Seems like nobody is actually reading the TFA which is a shame because what the article describes is truly mind boggling:
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
> It seems like the larger problem is he maintains access of keys and systems as opposed to the board and can boot out anyone not loyal to him ( or any other admin who could remove him).
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
It's a true power struggle. As a software engineer I have actually fallen into the trap of thinking that because of the law or a contract something would happen. It is a softer power than I expected.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
> Wu retains control of the Chinese unit via his possession of the company stamp which is necessary in China to authorize important bureaucratic procedures.
If he really did this, he's going to prison, but not for a few years. Defrauding shareholders is one of the worst things you can do, because it attacks the system directly.
... literally all of the SPAC mania was about circumventing regulation and defrauding shareholders in public markets. All of the SPACs are worth a fraction of what they were at listing. I don't see anyone being prosecuted.
Edit: I take that back, [1] this guy got prison time. Do Chamath next.
In absence of a good enforcement mechanism, it absolutely does apply. Is Slack going to strip Mullenweg of admin control in absence of court order, as long as the Slack bills are paid? It would set a terrible precedent for them to do so unilaterally. Whatever the legal process this battle follows, it will be a year or two before it's even possible for a final ruling + court order for the handover of Slack admin control to happen. That's de facto Slack control for at least a year or two.
If employees can be persuaded to move themselves + systems to a board controlled chat instance, that's an angle, but Mullenweg has stronger cards if he's liked by employees.
If the board can show they fired him and he's now accessing their systems without authorization, I don't think it's a civil matter, and criminal courts might move faster.
Agree… the article doesn’t make it clear that he’s really back, just that he has taken control of key company assets like the company Slack and is saying he’s back.
I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.
News sites can be very large - so running on Wordpress.com infrastructure can cause such amount. With cloud storage (provided by WP), additional support etc.
Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
All I know is Wordpress and Beeper, are any of their other products good? Like isn't WooCommerce an absolute also-ran compared to Amazon, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc?
Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).
I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.
But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
You’re from the Matt “WordPress is 45% of websites” school of statistics. WooCommerce is nothing compared to Shopify, barely a blip, inconsequential. WooCommerce is “installed” on millions of websites but it processes perhaps 1% of the volume of Shopify.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.
edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.
edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
The link that you provided largely confirms what parent said: it puts WooCommerce ahead of Shopify in terms of store count, with a number (4.34M live stores) which is consistent to the one mentioned by parent ("over four million stores").
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
I think any interpretation of this that would measure "a third of... shopping" by number of individual sites rather than dollar volume is disingenuous at best.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
I cannot read the article, thanks for summarizing.
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Yeah, not a chance I disable an adblocker for TechCrunch slop reporting
I hope someone eventually does a deep-dive on the organizational structure of WordPress and how much of a mess it is.
As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.
These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
It does sound as if he has lost his grip on reality.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:
> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
We need to go back to a time when a CEO 'trolling' or acting like this would be career suicide. It seems like half of the biggest tech companies are run by people with the emotional and social intelligence of 3 years olds.
From an outsiders perspective, Matt's claims of comment sections like this one being heavily astroturfed do sound somewhat credible.
Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.
Are there real people with opinions about this?
I'd like to hear them.
This seems pretty easily explainable by Matt’s actions appearing to be hypocritical and antithetical to the views of people likely to comment on Internet message boards. People value stability from infrastructure providers and Matt’s antics with wordpress.org during the WPEngine dispute salted the earth for his chances of getting support in a board dispute. Even Matt’s own previous posting here did him no favours.
Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.
The reality is that the board has the votes to remove Matt as CEO and Matt has enough shares that if the board is decided by simple 1 vote per share then he can replace them but without knowing the agreements with its investors and shareholders we don’t know if the boards mechanisms actually allow him to replace all the members. Since the company is privately traded, these aren’t published anywhere, so it’s unknowable for those of us in the peanut gallery (unless it eventually goes to court, which is likely unless those agreements are decisive).
If you’re inclined to see everything as a diversion and all criticism as inorganic, then I think it’s better to admit you just want someone to confirm your views and you’re not really looking to be convinced, as much as you phrased your question that way
I mean, this is not his first rodeo at that and our not first watch of these power struggles.
He's clinging to what he has, and for any outsider this (or the path leading to this) doesn't look like healthy behavior.
What we live through life can trigger extremely strange behaviors we didn't see before from people, so I don't think all of this can be attributed to astroturfing.
Every comment section on the internet is a target for astroturfing, yet attribute everything to it, is not right.
Uh you've just now said the same in slightly different words, then closed with "you're wrong" spoken through a corporate filter.
Which.. kinda doesn't really convince me.
But anyway
> He's clinging to what he has, and [..] this [..] doesn't look like healthy behavior.
That's not something I would agree with. Can you explain why you believe that protecting "your baby" and clinging to it is seen by you as "not healthy"?
From my understanding of the world, that is very healthy.
I mean, both can be true at the same time. For a slightly controversial example, look at Kanye. If you knew him before he got off his rocker (especially the 2000s), he was a very different person than who he has become today.
So he was on a leave of absense, and now is no longer on such a leave? This is only an attempted coup if you think the leave of absense was a pretense, but they give no evidence of that in the article. I saw it suggested that he usually has wild ideas after returning from burning man, and the board wanted to insulate the company from the effects of that. That he's now back is evidence for a theory along those lines, and contradicts a theory that the board was trying to get rid of him. But I have no insight beyond that.
In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
you are less likely to have the same vulnerabilities as everyone else though, so unless somebody is targeting you, those vulnerabilities might not matter all that much
I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price.
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
How do you actually do that? Is it all running locally? Cloud agents? Would love to hear about this. I see these deep agent loops mostly just burning tokens, but when I guide the AI I get very good results, so I’m not sure where the disconnect lies.
I use Zed (https://zed.dev) as my agent harness and either the $20 ChatGPT sub + Sol for personal/independent projects or an enterprise Claude account for sponsored/paid work. From the stats for my current work I use about $400/mo in tokens and a lot of that is non-coding work like pruning JIRA, managing business documentation, making dashboards - so my true coding agent cost is significantly less.
It's pretty simple, you could probably set up something like that by:
Configure some kind of CLI tool to talk to your ticketing system and git repo so you can programmatically interact with them. If you don't have a ticketing system, instruct the agent to use local text or markdown files to track issues and progress.
Ideally, make your code runnable in a way the agent can use. For my webapps I build a test harness so that I can run all the endpoints and workflows via reproducible tests against an embedded database. This is easier than it sounds, e.g. there are libraries out there to embed PostgreSQL or SQLite into source code, you can set up a test harness so you can run unit tests, integration tests and workflow tests that use your real frontend, server and database.
Paste this comment thread into the agent prompt and tell it to run a similar loop on your code base: a session that searches for vulns and writes up a report, some way for a human to do a review pass on the report, a session that indexes the reviewed findings into tickets, and sessions that fix the fixable issues and submit patches to your repo. The next search session should first read all the open issues so it doesn't duplicate work of earlier sessions.
LESS IS MORE - avoid fancy agent tooling and skills, don't cargo cult from others, build your own tools as you find your own needs. If something can be automated, use the agent to write tools and tests for it, don't just keep prodding the agent to do it.
I used to ask this question back ~2015 - I was seeing companies with massive, clunky CMS installs just so their non-technical/less-technical staff could update their websites without filing tickets to IT/dev. It seemed to be more about those departments wanting autonomy and not having to wait weeks or months for internal IT/dev to make site updates. The consensus within one dev group was that the company would have been better served by hiring someone who knew HTML/CSS/Javascript to embed with the non-technical people and edit a straightforward frontend site for them.
In most web frameworks its not terribly hard to extern content (you probably do this already for translations) and just have a nice little yaml or json thats easily edited.
A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.
This and previous submission about the Automattic board attempt to fire the founder should be used as a lesson that you should never ever give up control of your company to anyone.
Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.
And FB is a lesson to a lot of companies and the public not to allow the same dual class stock structure. Zuckerberg can cash out a lot of his equity and still be the controlling force behind FB even though other people "own" a majority stake of the stocks and equity.
As fou der - yes. The question is if investors accept that gamble.
Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end.
How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
It surprises me to no end that people continue working for this lunatic. When this company was offering an early severance, I am surprised only 159 took the offer [1]. Per cited article, this was 8.4% of the total workforce. Apparently there was even a second severance offer at around the same time of the CEO's legal fight with WP Engine [2].
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management.
I'm not involved at all in WP, but one thing that I've noticed is that when people talk about Matt Mullenweg online, it's apparently alright to call him mentally ill, scum, unhinged, wish him harm, cheer his setbacks, etc etc.
I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too.
Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild.
More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg?
I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.
The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
> and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
The purpose of the Communications Decency Act is to allow providers to moderate community content, and section 230 provides liability from both undermoderating and overmoderating, so that providers don't forgo mederating altogether, for liability reasons.
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.
Modern socializing is all about appreciating non-existent achievements by non-existent people so that everyone knows you’re cool. Or as best stated: “Life will find a way.” - Dr. Real Human Jurassic Park Character, And Not Michael Crichton
Pacific islander would be the closest match for an Australian aboriginal but it would still be a lie. Whoever designed this form knew what they were doing by not having an "other"
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Afaik corps can only have board voting on the basis of share ownership ("one share one vote"), but you can mess around with how many votes each share class gets.
Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
We picked democracy because it is very difficult for a citizen to move to a different country/start their own if they are unhappy. Democracy is a fix for that power imbalance.
By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
>Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
damn, I guess feudal aristocracies or oligarchical nations are also democratic.
If you are describing how a US corporation that is not a worker cooperative is run as a democracy, you either dont know what the term means or you are being in bad faith.
when a literal handful(as in the number of people could be counted between both hands) can decide the fate of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it "largely democratic" is lolworthy.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Well, it matters a whole lot once you choose to bring up "One share, one vote" in response to "One person, one vote", since it shows that it's either wrong or shows a gross misunderstanding of democracy.
IMO it matters roughly as much as it's common. Do you know any country where, say, 10% of public companies have non-voting stock your can buy and voting stock your cannot easily buy? 20%? 50%?
A hypothetical country with multiple classes of citizens that had different rights and voting powers would not inherently be undemocratic. It's not something I'm in favor of but equality != democracy.
But said country would not fulfill "One person, one vote". Why should we weaken such fundamental ideas by allowing them to mean the opposite of their real meaning?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
You are asserting this "one person one vote" definition of democracy. I am questioning it. Where did this constraint on what qualifies as "real" democracy come from?
Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
> You are asserting this "one person one vote" definition of democracy. I am questioning it. Where did this constraint on what qualifies as "real" democracy come from?
I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?
> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.
Yes, kmeisthax was the first to state it in this thread. On that basis you referred to a "gross misunderstanding of democracy" and later used the term "newspeak" leading me to believe that you hold that definition to be correct. You (and kmeisthax, and possibly others) are asserting it to the extent that a rationale for that definition has not been provided.
You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.
Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
> The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy
How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].
There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
Soviet Russia and early communist China both went from mostly-illiterate peasant economies to mostly-literate, partially industrialized, with home-grown heavy industry and weapons technology in the span of like 15-20 years.
Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
Only very partially free, though. The govt still has massive control over the markets, and especially the banks. They still plan a lot of their economy.
>However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic
What the article is actually reporting is that no one at Automatic is giving a straight answer not that the board caved and reversed their decision.
So what happens when the courts get involved?
Because "he won, because he was the only one with the passwords," seems like a software engineer fantasy.
The board wants to make money, that's why they hold shares and positions. If Mullenweg has the power to destroy value, that will be powerful leverage over them. If his employees side with him, if he holds the accounts, they'll have to negotiate carefully.
Of course, you would need a lawyer to determine when this crosses from a civil dispute to a criminal dispute because at some point him using the keys when he's not authorized could be a crime and if they can get the cops involved that certainly changes the dynamic.
> Wu retains control of the Chinese unit via his possession of the company stamp which is necessary in China to authorize important bureaucratic procedures.
Chop is another word for the stamp.
Edit: I take that back, [1] this guy got prison time. Do Chamath next.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-ceo-special-purp...
If employees can be persuaded to move themselves + systems to a board controlled chat instance, that's an angle, but Mullenweg has stronger cards if he's liked by employees.
I don’t think this is over until the board releases a statement. CEOs can pontificate all they want but at the end of the day the board is legally in charge of and the final say at a company. 99.99% of the time it’s just the CEO saying everything and the board quietly giving their blessing out of view. This is the 0.01% where everyone actually wants the board to speak, loudly and clearly.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching
About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.
Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.
It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.
It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.
If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.
It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.
Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time. Some of the more complex extensions to Woocommerce are paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).
I would really like to stop using WP over time, and it feels more urgent each time an Automattic story hits the headlines.
But I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.
WooCommerce isn’t bad, acquiring it was a good call for Automattic, but to put it in the same league as Shopify is pure fantasy.
As for cost control, I’m not sure why you think Shopify is more expensive. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify is expensive because migrations are expensive but day to day running costs are pretty much equivalent.
https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/WooCommerce-Checkou...
https://trends.builtwith.com/shop
And keep in mind most major Shopify users are building out their own front ends so these BuiltWith numbers are underreporting on big Shopify customers, whereas WooCommerce is almost never used without a WordPress front end. These are the most favorable numbers to WooCommerce and they are still bad.
edit: it’s even worse than I thought. Woo’s own stats cite storeleads.app which lists the biggest Woo stores as… some blogs? Shopify has most of the top stores from brands we all recognize. Woo has zero. Woo’s involvement in actual commerce is pitiful, I think 1% of Shopify is optimistic.
edit edit: one of Woo’s most popular stores is billyparisi.com. A recipe website that sells a couple of t-shirts. A WordPress blog that drives all of the traffic and a WooCommerce tacked on for the sake of it. And that’s one of Woo’s best.
Source? This source [0] puts Shopify 10x ahead of WooCommerce on GMV. They're close on number of installations. That roughly matches my experience working in this space in 2022, though it's definitely possible our customers weren't representative of the market as a whole.
[0] https://www.sanjaydey.com/shopify-vs-woocommerce-why-brands-...
> They're close on number of installations.
2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
It's true that the link puts Shopify at roughly 10X in terms of GMV but parent did not claim otherwise.
> About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations
And as for this:
> 2.84M vs 4.34M is quite a wide margin, wouldn't you agree?
No, I wouldn't. I think that's within the margin of error for the typical methodology of this kind of research. They're the same number.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
A more optimistic, less chaotic and exasperating time.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
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Yeah, not a chance I disable an adblocker for TechCrunch slop reporting
As someone that’s pretty much worked in/with WP for my entire career, it’s always seemed like the worst of both worlds - distributed and slow-moving, yet still ultimately controlled to a massive extent by a single individual.
These kinds of absurd situations just slowly push people toward Shopify, other CMSes, etc. There will be no grand exodus, because too many companies are intertwined to the WP ecosystem. But combined with AI, the horrible design of Gutenberg, and half a dozen other things, I really worry for the future of WP. At this point I generally only recommend it to people that need something extremely customized. Other platforms are easier to use and don’t have the soap opera drama.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.”
And if he's trolling, then I would argue that's also evidence towards having lost his grip on reality.
Maybe Mullenweg killed the interim CEO in combat?
There is a Thunderdome at Burning Man.
https://journal.burningman.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Th...
Not beyond the realms of possibility then
I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.
The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.
Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.
> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.
Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.
[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...
Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104 - Sept 2026 (144 comments)
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636283 - Sept 2026 (372 comments)
(I know there have been many other threads in this long saga but I don't have the time (or the stomach) to try to list them)
p.s. We merged an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683265) into this one, which is why the timestamps of some of the comments are older.
Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.
Are there real people with opinions about this? I'd like to hear them.
Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.
Yeah that mechanism I understand, and I do understand that this would lead to exactly this kind of politics.
But.. that still means that it leads to this kind of politics, which was my point.
I'm not interested in the politics. I'd like to know the reality.
It's.. again.. a diversion and a "stop pulling on this thread".
That is not how you prove that the comment section is organic.
He's clinging to what he has, and for any outsider this (or the path leading to this) doesn't look like healthy behavior.
What we live through life can trigger extremely strange behaviors we didn't see before from people, so I don't think all of this can be attributed to astroturfing.
Every comment section on the internet is a target for astroturfing, yet attribute everything to it, is not right.
Which.. kinda doesn't really convince me.
But anyway
> He's clinging to what he has, and [..] this [..] doesn't look like healthy behavior.
That's not something I would agree with. Can you explain why you believe that protecting "your baby" and clinging to it is seen by you as "not healthy"? From my understanding of the world, that is very healthy.
Why not?
ETA: Or better yet a clearer statement that nothing about this is clear.
Way more are than we are told about.
I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP.
Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?
This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted.
Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.
It's pretty simple, you could probably set up something like that by:
Configure some kind of CLI tool to talk to your ticketing system and git repo so you can programmatically interact with them. If you don't have a ticketing system, instruct the agent to use local text or markdown files to track issues and progress.
Ideally, make your code runnable in a way the agent can use. For my webapps I build a test harness so that I can run all the endpoints and workflows via reproducible tests against an embedded database. This is easier than it sounds, e.g. there are libraries out there to embed PostgreSQL or SQLite into source code, you can set up a test harness so you can run unit tests, integration tests and workflow tests that use your real frontend, server and database.
Paste this comment thread into the agent prompt and tell it to run a similar loop on your code base: a session that searches for vulns and writes up a report, some way for a human to do a review pass on the report, a session that indexes the reviewed findings into tickets, and sessions that fix the fixable issues and submit patches to your repo. The next search session should first read all the open issues so it doesn't duplicate work of earlier sessions.
LESS IS MORE - avoid fancy agent tooling and skills, don't cargo cult from others, build your own tools as you find your own needs. If something can be automated, use the agent to write tools and tests for it, don't just keep prodding the agent to do it.
It is very empowering for people with limited skills.
Facebook is a good example on how to structure your company to keep control of it.
Facebook, when, Meta took a bunch of bad decisions in recentyears. All that Metaverse is just a write off ... for now the stock market liked the "vision" but that may end.
How willing investor's then are to play such a game is to be seen. I guess this only works in exceptional cases. Facebook was a money printing machine everybody wanted to be a part of.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-ma...
I used to eat there occasionally because it was cheapish many, many years ago.
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Split
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
The story is that Adi was less of a hardliner, but still a card-carrying member of the nazi party.
https://in.rediff.com/sports/report/adi/20051108.htm
Which would be terrible if true.
I've actually never seen anything like it. Is this what the WP community are like? I think that would break me too.
Microsoft has done plenty of awful things in its day, but I've never seen people diagnose Steve Ballmer with mental disorders and wish him harm, let alone that would become just the accepted majoritarian narrative around him, as it seems to be around Matt Mullenweg. It seems wild.
More broadly, why is there a 'WP drama' sub-Reddit? Why are there blogs documenting all of this with glee? Why are people registering domains to post screeds about this? In other words, why has a cottage industry sprung up around - as far as I can tell - bullying Matt Mullenweg?
I don't know what to make of it. Who are the WP community, that this is how they engage? Is there some big 4chan-WordPress overlap I'm not aware of? Is this an outgrowth of teenage faux-radicalism off Tumblr? I genuinely don't know, but it seems very off-putting. If this is what the WP community are like, I sure wouldn't want to become involved in it.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
That's an oddly specific thing to clarify upfront.
Did anyone else think "what the fuck did I just read" after this sentence? Did Matt write it himself while posing as a "spokesperson"? This reads like that time Trump wrote in pseudonymously to a newspaper about how amazing and perfect Trump was.
Oh, I hadn't finished reading. The whole article is a WTF did I just read.
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.
If HN: it isn't a public service that has to allow free speech. One of the reasons it has persisted and maintained a certain level of quality is because of it's community rules, and their enforcement.
Flag is for inappropriate content / behaviour.
* American Indian or Alaska Native
* Asian
* Black or African American
* Hispanic or Latino
* Middle Eastern or North African
* Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
* White
I learned Duck-typing from Ruby: if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck -- it's a duck.
Applying this to Sam: he's white.
?
Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Co-ops can have more democratic voting arrangements, and usually have "one shareholder one vote" principles, though other options are available, and you can mess around with how many votes each shareholder gets.
By contrast its relatively easy to quit and start a new company if you feel like it. That is the control for a company.
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
damn, I guess feudal aristocracies or oligarchical nations are also democratic.
If you are describing how a US corporation that is not a worker cooperative is run as a democracy, you either dont know what the term means or you are being in bad faith.
when a literal handful(as in the number of people could be counted between both hands) can decide the fate of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it "largely democratic" is lolworthy.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.
> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
From kmeisthax? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683985
I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?
> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.
You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.
Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.
Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.
"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."
Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.
If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.
(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
That's a hilarious leap.
Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
How? Will you also advocate to killing a bunch of people to get from now to the state where workers own the means of production like Trotsky and friends?
There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
The word you're looking for is "collapse". It's when something is stable at one point in time, but then later breaks down. That's what "changed". It wasn't random like weather or something. The economic systems collapsed.
> None of this is settled
The fact that it has happened numerous times in different parts of the world makes it pretty settled in my mind.
Then the soviet system stagnated hard under Brezhnev while the Chinese pivoted under Deng. But those first gains definitely happened under full communism and no capitalist economy has modernized faster.
Have you asked people in China about this?