and windmills and puts both feet in his mouth while doing so.

And he's got bigger fish to fry,

Namely, he's getting antsy about Wordpress and his ownership of it.

There's several good articles that go into this listed here

I'm of the suspicion that he's kind of tilted that he can't get more profit out of it, and to get more profit he'd have to consolidate the whole wordpress and privatize it to get stocks. This being a separate entity from his other things like Automattic. He wants to make it a public company and is bullying other major wordpress things into folding so he can get an IPO going. This is all a mild suspicion and is not likely to be the thing.

In any event, it is antithetical to wordpress itself, which has been an open source project for a very long time, wordpress.com being a fork of it but not the whole of it.

What I think is going on is that he's attempting to copyright troll his way into getting all of the major wordpress things in one bag and then go IPO and take it out of open source. Surprisingly enough unlike Nintendo and it's copyright trolling RE: Palworld, it's not going as nuclear or as smoothly as Matt would like.

And his one big flaw is that he's terminally online and simply won't shut up about it, even if he has anything to gain from it.

What's kind of the worst part is that really he's of that breed of guy, the same techbro investor millionaire wannabe that Elon is.

In any event, the guy gets tilted very easily and I think will willfully misconstrue anything that isn't going along with him as against him. Whatever he thinks he's accomplishing with all of these moves, it's not working, and is only sinking the ship worse as this spat's gotten him a lot of bad attention.

Somethint the CNBC article gets into is the following quote

'What are the legitimate ways of monetizing open source and does the commercial entity created by the authors — how much control should they have with the commercialization efforts?'Tunguz said. In this case, "hundreds of millions in revenue is at stake between the two," he added.

Which I think lies at the heart of this issue. Matt desperately wants to monetize Wordpress, regardless of whether or not he's trying to wrangle things to the IPO table or not. And it being open source is antithetical to monetization in of itself. Like trying to bottle wind.

something something constant growth only mindset is the scourge of good business and the modern internet.

This article really highlights what I mean when I say growth only mindset