Yet another Hacker News

Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave

41 points ilamont 1 hour ago 35 comments

pinkmuffinere 1 hour ago | parent

1. Wow his profile picture is so extremely fluorescent

2. I guess I should move my blog off Wordpress

eknkc 59 minutes ago | parent

How the hell does this look like it is burning a hole in my screen?

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1998201848008679424/OGH...

BalinKing 53 minutes ago | parent

It's an HDR image, I think.[0] At the moment, only some browsers show it as brighter—Firefox on macOS, for example, doesn't support HDR images and I had to open the page in Safari to see it for myself.

[0] see, for example, this submission from the front page a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.

dtf 4 minutes ago | parent

It's an 8-bit PNG of a magenta patch (with a dash of white), but the ICC profile is set to Rec.2020 PQ. So I think the high 255 values of 8-bit magenta/white will get mapped to very top of the PQ curve, which is like 10,000 nits (or whatever brightness your display can muster)

flerchin 53 minutes ago | parent

It says he has 84% of the voting shares. Is there any possible way that the board could have been successful? Regardless of Mullenberg, (and I know he's controversial) a coup that is pre-ordained to fail seems like value destroying negligence.

jordanb 50 minutes ago | parent

They could have known they wouldn't succeed but they could have decided their fiduciary duty requires them to either try or resign.

hoten 47 minutes ago | parent

Didn't they craft themselves a nice golden parachute if fired? Then proceeded to kick off events that would guarantee their dismissal?

That's less fiduciary duty and more hacking a payday.

collingreen 31 minutes ago | parent

Getting out of a toxic job while failing up. Business can be strange sometimes.

throw0101a 23 minutes ago | parent

> That's less fiduciary duty and more hacking a payday.

A large golden parachute for firing a board member could be a disincentive mechanism to do it: a 'poison pill' of a kind.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_rights_plan

They could have felt they were doing the right thing, and making a public statement of the situation, but knew it was a bit of a kamikaze tactic and so made it more painful for when the eventual backlash occurs.

doikor 45 minutes ago | parent

Yeah the minority share holders can’t sue them for not trying to do their job even if it lead to them getting fired. (They could have quit too)

If they truly believe the CEO was destroying the company/its value.

bloudermilk 53 minutes ago | parent

How does a CEO pull off resisting an ouster and firing the board?

doikor 50 minutes ago | parent

By personally owning 84% of the voting shares. This coup was doomed to fail from the start.

dylan604 36 minutes ago | parent

Being on the board is a Sisyphean effort based on the weighted voting setup. Some seem to be slower to realize this. At that point, they could quit and walk away with nothing, or as others have suggested, this could have been done deliberately to at least get a payday on the way out.

jordanb 48 minutes ago | parent

Apparently corporate structure gave him power over the board. Historically this kind of structure was considered undesirable and illegal in a public company, but beginning in the 2000s there was this idea that "visionary founders" should be able to demand absolute control, ex: Zuckerberg

VCFundedGenYer 41 minutes ago | parent

The same way Mark Zuckerburg does - he maintains majority control.

xnx 48 minutes ago | parent

Fireship pointed out that the board members gave themselves a generous severance package in the very brief interim, so that was very possibly the whole plan.

ImPostingOnHN 34 minutes ago | parent

That was my guess:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49692654

tptacek 12 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, if Mullenweg really did control a majority of the voting shares, the previous board are the villains in this story no matter what you think of Mullenweg.

bastard_op 45 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised anyone still uses wordpress after this whole sh!tshow, but outside HN folks probably don't even know. Just reading about it about it puts me off from the product and company.

slopinthebag 38 minutes ago | parent

its also hard to move off of

collingreen 31 minutes ago | parent

What makes it hard, these days?

I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?

slopinthebag 21 minutes ago | parent

its getting buy-in, especially from people entrenched in their workflows, convincing management and sometimes legal depending on what plugins are being used.

sixothree 30 minutes ago | parent

It certainly is. But I won't be recommending it for new projects. Imagine how bad that would make you look.

chaosharmonic 37 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I'm left-swiping anything that involves working on it, outside of maybe being interested in helping people migrate to anything else. I don't know enough PHP to maintain one anyway, don't like what little of the language I do have exposure to, and want nothing to do with this toxic ecosystem.

bsoqk 18 minutes ago | parent

If I had to stop using all the software whose politics I find problematic I would have to earn a living breaking rocks.

dgellow 13 minutes ago | parent

Deciding to not use Wordpress isn’t that hard though

stephbook 8 minutes ago | parent

I have an amateur website up and running where club members can book an accomodation.

Most other software wants more than the $100 one time payment that some random WordPress plugin demanded (VikBooking.)

sneak 11 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think that’s been true for 10 years or more.

Freak_NL 10 minutes ago | parent

WooCommerce.

Unless you want and can go with Shopify and go all in on their platform, WooCommerce is what you need to host an online store on hosting of your own choosing. Alternatives seem to lack the numbers to tackle issues when something goes wrong without too much downtime.

(WooCommerce being a popular WordPress plugin.)

dj_rock 38 minutes ago | parent

Come at the king you best not miss...

smoovb 25 minutes ago | parent

Wordpress does not seem long for this world. How much of the Wordpress ecosystem is pure wasted resources, trying to be accommodating for all possibilities? As people see how easy Claude or Codex makes it to get off flat price Wordpress hosting and on to usage based platforms like Vercel, Wordpress usage will fade out. Feels like bloatware has no place in they coming world of AI customized software builds.

sosborn 11 minutes ago | parent

Most of the organizations/departments running wordpress aren't interested in customized software builds and all of the infrastructure that requires. They want something they can pay a simple monthly fee for, and host it with a company that deals with security, backup, etc.

tecleandor 18 minutes ago | parent

Looks like the Altman Maneuver...