Discussing WordPress Frustrations

watching some live streams this morning, I'll show those in a moment. We're going to talk about the sort of frustrations that a lot of folks have been sharing. Not just this year, but for the last 20 years of WordPress, and how we've sort of maybe got to this point. And I think that, Hey, things are exactly the same, as they were a decade ago, 15 years ago, except now, Hey, there's more people, there's much more attention on it.

And we're really dissecting a lot of the same challenges, that we've had, For many, many years. So happy to have people join this conversation and happy to be here with you, Mark Szymanski, as always, not just listening to your voicemails, but seeing your wonderful face live on YouTube. It's always a pleasure, Matt. Thank you so much for having me, as always. Do you want to tee up while I coordinate this? Do you want to tee up today's live stream that we watch?

I'm going to pull it up so we can see it, but Paul Charlton launched, went live

today, but can you tee that up for the audience? Let them know what it was, that was going down, what the topic was and what we're going to react to.

But the reason I think that's related is cause we clipped out a piece of that where Anne was specifically talking about, like kind of like influencers and like, do we have a, As influencers and WordPress people like that, people that have audiences, should we kind of talk more about, and create kind of dialogue, like more, kind of like the idea of like contributing more directly to WordPress rather than just like kind of

like shouting out our opinions into the void, and seeing like who follows that and stuff like that. Which, obviously, big topic, we'd have to dissect all that. But I feel like maybe this was, a little bit, kind of related to that. Regardless if it was directly related, it definitely had, you know, the same topic to talk about. so it's just back and forth a little bit on that, and that is what, I was really excited to see this live stream today.

So, I saw it came up in my subscriptions, and, Paul, WP Toots, for some of you guys that may not know his name, Paul Charlton, put that up there, and it was him, Imran from WebSquadron, Mark Crowell from, WikiDesign, and also Jeffrey at Lightbox. all great content creators. So, yeah, it was a really good live stream that, that they put on. And, I know I was watching it, Matt was watching it, a lot of other people were watching it, and we just had a lot of ideas.

So that's kind of where we are right now, just kind of giving our thoughts. Because this is a very important topic, regardless of your opinion on it. There's a lot of nuance here that needs

It's always going to come off probably in the wrong light that we're doing, that we're doing this and reacting to this video because obviously I have some strong opinions on, some of the answers or some of the commentary in today's, I am, obviously a proponent of, of open source fan of WordPress. I think everyone generally always throws out the general statement that we're all fans of WordPress and we just want to see it do better.

I have a particular angle, as you know, Mark, and a lot of people watching the show. You know, I have this particular angle on WordPress. What that means to, to, to love WordPress, wanted to see it succeed and to also criticize it. I've been a critic of WordPress for many years. Primarily though at the, the leadership level. Not so much the, the software side of things. Like, yeah, of course there are things where I wish this could be better.

But I've never been One, to be hyper critical of how things are getting done. because, while I, appreciate designing a good product, I also, as somebody who has, I've developed products before from the product developer standpoint, not the actual punching the code into the, into the computer perspective. I appreciate a good product, I appreciate the process, and I can understand why things end up maybe being the way they are.

but I'm not a front end designer, I'm not a JavaScript expert, so I can't debate or, or give hypercritical feedback on how something is done, or at least I don't feel like I can't, I should give that kind of feedback because I can't do it. Right? So like, I'm not the guy who's going to tell people, hey, it should be, you know, we discussed this with Kevin, it should be whatever, 768 pixels by default. I mean, I'm not the guy to tell you that.

I'm just the guy that says this works for me or it doesn't, you know, so that's, that's like my perspective on it, but, I highlighted a couple topics from today's discussion. I think you maybe jotted some down. Let me just tell you the topics, some of the topics that I pulled and then we'll, we'll, we'll jump into them. So I wrote things down from today's live stream. If I can find it, I sent it to you. Here it is.

So like open source versus ownership, I want to talk about that today and highlight a post that I've, that I've written and, and, and highlight one from DHH. From Basecamp and Ruby on Rails fame. the automatic apparatus, like it could be a five hour episode just talking about the automatic apparatus.

but I do want to talk about that because some of the feedback that I heard in today's live stream is like, I wonder if people understand, I mean, I don't, I don't think I fully understand it, either, but I feel like I have a strong understanding of how automatic works. And I want to just highlight some of that today, contributing and what that means like time versus payment versus not for me. That's probably the biggest, thorn in my side from today's, from observing today's live stream. yeah.

Which we'll break apart in a little bit and, prioritizing features. So open source versus ownership,

automatic, the apparatus contributing versus, being paid or versus not for me. And then how, how did we end up here? Like, how did these features get prioritized? those are my big four. Did you have some big takeaways today that you want to punch into?

And I think that the big thing that I've, Maybe just the way that I am is like I like to try to break things down to like as Fundamental as possible and really understand like the things everything works as I'm trying to learn it. Like I'm asking a lot of questions, right? You know, I've had so many conversations. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.

I feel like the one thing that we could all do a little bit better is understanding that this is very nuanced and that we kind of all need to get. No matter who we are, like, if we're always just getting more educated on how everything works, then we can have a more honest discussion across the, across the board. And I'm not talking about anybody specifically, I'm just saying that's my personal philosophy on it.

So that's why I love talking to guys like yourself, because you guys have been at it for a while and you understand, the ins and outs of it. And then, you know, we can kind of go from there with a conversation. So, but I like these topics. I'm excited to chat about them.

You know, we came from a time, I guess it's all like pre COVID, where there were many types of WordPress events that were happening. Pressnomics sort of being like a flagship business focused WordPress event that happened, was a company I worked at, Pagely. And, that happened for many years. That was, like, the thing. Like, so many people were hyped to go to that, because it was very business focused, and a lot of deals got done, and you just saw the business side of WordPress.

Loop comp for developers, like, there was a time where these, like, other events were happening. You know, so when folks come into the community like you, like in a post COVID world where they're kind of like trying to figure out events again, you're like, why, why doesn't this exist? And I, maybe for like the old folks in the group where it's like, oh yeah, we had that at one time and we're forgetting to like relay that to you or to like understand we need that back.

Like we need these types of things back. So it's sort of like, you know, the waves have crashed on the shore and they're pulling away. Yeah. Like, Oh yeah, at one time we had all that and now it doesn't exist. Let's get this stuff going for folks. I want to talk about, let's talk about this WordPress, open source ownership thing. I think this is a great post, and I should probably pull up my own site as well. That way we have that.

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago called, what would we do with the keys to the kingdom? And I referenced, this is the post, what would we do with the keys to the kingdom? I'll throw that in chat as well. I referenced this post by, David Hanson from, Hedmeyer Hanson from Basecamp, again, started Ruby on Rails open source project. And he writes, open source is neither a community nor a democracy.

I'm not going to, obviously, read the whole post here, but I, I implore folks to go ahead and read this. This is something that I think is very true and is what triggered me to say what would we do with the keys to the kingdom if we had it. Like a lot of us air our grievances online and on live streams like this and podcasts and blogs and Twitter threads. What would we really do if we were the ones in control? I don't, I don't think it would be any better.

In fact, I would probably guess it would be worse. because as David points out, like, there needs to be somebody who's getting it done, getting the job done, setting the direction, and sort of, that's the person, that's the leader of the project, and in our case, it's, it's Mullenweg. And I don't think, and I'm, and I fully stand behind that as the decision.

There are things I don't like about it, but I still fully stand behind that decision because I still have enough, Confidence in his ability to, to do this with, you know, the criticisms that I would still give along the way. this is a fantastic piece. I think everyone should read this because what it's saying is like, Yeah, you don't own it. Like, we don't own this. That's the thing.

Like, we, it's, it's open source and we can kind of fall into this, gray area where, Oh my God, like this is ours. We all have this say, but we don't. in the, in the fundamental direction of where the project is going. We can have say on little things that happen along the way. I get, and I talked about this last week. I think it was you live when, we got our little feature put into WordPress 6. 6. Perfect example. It was showed up.

We, we said something, we made a post on GitHub, an issue, people developed it. It went in, we got credit. Like, that's awesome. That's the cool thing about open source and you can make these changes. Massive fundamental direction. We're probably going to have less of a chance to have that, to have that opportunity for us because we're not in control. Open source doesn't mean we own it. We can just partake in it. that's just my particular view. I'd love to have your thoughts on that mark.

If you have something else.

To differing degrees definitely some misunderstanding between like what open source is and what that actually means From my understanding currently where i'm at for my framework is open source doesn't mean anything really about the community per se It's more so much more about like the licensing of the software. So like gpl version 2 I was actually looking it up today because i'm trying to Wrap my head around this too.

Like it, when something says it's open source, it's just meaning like the software licensing. Right. And correct me if I'm wrong. So it's like, you can see, anyone can see the code. They can reuse the code. They can fork the code, whatever. But ultimately, there's more to it than that, but I'm saying it doesn't inherently mean that you own it as like a community member probably doesn't even really mean that you're entitled to an, like an opinion or your.

Or your feature set per se, like, like it, not inherently. So then that's where all these other things come into play. And it's like, everybody uses WordPress and they get, they hear the word open source and they kind of get, sounds like a little bit misled to the fact that like, Oh, you can, like, you can just basically just scream what you want to happen and then it can happen.

I, I contradict that slightly though with the fact that I don't think that would be like a bad thing, but it doesn't seem like that's inherently the way that it operates. so again, this is just kind of me trying to think of like, okay, how is it, how does it actually work? And then is there a way to make it better or something like that?

But, I think the bottom line is again, the open source side of things, I think that word and that terminology and the way that it's thrown around sometimes does, I don't, I think it's just a slight misunderstanding. Perhaps from what I've seen here, because, I dunno, that's, I'm still navigating myself, like I said, but that's kind of where I'm at with it.

And I feel like I want this ownership and, I feel like I want this ownership and WordPress is in an interesting spot because unlike, let's say, Ruby on Rails, which is what, DHH is mostly referring to, like, he built, I don't even know what the technical term is, he built that coding framework, that code base to make his own products, and the byproduct was, oh, this is now open source, you too can go build your own products like I'm doing over here with Basecamp, right?

So So, he built like this, what I'll call like the engine of, of Basecamp back in the day to help him build that product and, oh, by the way, I'm open sourcing this so you can do that too. It, it, WordPress, on the other hand, was created open source and then Automatic was built to help sell the dream of WordPress and they're the same exact products. So it's, it's, it's very hard to, to understand. Get yourself away, like pull yourself away from that.

and say, oh, this is, this is mine because I can do it on any website. I can, I can build it, I can make it, it's all mine. But really, it's not. the GPL and Open Source affords you to go ahead and do other things, but like the overall direction of where this is going is not ours.

And I think it's high time that we understand that, be okay with it, because I've said this a million times, I don't want to get into it now, but I think Automatic needs to survive in order to be the best steward of Open Source WordPress.

As like super disrespectful, but it's like if you're going to, to, to criticize us, try to understand as much as possible of, of where all of the chips lie in this, in this game, of automatic and open source. let me pull up Automattic's website and then we can share this. And this is great information for anybody who's never really, you know, taken a look at this stuff. Don't forget, been living and breathing this stuff for a while now. So, I can understand how it can be helpful.

It can get overwhelming. So let's

just take a look at this page. This is Automattic's homepage. Here are all the products that they are, that they have listed here, which, I don't even, yeah, so WordPress. com, Beeper, Tumblr, Day One, WooCommerce, Jetpack. WordPress VIP, which is enterprise level hosting if you've never, run across that before. Pocketcast, which is a podcast, app, podcast listening app. Akismet, which is the spam protection, product that they launched, many, many years ago.

Longreads, Newspack, Gravatar, and then they also contribute WordPress. org. And then all these other, open source initiatives, WordPress for Android, WordCamp, WPJobManager, Five for the Future, right? So that's just automatic, like the core products. And then automatic is also investing and purchasing other companies. they had invested in Castos, which is a company that I worked at before. InstaWP, they've, done seed round investments in.

Other WordPress, hosting companies, they've done investments in. This is like that traditional VC world, that maybe folks aren't just acquainted to, but it's not just, hey, we're giving, they're giving money to Automatic to just do WordPress. It's all the things. at, at Automatic where that money goes, right? 2, 000 ish people work at that company. If we just take a look at CrunchBase, which is some of this data now is locked behind a, payment, payment wall.

But recently in the WP Product Talk, interview with Mullenweg, they were talking about the size of the company. He's just over 2, 000 ish people now, at Automatic. And they're Recent funding round came from, Where they hide it now? Let's see. So the last one, it says 2021. Automatic was funded by 30 investors of Iron Global, BlackRock being the most recent investors. BlackRock should raise some eyebrows, of course, for some people. Automatic has made 19 investments.

The most recent was last year, Liquid AI. It's a, it, in their recent acquisition of Beeper, 125 million, that's a, messaging app. and they're, looks like they're getting more into the, into the messaging game. This is, the point I'm trying to make here is 2, 000 people, if you've ever worked in an organization with 100 people, let alone 2, 000 people, it is extremely difficult to move things forward.

I'm not saying that this is The right thing, I'm just saying like this is what happens when you have an organization that grows this large, who's also trying to build a profitable company. If you look at somebody like GoDaddy publicly traded company, I think automatic roughly valued at 7 billion from blog posts and stuff that you see. but you look at somebody like a GoDaddy and you start to see their profitability, their market cap, their amount of employees.

And you're like, well, Boy, they're also profiting, profiting off the back of WordPress. Why don't they do more? And they do. They do a lot, in the community. But, this is where that frustration grows at the sort of enterprise and big level. Whereas, Automatic isn't bad just because it's getting a lot of money. There's a lot of other companies with a lot more money. Also profiting off of WordPress, who should also fall under scrutiny and contribute back to WordPress as well.

So, I just have a fundamental issue when it's like, they've got all this money, why aren't they making WordPress better? Because look at all the stuff that they're doing, and it's not 2, 000 people just making WordPress better, right? Of those 2, 000 people, I don't know how many people are in administrative, right? 200 people, 10 percent of the company are in HR, comms, like all this other stuff, legal.

you know, then you have a executive team and then you have support staff and then you have the product managers and marketers and SEO people, like, it's a big company. and it's, they're not all just pouring their resources into, into WordPress. does that make sense to you, Mark?

And then the next question I would have is, Okay, who, who is, I want to know exactly as, as, as good of data as we have, which I know we do have some, I'm sure we could like find some or whatever on the actual WordPress project stuff. But like I've seen those graphs of like, Okay, automatic is like the biggest chunk of supporters, like people writing code, and then like GoDaddy is in there, or you know, 10Up is in there, people contributing to actual WordPress.

So one of my questions is, I know half the answer to it, but one of my questions is okay, who is actually contributing to WordPress? So for instance, when anybody goes on the internet and says, Hey, this sucks about WordPress, like the, this feature, this UI, UX, whatever, like I don't like this. Who is that specifically? Specifically who made that decision? to make that, to put that in there, or to change something

or whatever. So like, how does that actually work? Because I feel like that's a big problem where, you know, in, in private companies you don't, or, you know, public, but like, you know, actual corporations. Like, you don't really have that full clarity, but maybe you'll have like some sort of like a leadership type chart and things like that, and you'll be able to kind of like decipher some things or whatever.

But like, ultimately you're just yelling at Apple, for instance, Oh, they changed something. Oh, we hate Apple. So with WordPress, I feel like it ends up just being kind of the same way, even though it doesn't operate the exact same way, I want to say, like, cause there's just seemingly people getting paid from automatic, there's people getting paid at 10 up, there's people getting paid at GoDaddy to sponsor a certain amount of hours to this project. Right. Right. And then.

I don't know the, I don't know the answer here, but there's also free labor, right? That is, that is contributing to it. So that screws with people as well, like just mentally, which totally makes sense. It's like, who, who is like contributing for free? Like, how does that work? and then you have conversations like we'll probably get into like, well, why would I contribute? Regardless of code, why would I contribute in GitHub or Slack or wherever for free?

Because people are making money from me doing this. And then the rebuttal to that is like, well, you contributing is how the open source project continues to flow forward. So it's kind of like you are helping yourself, even though you're not getting paid. There's a lot of, I just expressed a lot of different things there. But I'm telling you, like, this is from like, we'll call it like more boots on the ground type thing. I'm in the comments. I'm in, you know, making content.

I'm watching other people's streams. I'm on Twitter. These are the types of questions that people just don't know the answers to. And it's not really their fault because it's so goddamn nuanced. that it's, it's so difficult. Like I've spent the last 12 months of my life trying to figure this out. And I consider myself to be kind of of this mindset where I can dive in and deal with this and try to figure it out and try to piece it out.

And one of my goals is to hopefully come out on the other side and be like, Hey, this is really nuanced, but here's like a crash course because I haven't seen anything like that. I wish I wish something like that would exist. so I don't

is quite powerful and also very understated. I think it came up in Paul's live stream today where somebody said, well, what would happen if it was five? I don't think you wouldn't get this kind of amplification for WordPress and it certainly would not have grown this large for obvious reasons if it wasn't, open source and you won't be able to do that with another platform. Like you simply can't

do it with a commercial Wix Squarespace, platform. Webflow, because those are all hosted things and there's no portability there, it's just off the table. So you have to be able to say, I value that ability for me to just take this, start a business, replicate it with as many sites as I want without being taxed. Right?

And I don't know if that is like something that can be stopped. So, you know, we don't need to go down a rabbit hole here. All I'm saying is like, when you make the claim of this is open source and you can't, you're like, you're not going to have the same impact with something that's not open source. I'm not, I'm not saying that I want that to happen.

I'm just saying that like people are so, so quick to just give up their shit nowadays that like they don't even think like these, like, and again, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to judge these people. I'm making observations. They watch a Wix ad and they're like, this is fantastic. Super easy. I'm going to, I'm just going to jump on there and use it. Like they don't even think twice about. Like, where is this data? What's going to happen if this, if these people jack up my rights?

What's going to happen if like I say something and they kick me off here? Like, they don't think about any of that until it happens. So and, and if those things continue to happen, maybe people will care more. But I'm saying like, I mean, you know, the phones that we have and the different things like, I mean, the phones is a great example because we have Apple and we have Google basically.

And then we have like, you know, these other types of phones where it's like, Oh, you don't have, you know, not connected to the internet or whatever. So I'm not trying to get off topic here, but I'm saying that I, I wouldn't just like, you Make it seem like this is always going to be the case, because there's It doesn't seem like it's even trending in that direction. It seems like it's trending away from that.

How about you protect my data? You're like, why are you yelling at me and telling me not to answer phone calls from Spain? You know, the market is spam. You're the one that got breached. So there's data like your customer data, your customer identifying, information. And in WordPress, I think people kind of throw that around. It's certainly about the content, in your WordPress site. And for me, it's much more of that, like, technical reason, is I can be portable with it.

I can, I can take that content from one web host to another web host, or I can extract it, or archive it how and when I want, and I can manipulate that, right? So, yes, WordPress allows you to do that. And yes, WordPress is, is open source. you know, so, I, I think that the argument is, for open source for the, for the reason that we're going to jump into, you know, right now. And one of the things, let me just share the screen again.

One of the things that come up, and I'm going to try to zoom in and do this so that it's as easily Readable as possible. I'm trying to do it with two hands here. Hold on one second. So zoom in. So this is the, the Gutenberg GitHub, repo WordPress doesn't operate, and, either Zach or or Brian, if you're in there. none of the, the comments, for WordPress core are in GitHub. This is, that is all in, track and WordPress legacy, like SVN.

It's That's a whole other stream that we can go into, but if we look at just Gutenberg, because they are using GitHub for all of the communication here, this is the value of, this is the other value of open source, right, is that we can actually see it and see this stuff being developed, right? Sure, are things happening behind the scenes? That are not being, you know, documented and they're in slack. The conversations are happening in slack. Absolutely. Do I think it's nefarious?

No, it's just the way of life, right? It's like you have conversations

with, if you're, if you're at a job and you have a meeting with somebody, you're talking to them in zoom or in person, that stuff isn't documented. Things happen, right? So. So, what this open source project allows us is to see the stuff happen and we can analyze it and also comment on it and, and see it in real time. So when people say, why did they do that? We can see it right here, in something like, like GitHub, especially for the Gutenberg project.

So that's what this open source project affords us. It affords us that, that visibility. This is also a, a hat tip to version control. Mark, you and I talk about this a lot. This is all done in GitHub, a version control type of, tool so that we can go back and see everything that's happened, over the course of all of their releases, tie it back. To a particular thing. So add example for query block and post lists. This is the issue where it all sort of stem from.

You can now click that and say, why did they do that? And you can see it was started, by a particular person. I don't know exactly what this is. Add example for query block and post lists. But as an example, you can see what the, the thing was, why. Exists should exist, how it's going to get done examples, so on and so forth. And you can track the whole thing and see it all come together. on GitHub, if we go, can I jump in here? Yeah, go for it.

There's a general sentiment that not backed by data, but there's a general sentiment that like GitHub and the Slack, this, that whole situation, which again, Difficult to manage something of this size, but GitHub and Slack and like in track, I don't know what track is, but like, I haven't gotten there yet, but like all these different things to like manage this open source project, people have said, and we've actually seen, we have seen.

examples of this on, on Twitter and stuff like that or X or whatever, like to say like, Oh, you know, the code base is getting kind of like, it's hard to jump in. It's hard to like, understand different things like that. It's hard to get involved in all that sort of stuff. Because I mean, there's probably a reasonable amount of people that have never used GitHub or don't use it like frequently enough to understand kind of what's going on there. I'm not saying it shouldn't be hard or whatever.

But like, there's a general sentiment there. I feel like it is hard to get involved, or people don't know where to start. I have personally educated people after I learned from guys like you, how to go where to go things like that. So I think we're moving in the right direction there, but it is kind of difficult there. I don't have an answer for that. But I want to reference that article that you made and you had me read with from DHH where he mentions in there It's not a democracy.

It's not like a community It's more of like there's a level of elitism and it's not in a bad way the elitism But it's like a level of elitism I I relate that in this case to like you have to understand how to use these tools You have to understand the language that's going on You have to understand the the way to get involved and actually It's a way for you to actually impact and do something if you want.

Which is interesting to me because you juxtapose that with the idea of democratizing publishing. Which the tool itself actually does. Correct. But utilize, or moving it forward is not, those things are disjointed from one another. Which again, I'm not saying is a bad thing, but it is the reality of the situation.

So, It's just kind of a weird spot where, like, if, if you and I weren't having this conversation for the last 12 months, like, there's no way anybody would understand that whole, that whole juxtaposition of all that.

No, no, no. The tool itself will help us democratize publishing. but what we're doing is building this in an open source fashion. Gutenberg as an example. this is, the graph, and listen, I'm not a developer, but, I can try to understand the highway of how we're all connected here. This is the stats from the repo from 2016 to 2024, when Gutenberg project first started. Again, it's a standalone project, and plugin, that exists, outside of WordPress. And, for, for many reasons.

But, one of the reasons is Matt thinks, Matt Mullenweg thinks that this project will be bigger and, and more adopted potentially than, than WordPress itself. Like Wix. Could some, one day be like, oh yeah, that Gutenberg thing is good, let's bring it and adopt it into Wix. and then therefore they would be giving back to the Gutenberg project, et cetera, et cetera. and it's just, just for those that might not know, Gutenberg stands separate, in its own separate plug in.

So if you ever want The more advanced features that are being developed like this is being developed and enhanced outside of WordPress core, right? So there's all the features that are happening in Gutenberg and then there's all the features happening in WordPress and when a WordPress point release comes together They take whatever the last five or six releases from Gutenberg itself and bring it into the into the core release, right?

That's a 50, 000 foot view of this and But back to the main point here is when you say who is making these decisions. you can go in and look at all the top contributors. in this, in this screen here on, on GitHub. And you can see everybody. And I'm not gonna punch into everyone here. but if we don't, if we discount, this chap here who hasn't contributed since roughly 2020, middle of 2020.

the top ten contributors, not counting this person, out of the top ten contributors, eight of them are from Automatic. two of them, one is, from GoDaddy. let's see if I can see him. If you just hover over folks names, depends if they filled out their profile, but you can see, if they're getting paid from Automatic, or if they work for Automatic, it's not like it says, we get paid by Automatic. I think this is the person right here, yeah.

So this, this is actually the, the, the chap that helped Brian put our, our, our little feature together, at the end. He gets sponsored by Loose Inc., L O O S Inc. so he's not Automatic, and there's one other person here on the list from, from GoDaddy. The rest here are, are Automatic, but they're not Automatic. That's just the top 10, and then you can go back and see, like, okay, who, who are all these other folks getting, you know, contributing to, Gutenberg, right?

So if we go and we look at this person, it may or may not say it. Yep, so at Automatic, he works at Automatic. And that's the other thing that this open source world affords us, is we can kind of see who's putting this all together. and who's making the decisions here, and at least easily here with, with the Gutenberg thing. So when folks are like, Oh yeah, I wish it had this feature. I wish it had that feature.

And you, and then you look at automatic, this is the going back to the bigger issue is you look at our magnet, why are they making these decisions? They have all this money. Because this is just one sliver of a project that Automatic is paying people to contribute to which basically helps us. Whether you like Gutenberg or not, and you don't think it's moving fast enough, all that work is contributing back to us and our customers and our friends and our clients who use this stuff.

Hopefully getting better and iterating better year after year. they're the one footing the most amount of payroll out of those 2, 000 people and millions and millions of dollars that they have. They're the ones contributing the most to WordPress. What does that lead to? That leads to that sort of elitism and, control, and direction. you know, that, You can or cannot agree with, totally up to you on whether or not, you know, you, you want to.

but this is where, when you're saying who's doing it, you can kind of come and see it right here. Back to the issue I had on the stream, is, You know, when, I'm frustrated too, and actually I thought about doing it. I'm not going to do it today, on today's live stream, but this is a frustration that Paul brought up, that I've brought up, and many other people have brought up before, is like, why is, why are all these other settings behind the three dots, right?

The three dots, the infamous three dots. Why can't I just expose that forever? How would you do it? You would come here to, let's say, Gutenberg, because I would believe that would be, that would fall under a Gutenberg issue. So I would believe that would fall under a Gutenberg issue. And you would open a ticket just like I open a ticket about putting the command in the command palette for getting to template parts.

You, too, could come in here and say, I want that three dots to be exposed every time I go into a WordPress site. I don't want to have to do it every single time. I agree. How do you make that presentation? How do you propose that? You come here, you make the issue, and you start writing the proposal. But you can't just be like, Ah, I just want this thing. You know, yell it into the void, and then hope it gets done. Just not gonna happen.

So, if you really want it, come here, open an issue, And then, then you'll see how software is really made because it, there's just one set of vocal people like you, me, and others who get this stuff, but WordPress is being used by so many other people that it's not just for us. And that, I think that's what that folks who are so vocal about this need to realize.

You know, we can't go into the get hubs of, you know, other big stuff, you know, big, players or wixes or whatever, you know, and do that sort of thing. So it is definitely something I should do a lot more, and I think that I just may, if I actually see something that I disagree with. Like, I think that three dot thing is a great example. I mean, just the question that I would have in response to that, though, is How are these decisions getting made initially though?

Like, like I think, okay, here's the perspective that I get from some people. How did it get to this point where like so many people, even like supporters, Think that there's so many weird things about the platform. And again, I'm not going to say that I sit here and use Gutenberg every day. I don't.

Okay. But I'm saying that like you, you get that from people that are actually in there often and they're like, and then, and then people that are exploring it often from a deeper base, not just the UI, but like the code and like the way it interacts with other third party tools and things like that, and it's like, how did it get to that level? Is it, is it, is it literally just. If you go in there and just have a suggestion, like what's the actual process for making that happen?

You know, like, how, who, who's the end decider of like, if, if the, if the command palette should have the template part thing show up in it, that seems like a pretty straightforward one. But like, that would be my next, my next line of thinking is, because I think that is definitely something that some, that people have said as well. It's like, well, they're doing that cost benefit analysis in their head. They're like, okay, well, I can make content. I could talk about some stuff.

I could talk about all these different things. Okay. That I know that that is working to some extent. I know that that's resonating with people. I know that people are, you know, appreciating that content. It's thought provoking. Okay. So then somebody comes to me and they say, Hey, you know, you should really go into the GitHub and, and write all this stuff up and do all these different things to, to make sure that these actually get pushed in. Fair, fair thing. Fair point.

But then they're like, okay, well, I'm not getting paid by, you know, I'm not getting paid to, sponsored to, to produce any of this content or contribute or anything like that. We already had that discussion. It's a, it's a fair point, but there's definitely counters to that. But then the question becomes, if they like, are there people like putting stuff in, like putting a bunch of, is there somebody is super straightforward question.

Is there somebody in like deep in the contribute, contributor aspect of Gutenberg that has put in like 100 issues and none of them have ever gotten taken? Yeah. So like, there, see what I'm saying? Like, that's, that's like, why am I even going to do that? I'm not, I'm playing devil's advocate here. Why would I even like put anything in there if it's not going to even get like seen?

Cause then you have I could absolutely see a case where like you have people put stuff in there and their, their reputation has already preceded them. And then they're not going to get the stuff. This stuff isn't going to get taken up anyway. That's not a reason to not do it because I think three steps ahead, if you actually did that and put that in there and then again, didn't get taken up. Now you make a video and you say, guys, I told them to do this, and they didn't do it.

Well, man, if you're in this living and breathing it and making a living off of creating content for WordPress and you don't have the time, I don't think many people in the audience are gonna have the time or the care, or the understanding to really, You know, follow this through, right? They said something, Oh, 500 people watching this, maybe 50 people go and do something. I doubt it.

If you're not going to do it and you're representing a fact that you won't do it, then I don't think anyone in your audience is going to do it. But 100 percent this is when I had the same thing with the conversation with Kevin. You have to be able to meet in the middle. And be like, okay, I'll spend time on your side, and you spend time on my side. Because the same thing's happening, on the automatic side, and the contributor side.

They're not, they're saying, I'm not gonna watch, there's so many videos, how am I gonna watch an hour long video of these people? Like, they're just gonna say the same thing. sorry, I left that comment on. so there needs to be some participation and you and I, are seeing that and other folks who are on this, on the live stream right now are seeing this from Automattic with like Anne McCarthy trying to reach out to, to YouTube creators and sort of extending that olive branch from Automattic.

I'm seeing it too from like the media core side, trying to get more sort of, organized content. Content and information out to content creators. So it's slowly happening I think people are just really upset about the velocity and just simply can't understand why it takes so long Because of the because of the size of this apparatus that we have in front of us It just it's just going to take time and and I don't know any other way the other way around it. How do these things get decided on?

Hey, even I'm not 100 percent sure, and I love anybody in the audience, like Courtney, I saw you, jump in. I don't even know how all the decisions are made, and I think that that's largely what everyone has, an issue with. But you have the core vision of the phases that Mullenweg, spelled out. Many years ago, we're on the third phase, right? I think fourth phase, third phase, of the, of the Gutenberg project. And, He

sets the general tone and direction. It's him, right? That's why he is still a lead contributor here in WordPress, even though I don't even know if he's writing lines of code being contributed to it. He's just, the guy who's, who's, who's leading that direction. And again, I don't have any problem with it as long as somebody's leading it, right? Somebody needs to lead it and

have a vision. then there are, oh, I forgot, my screen's not up. One second. And then there are, Things like this that happen. I don't know 100 percent how people, I just randomly search on make WordPress for the word proposal because these are, these are how things can happen. starting at the, say, wordpress. org and make level. People will do proposals to have things happen on either the wordpress. org site and for, you know, the team around it.

So that's just, One other column of all the, how this happens. people write out a proposal, they put the idea out and people. Talk about it, and then eventually something happens. And whether that whole conversation happens here in these comments, in this little comment section, and eventually it leads into something changing, or there's a Slack group that's happening, and people are chatting

there, and then it makes its way into the project. Yes, this is where, like, that disjointedness happens, where there's so many different pockets of communication. But at least there's pockets of communication happening, and it's all out mostly in the open. So there's just many areas that impact WordPress and these conversations are happening all over the place. Do you wanna put that link in the chat? Cause like, Like, this is an example. This is just an example.

I just searched for the word proposal. I got

Like, let me, let me pose some, some scenarios here, because this is how I, this is how I learn to understand things. So, we have whoever puts a proposal in here, and then underneath this, we could have 55 people that say, this is the worst idea I've ever heard. And then, then though, because this isn't like, democratic driven by the people, could we have whoever the, whoever the, Like what happens next?

Like, what if the, is there somebody that like kind of monitors these and says, nope, actually, I disagree with you 55 people. This is a fantastic idea. We're doing it. Is, can it work like that? Or am I, I'm just guessing, I don't know. Because I'm really confused on how this part works. Do we, we don't have a process for that?

also depends on is it something that's impacting, WordPress. org, like the site, which is this particular post WordPress hosting directory, but the software is, is Can and could happen without, you know, this official, proposal. Yeah. Daniel says, this is the same discussion we keep having going all the way back to WordPress and the foundation, how decisions are being made. A hundred percent. Courtney said, I'm correct. I trust Courtney. Mark says, yeah, Mark, you're correct.

tonic loads of, loads of discussion. zero real leadership. You know, the only thing I have an issue is when you say like, are, Are the, the leadership, is it, is it about you don't like the leadership or is it things aren't happening fast enough? Because once again, I just, I've been in the software world for a long time and either, you know, I work at Gravity Forms, that's my, that's my day job. There are things that just have to get done, and then there are nice to have features.

And then when the things that have to get done are either complex, or we're trying to support WordPress, or, certain WordPress features, and it has to be, backwards compatibility, and you're wrestling with that, like, man, sometimes the software thing takes a while. And I said this in your livestream last week.

Week mark like imagine when we're talking about version control like imagine trying to Do WordPress with 2, 000 ish people and then imagine trying to develop a website with six people And just like how drastic of a difference it is with 2, 000 But also like how it can be the same kind of technical challenge with just six people looks like we lost Mark's video mark is back

It's a very interesting thing, but this is this is the type of stuff here where like The way the way I work and I think about these types of issues is like I'm, not even at the point where I can like Render a full opinion on if this is right if this is wrong because what we just discovered there as an example It's I guarantee you most people don't even know that Okay I guarantee you most people don't even know that that's how it works where like you could put up a proposal for an instance and

then we're still not even sure if You Like how that gets vetted if there is a process sounds like there kind of isn't one you can render your you can render your Opinion on it, but then it it we don't know how that ends up circling through compare and contrast that with maybe something like at another Type of company another corporation where like you could just put in feature requests and maybe it gets cared about maybe it doesn't but ultimately though the thing there is like If I went to

Apple, and somehow Apple is a bad example, but if I went to a company like that, put in a feature request, and 10, 000 people upvoted it, I think they're going to be like, well, a reasonable percentage of our user base thinks this is a good idea, let's look at it a little bit, and then they might implement it just because most of the user base agrees, and they want to make more money, they want to make their clients more happy. So, that's the way that I would kind of think about it.

But again, here's my thing. I'm not even rendering an opinion on whether I think this is right or wrong. I, we just need to understand, hopefully the majority of people need to understand how it's working before we even say if it's, okay, this is good, bad, or like, is there, is there a way to make things, kind of more efficient? Like, do we have a way to optimize things or opinions on how to optimize things? Can't even really do that.

Cause it seems like there's a lot of minutiae here that needs to be, still understood by the masses.

I don't know what the number is, but it's certainly not millions. And it's certainly not a complex product as, or a piece of software as WordPress is. So it's, it's one thing to be like, Oh yeah, I need that thing, throw it in. Just like with the expand three dots on the entire admin panel, how would you get that done? How would you do that? And let's say you can propose it to Gutenberg. All right. What, what is enough?

So if we use your example before Mark about like, Oh, we tell people to go and create an issue. And then if it doesn't get done for five years, like there was an issue recently, somebody brought up again has been in there for like 13 years. Right. but if somebody puts an issue in and it doesn't get touched, like, well, how much effort did you put in to creating that issue? Right. Did you clearly articulate it? Is it a big enough issue for somebody to pick up on it? is it. easily solvable, right?

So when I put my issue in for putting in a command into the command palette, I was lucky enough to have Brian Cordes be like, I think I can do that and write that code, and I will go and do it. So immediately, it was like a one two combo of like, here's my idea, here's why I think I need it. So I articulated it halfway decent. It's a very simple thing, so it's not that hard. And then Brian wrote it.

And then got feedback from other developers who, who contribute to, to Gutenberg and moved it up the, moved it up the chain. So it's one thing to be like, go and create an issue and just be like, this thing needs help. And then you just leave. But it's another thing to come in and say, okay, we need those three dots expanded. I think the best place for that is in the site editor preferences. Because this is what I was thinking when I was listening to it.

And it would be a toggle inside the site preferences. preferences window, and I would even make a little screenshot of like, here's where it can go. Here's a little toggle UI, and you could turn this on and off. But, but that just starts the discussion, right? For a thing like that, because it's one thing to just say it. It's another thing to implement it. And that's the difference between like, I don't know, a user base of Crocoblox versus WordPress. Crocoblox may like, yeah, throw it in.

Easy, right? We're only supporting 10, 000, you know, I don't mean this in a bad way, but we're only supporting 10, 000 paying customers or whatever the number is. Versus millions of people have to use this and then it has to be supported. Right? So there's a big difference. I, I, I, I, I hope people realize like, you can show up and create that issue, but then what's a good issue versus a bad issue. Does that make sense?

Please explain, elaborate, and if you can, demonstrate it with a, with a video and a, and an illustration. where was I going? I was going with, do do do do, we're looking at Gutenberg, oh, WordPress core contributors, right? So there's core contributors to WordPress, right? So this is across the, the, the lifespan of WordPress. And these are folks who actually had core contributor access to WordPress, like those that can actually push the code to WordPress core.

And you can come in and you can see all of them, throughout the, history of WordPress. let me go back so I can see that number. The number is 72 total contributors. Core contributors, right? Folks who can actually push code to WordPress Core, which impacts the entire world. That's why that number isn't as big as something like, Gutenberg, which has, 1, 300 ish people over time, 1, 100

contributors over time, because, This is a project on Git, on Gutenberg, on GitHub that anybody can come and, and contribute to, right? So Is that, wait, so there's 72 active core contributors? No, you'd have to go, no, that's overall time.

All the, the checks and, you know, we're checking this and we're doing that and, okay, we're gonna, everybody, everybody's checking and everybody's making sure there's no last, errors when they're committing the, the code, you know, to WordPress. they get to see all that stuff, right?

Or you get to see all that stuff as like a, as like a, you know, somebody in the audience seeing this thing launch and everybody's checking in and you really get to see, wow, there's a, there's a lot of people that, that, that, that partake in this. but you know, you can even see it like, again, back to the value of, of, of open source and version control. I know I'm bouncing around here a lot.

but when you go and look at something like, this is, this is where, like, I'm not a developer, so this is why it's probably painful for developers in the audience, but if you look at something like, add padding around selected values, author filter, you know, you can come and see from a developer standpoint, performance tests, you can, you can see how all of this stuff affects the code, you know, for lack of a better word, like, was there an issue when the code was, merged into a particular, you

know, version of WordPress. So like all of that stuff is being tracked in, in GitHub. So you can kind of see where things are failing and. And what, where the code is going, if that makes sense. And again, I'm not a, I'm not a developer. I just, I just trust the process here. And I trust something like, like GitHub and version control, because you, that is all documented. So you can kind of see if there, if there is a problem, you can go back and go, Oh God, this is where this code got merged.

We need to, we need to roll that back. or we need to pull that out kind of thing. Yeah. Okay.

somebody says, here's the description, when you're on the patterns archive page and you want your filters sync or not sync pattern, the back office crashed with this JS error. So this is obviously the code stuff happening. And then this person. I'm not even going to pretend to dissect this code, but this person replied with, with the issue. So

So all that code is getting mirrored to GitHub so you can see it. But all the other discussions and access to contribute, that code happens in in track.

Theme developers are, are still putting their, their themes and having the discussions of approval and what has to be changed, what needs to be updated. Like this is, that whole community is in here. but it all, all the WordPress core stuff also gets mirrored to, to GitHub. So you can see the code, you're just not gonna, you're just not gonna see all those discussions.

It doesn't ever really resonate with me. I find it to be like, quite, like maybe it will end up being true, but I find it to be like, quite like, I don't know, just maybe a sad way to think about things. Like, do we think like, things could improve? Like, it almost seems like it's a sentiment that like, you can't improve anything. Like, it's just, ah, this is just how it is.

Like, oh, we're starting to satisfy those requirements that we get in Bricks, and now we have that stuff in, in WordPress. Is that in, is that improvement? Is it improvement in the publishing side of it? you know, somebody on that call today brought up, like, oh, the first thing I do is I disable all the screen options. Like, all the stuff that shows up on, I'm assuming he's talking about, like, WordPress dashboard and all the other stuff that pops up.

Like, okay, is that, is that How bad is that? Is like, is that all you want to get better? Is like that improve, like that onboarding experience? Like, is it the onboarding experience? Is it more themes? Like, what is it that people want? And I don't think that anyone can clearly answer that. because there's just a, such a vast amount of, of stuff that people want from WordPress. You know, I don't know what improvement looks like. Is it, is it clear, clear, clearer objectives?

Is it more transparency with leadership? Is it those features we talked about? Like, what is it? Like, what is it gonna make it better? Because I think, my answer is, I'm not unhappy. Right? Like, I know I'm gonna come off as, as an automatic apologist. But I also say, like, Step up other companies who are also making millions, if not billions of dollars off of, off of this industry. And, and contribute.

I'm not worried about, I, I, I'm, you know, I'm of the, of the mindset of like, I don't feel like it's that bad because, because we still have the products to be able to, to do things better. If you don't like Gutenberg, you know, that's fine, but you can, you have other options. Elementor, Bricks, go ahead, pick something else.

I don't know how long I can say that for, but question because I'm new here.

Interesting. Okay.

But until we understand that that is how it is, because still I think people are confused apparently that it's not a democracy and it's not like, oh, I want something, I can just say it and it just happens, which is important to know. Like, we have to understand that.

The parameters of what we're dealing with and like what the situation is before we can actually have an honest conversation Or and make any progress whatsoever regardless of what your definition of progress is so, Yeah, and I would say the only thing I would say though is like if that's the case you line those down those up it's like I mean I I as an aside Maybe off topic.

I find it like crazy that like 43 percent of the internet seems to be Completely completely like at the, the mercy of one individual. Like that's kind of like that, that seems a little concerning to me. Not, not like again, nothing against Matt Mullen.

We never spoke to the guy seen his interview seems great, but I'm just saying like all of that one person epicenter of that, like, and we've talked about this before, hopefully there's like kind of more of like, we're understanding now that like time is a reality and like we have built, we're building kind of like, you know, some, you know, contingency to that, like with, you know, troops and different things like that, and like kind of the, you know, the seconds in command and stuff like that,

which I don't know how much or how little that has happened in the past and everything. Cause obviously when you're trying to run something big, you can't just do it alone. So I dunno, that's just, we don't have any answers there. I don't feel like from what I've heard, it's just, we'll see what happens, but that's still something that's kind of like Just, I would just be curious about, like, how, how do we, how do we go about that?

You know, not the next generation of users, the next generation of operators, or,

But I think just like if you're a, I don't know, if you have an idea for a movie, and a movie starts getting made, like as a writer, or as like the creator, like, okay, it's one thing to be like, here's the thing I want done, but then it's, again, it's this massive apparatus, and it changes and evolves over time, and it's out of your control, unless you're just an absolute, like, maniac narcissist and you're just like in everybody's face, which, you know, Hey, it kind of sounds like he's in,

he's still talking to all these people about all these products. Like he does need to maybe take a step back and hyper focus on, on the core of WordPress. but I think like his direction, there's one thing that like he sets the tone and the direction, but how it evolves, he's not like it's him writing the lines of code and the features are being built or whatever. Maybe like, even like Steve jobs to a degree, I guess. you know, he has the ideas.

This is the vision, but eventually, like, reality sets in and it has to be built a certain way and it, and it, and it evolves just because there's so many people, you know, contributing to this thing that maybe his idea doesn't take shape exactly like he's wanted. and he's, you know, he's talked about it. Look at the, Data Liberation Initiative. That's just his idea.

And until maybe he makes, automaticians actually, you know, write these export import migration tools, he's just like, here's this idea for data liberation. Here's what we should do. And he just throws it out there. And now it's up to the community and anyone else who wants to contribute to that, to actually make it reality. So what did he do? He sort of like, put the carrot on the end of the stick a little bit closer. And he was just like, Oh, if you want to make this plugin.

I'll make sure, make a plugin to do something like this. I'll make sure it gets approved in 24 to 48 hours or whatever, which is, you know, contrary to like, if you just have a plugin that you want to contribute to wordpress. org, it might take a month, two months, three months. I don't even know what the wait time is anymore for plugins. So his thing was like, I can help you get this done faster if you're contributing to this data liberation project as an example.

Then nobody did anything with it, and then he had to dangle the carrot, and it's like, Does he, as, using that one as the, the one in question. Does, is he gonna have like a, a direction for that, that people are gonna have to follow as well? and he's just getting it started and then he's gonna be like, okay, actually this is kind of where I want you to go, something like that, or is he much more hands off than that?

Because I've literally heard like, again, without actually talking to him and hearing that specific stuff, I've heard kind of both ways. I've heard he's very on, you know, like you said, on all the different companies, kind of like in there, like CEOs of different companies and stuff like that. Very like hands on with a lot of that stuff. And, but also at the same time, like, how could you possibly be hands on with all this stuff? I mean, it's just too vast. So I don't know.

I would love, I would, I'm just curious genuinely about that as an example, but

org slash data dash liberation, you will see we have the start of what, hopefully will be something that creates a ton more freedom on the web and a ton more portability between

platforms, including in and out of WordPress. WordPress could be a, maybe a middle ground between something else. however, this has had very, very little progress. So if you go to that page, click on some of the links, you'll see mostly empty GitHub So I just wanted to point this out, as an amazing place if you're interested in contributing to WordPress, to adopt something and have total ownership of it. So if you wanted to, sort of, each of these projects is fairly self contained.

So if, you wanted a chance to actually lead something within the WordPress project, you could be in charge of the, say, Wix to WordPress converter or something like that. this, I think, is also going to be really important for us as, The more and more marketing dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in marketing for proprietary platforms. Proprietary platforms have gotten tons of investment in the past few years.

Things like Shopify, Squarespace, etc. And they are coming as sort of the macroeconomic conditions have changed. They've started to really target WordPress agencies, WordPress users, WordPress sites quite a bit. And so they're coming and trying to snipe away our community. so. So, we have to keep an eye out for that. And the problem as well is when people go that way, it's almost impossible to go back the other way.

It's like, I don't know if you had this advertisement here, but the Roach Motel, the Roaches check in, they don't check out. That's a lot of these proprietary CMSs. They'll let you check in your data, but you can never check it out.

So as part of our mission to democratize the web and increase freedom, I think it's really, really important that we create portability, even when the platforms themselves don't support The other big part of this that I think is also super relevant for this audience is we need to make wordpress to wordpress easier. Who's ever tried to transfer a wordpress site to something else?

So, okay, so whether or not this is just a pet project, like understanding that Matt comes up with maybe a lot of pet projects as, you know, somebody in a more innovative leadership position should be doing, like taking bets and making these different things happen. That is how it started, at least the way that I understand it with data liberation. Here's an idea, here's why we need it to get done, and let's go build it.

And by let's go build it, it's just here it is, you know, WordPress community, go and build this. Now, I think what's important to understand is that if you're a developer, like you have to get your, your, this is, this is the, this is the challenge that a lot of us have with the community is we, we only see ourselves like website builders mostly, like we're the most vocal, we're doing content marketing, we're on Twitter, LinkedIn, Livestreams, doing all this stuff. Right.

But there are, there's a whole group of people, much greater than the business side of WordPress, who are, who are developers, and somebody who wants to make a name for themselves, rightfully so. And you, and you love the idea of open source, and you're a fantastic developer, and how do you, how do you, Shoulder your way up in, in a community, where you want to give back to WordPress, but maybe you just don't have the podium or the stage that's, that is there for you.

What he said is, hey, you could be the person who makes the Wix to WordPress converter or whatever, like you could be the person that leads that. And there's a certain allure there for somebody who wants to build that. Right? Just like if, if WordPress was like, Hey, we're doing an open call for podcasters for wordpress. org, I'd be like, yeah, I'll probably try to throw my hat into that ring.

Like I, I'll try to create a story or an audio series about WordPress that I'll, that I'll contribute to. And I would feel super passionate about that. There is, there are people out there much again, much greater and much more mass than us who would be like, yes, I want to write code.

In open source and give it give back to wordpress and be that person who made that wix to wordpress converter because one you either just love it You love the idea of solving this issue, which I think a lot of developers are attracted to development in general. or you're trying to make it, you're trying to build up your resume and you want to get noticed. You want to get a job. You want to, you want to be hired by Automatic.

You want to be hired by some, you know, web agency or some software company. And if you're the person who made that decision, you know, made their mark on the data liberation project and you are making Wix to WordPress so much better. yeah, you've just increased your chances to be maybe hired by automatic or Wix because Wix does have an open source division, air quotes, where they give back to their own open source projects as well.

So it's also a calling card to the developers who are out there who want to contribute to this stuff. And I think we only see it from one lens. We're like, Oh, that'll never happen. Who's going to do that? Well, somebody will eventually maybe step up, or if not, it doesn't, and it just dies out. and it really depends on, on Mullenweg on whether or not he says, okay, no one wants to, to jump into this open source thing.

I'll take 12 people from automatic and make sure that they're contributing their time to data liberation.

again, I'd be interested to see like how much of his, he is super hands on with versus just having the ideas and letting them kind of like naturally kind of flow. I'm sure there's examples of that in the past and I'll be interested to see how it moves into the, into the future. Just because I feel like everything's getting pretty big. There's a lot going on. So obviously just can't be reasonable amount of delegation. I feel like has to be, has to be continually made.

And I'm sure he's doing a good bit of that. So,

The, the only thing, you know, that I really, you know, have a critical take on is if you're a content creator, And you're somebody with an audience that you, you should want to be meeting in the middle, right? Like, it's not just good enough to, it's still impactful. I just think from my own point of view, like you have to try to meet in the middle and understand. Get the other person to cross aisle. And this goes on both sides, right? Like if you're an automatician, and again, we're

seeing those efforts, with Nick Diego and McCarthy, you know, rich Tabor's going on shows and stuff like that. So there is a little bit of listening coming from that side. but from the content creator side, I feel like it's, It's, it's detrimental that you, that you understand, this apparatus and that you also, are, you know, meeting in the middle and contributing more than just the content.

I think if you're, a thought leader, an influencer, a YouTuber, and you have the audience, that you have to do, you have to go a step further, right, as, as a leader, in my opinion. Just in my opinion. check out the live stream today. It is still a good discussion. It's making more people talk. So, yes, there's a compound effect. There's a domino effect here. check out, the, the live stream discussion that I linked up. Again, it went on, the Web Squadron channel.

It was supposed to be Paul's channel. yeah, check it out. It's a good, good conversation. And folks like Mark, who's on the stream today, does a series called, Bridge Builders. Bridging the Gap. I'm not going to fill in the, what's the, what's the sub headline?

Oh, this is great. This is terrible. It's nice to see it, you know, and, hope and we try to package it in a short stream, but it's normally ends up being like two to three hours, but, You know, just trying to, just trying to get people different perspectives on stuff.

I don't know, like I said, I don't have all the time in the world to look at all these different things, so it's cool to see it, from professionals and, that are using these different workflows and just give us a little bit of a peek behind the curtain on the other things that we're not using every day. So, yeah.

at 12 p. m. Eastern, right here on this channel. Let me throw up the screen one more time. youtube. com at WPMinute, joined by Ryan Logan, talking about his recent findings of Elementor. Can we shut off that pesky AI? Who's in control? We'll find out tomorrow, on the livestream, everybody. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one.