WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Cloudflare’s announcement of EmDash as WordPress’ spiritual successor by invoking Will Smith’s Oscar slap, telling Cloudflare to keep the WordPress name out of its mouth. Cloudflare’s CEO responded with a tweet invoking the WordPress name. Mullenweg eventually edited his blog post to tone it down.
Screenshot of Mullenweg’s original conclusion
Spiritual successor to WordPress
Mullenweg published a blog post about EmDash in which its first criticism was the claim that it was the spiritual successor to WordPress. He compared WordPress by pointing out that WordPress can be installed and used on virtually any device and on any platform, saying that this is part of their mission to democratize publishing by making it easy to deploy on almost any type of infrastructure.
Matt addressed his next comment directly to Cloudflare:
“You can attack our users, but please don’t pretend to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit.”
The compliment sandwich
In the early 2000s, Googlers were known for their kindness and smiles. I don’t think it’s a calculated thing; the smiles were not a character; it was authentic. I think many Googlers who interacted with the SEO community were genuinely friendly and genuinely wanted to help people with their SEO problems. When I lived in San Francisco, I had many visits to Google and had nothing but positive experiences.
Matt affects the same kind of persona where he speaks with a smile. But he also does it by being critical of things, which is kind of a dissonant thing to see. His response to Cloudflare is the written equivalent of this approach.
It follows the complementary sandwich model:
- Positive statement
- Criticism or negative point
- Another positive statement
Done correctly, with tact and genuine empathy, it can soften criticism. This is a valid approach to providing critical but useful feedback.
Matt accused Cloudflare of using EmDash as a way to promote its infrastructure, but he did it with a smile.
He criticized:
“I think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services.”
Then he moved on to the positive statement:
“And that’s OK! It might run on Netlify or Vercel, but the good stuff runs better on Cloudflare. This is where I’ll stop and say: I really like Cloudflare! I think they’re one of the best engineering organizations on the planet; they run incredible infrastructure and their public stock is one of the few I own. And I love that it’s open source! That’s more important than anything. I’ll never downplay another open source CMS; I only hate the proprietary ones.
Then he criticized Cloudflare again:
“If you want to adopt a CMS that will work seamlessly with Cloudflare and make switching providers difficult, EmDash is an incredible choice. »
That last part is a backhanded and sarcastic compliment, implying that EmDash is a way to trap users within Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Mullenweg offered a bulleted list of additional critiques mixed with compliments.
Keep WordPress out of your mouth
Mullenweg ended his blog post with a conciliatory-looking paragraph that abruptly ends with a sentence evoking Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars:
“One day, perhaps there will 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 name WordPress out of your mouth.”
Mullenweg is doing something between the lines there. Whether he did it intentionally or not, he brings up Will Smith’s infamous moment at the Oscars, when he slapped Chris Rock and told him to keep his wife’s name out of his mouth. This line subtly evokes a violent image, with Mullenweg playing the role of Will Smith slapping Cloudflare in the face.
By using this specific phrase, Matt Mullenweg was, intentionally or not, invoking the Oscars dispute by comparing Cloudflare’s use of the name “WordPress” to an insulting personal attack.
Added:
Matt has since updated his blog post to remove the reference to the Oscar slap and posted a more toned-down conclusion:
“One 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. (removed the phrase “out of your mouth”, too spicy for Western palates.) I’ve mainly focused in this article just on the software, but WordPress is also very much about community – meetups, WordCamps, art, college programs, tattoos, books… The closest thing of a spiritual successor is not another, it is OpenClaw.
Discreet irony
After being told to keep WordPress out of his mouth, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince responded on X by saying it was fair criticism, then immediately putting WordPress in his mouth. Prince tweeted:
“I think this is a fair criticism of EmDash’s @photomatt.
I hope this will attract more developers to the WordPress ecosystem.
What Prince did there was politely challenge Mullenweg by tweeting the word “WordPress” in his response after being told to keep it out of his mouth while simultaneously adopting the persona of someone trying to “help” the person who had just slapped him. In the context of the Oscar reference, it’s as if Chris Rock responded to the slap by calmly saying, “I hope this incident brings more viewers to your next movie.”
Was this a discreet irony? If so, it’s a master class.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Prostock-studio
