<\/p>
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Cloudflare\u2019s announcement of EmDash as the spiritual successor to WordPress by invoking Will Smith\u2019s Oscars slap. Cloudflare\u2019s CEO responded by doing exactly what Mullenweg told him not to do.<\/p>
Mullenweg\u2019s first criticism of the new EmDash was the claim that it was the spiritual successor to WordPress. He made the point that WordPress can be installed and used on virtually any device and on any platform, saying that this was a part of their mission to democratize publishing by making it easy to deploy on almost any kind of infrastructure.<\/p>
Although he didn\u2019t say it out loud, the implication is clear: WordPress can be deployed everywhere, and EmDash is not as flexible.<\/p>
Matt aimed his next comment straight at Cloudflare:<\/em><\/p> \u201cYou can come after our users, but please don\u2019t claim to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> Back in the early 2000s, Googlers were famous for their friendliness and smiles. I don\u2019t think it was a calculated thing; the smiles were not a persona; it was genuine. I believe that many of the Googlers who had interactions with the SEO community were genuinely friendly and truly wanted to help people with their SEO issues. When I lived in San Francisco, I had many visits at Google and had nothing but positive experiences.<\/p> Matt affects that same kind of persona where he speaks with a smile. But he also does it while being critical of things, which is a kind of dissonant thing to witness. His response to Cloudflare is the written equivalent of that approach.<\/p> It follows compliment sandwich pattern:<\/strong><\/p> Done correctly, with tact and genuine empathy, it can soften criticism. It\u2019s a valid approach to providing critical but helpful feedback.<\/p> Matt accused Cloudflare of using EmDash as a way to promote their infrastructure, but he did it with a smile.<\/p> He criticized:<\/em><\/p> \u201cI think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> Then he switched over to the positive statement:<\/em><\/p> \u201cAnd that\u2019s okay! It can kinda run on Netlify or Vercel, but good stuff works best on Cloudflare. This is where I\u2019m going to stop and say, I really like Cloudflare! I think they\u2019re one of the top engineering organizations on the planet; they run incredible infrastructure, and their public stock is one of the few I own. And I love that this is open source! That\u2019s more important than anything. I will never belittle a fellow open source CMS; I only hate the proprietary ones.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> Then he criticized Cloudflare again:<\/em><\/p> \u201cIf you want to adopt a CMS that will work seamlessly with Cloudflare and make it hard for you to ever switch vendors, EmDash is an incredible choice.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> That last part is a backhanded and sarcastic compliment, implying that EmDash is a way to trap users within Cloudflare\u2019s infrastructure. Mullenweg offered a bullet-point list of additional criticism mixed with compliments.<\/p> Mullenweg ended his blog post with a conciliatory-sounding paragraph that ends abruptly with a phrase that invoked Will Smith\u2019s Oscars slap:<\/p> \u201cSome day, there may be a spiritual successor to WordPress that is even more open. When that happens, I hope we learn from it and grow together. Until then, please keep the WordPress name out of your mouth.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> Mullenweg is doing something between the lines there. Whether he did it intentionally or not, he\u2019s invoking Will Smith\u2019s infamous moment at the Oscars, when he slapped Chris Rock across the face and told him to keep his wife\u2019s name out of his mouth. That phrase subtly invokes a violent image, with Mullenweg playing the role of Will Smith slapping Cloudflare across the face.<\/p> By using that specific phrase, Matt Mullenweg was, intentionally or not, invoking the conflict by comparing Cloudflare\u2019s use of the \u201cWordPress\u201d name to an insulting personal attack.<\/p> After being told to keep WordPress out his mouth, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince responded on X by saying it\u2019s a fair criticism and then immediately putting WordPress in his mouth. Prince tweeted:<\/p> \u201cThink this is a fair critique from @photomatt of EmDash.<\/p> I remain hopeful it\u2019ll bring a broader set of developers into the WordPress ecosystem.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> What Prince did there was politely defy Mullenweg by tweeting the word \u201cWordPress\u201d in his response after being told to keep it out of his mouth while simultaneously adopting the persona of someone trying to \u201chelp\u201d the person who just slapped him. In the context of the Oscar reference, it\u2019s as if Chris Rock had responded to the slap by calmly saying, \u201cI hope this incident brings more viewers to your next movie.\u201d<\/p> Was that meant as understated irony? If so, it\u2019s a master class.<\/p> Featured Image by Shutterstock\/Prostock-studio<\/em><\/p> <\/div> News,WordPress#Mullenweg #Cloudflare #WordPress #Mouth #sejournal #martinibuster1775214334<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Cloudflare\u2019s announcement of EmDash as the spiritual successor to WordPress by invoking Will Smith\u2019s Oscars slap. Cloudflare\u2019s CEO responded by doing exactly what Mullenweg told him not to do. Spiritual Successor To WordPress Mullenweg\u2019s first criticism of the new EmDash was the claim that it was the spiritual successor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[18784,415,21530,11119,80,168],"class_list":["post-5766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-cloudflare","tag-martinibuster","tag-mouth","tag-mullenweg","tag-sejournal","tag-wordpress"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The Compliment Sandwich<\/h2>
Keep WordPress Out Of Your Mouth<\/h2>
Understated Irony<\/h2>