WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg responded to Cloudflare’s announcement of EmDash as the spiritual successor to WordPress by invoking Will Smith’s Oscars slap. Cloudflare’s CEO responded by doing exactly what Mullenweg told him not to do.
Spiritual Successor To WordPress
Mullenweg’s 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.
Although he didn’t say it out loud, the implication is clear: WordPress can be deployed everywhere, and EmDash is not as flexible.
Matt aimed his next comment straight at Cloudflare:
“You can come after our users, but please don’t claim to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit.”
The Compliment Sandwich
Back in the early 2000s, Googlers were famous for their friendliness and smiles. I don’t 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.
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.
It follows compliment sandwich pattern:
- Positive statement
- Criticism or negative point
- Another positive statement
Done correctly, with tact and genuine empathy, it can soften criticism. It’s a valid approach to providing critical but helpful feedback.
Matt accused Cloudflare of using EmDash as a way to promote their infrastructure, but he did it with a smile.
He criticized:
“I think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services.”
Then he switched over to the positive statement:
“And that’s okay! It can kinda run on Netlify or Vercel, but good stuff works best on Cloudflare. This is where I’m going to stop and say, I really like Cloudflare! I think they’re 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’s more important than anything. I will never belittle a fellow 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 it hard for you to ever switch vendors, 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 bullet-point list of additional criticism mixed with compliments.
Keep WordPress Out Of Your Mouth
Mullenweg ended his blog post with a conciliatory-sounding paragraph that ends abruptly with a phrase that invoked Will Smith’s Oscars slap:
“Some 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.”
Mullenweg is doing something between the lines there. Whether he did it intentionally or not, he’s invoking Will Smith’s infamous moment at the Oscars, when he slapped Chris Rock across the face and told him to keep his wife’s 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.
By using that specific phrase, Matt Mullenweg was, intentionally or not, invoking the conflict by comparing Cloudflare’s use of the “WordPress” name to an insulting personal attack.
Understated Irony
After being told to keep WordPress out his mouth, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince responded on X by saying it’s a fair criticism and then immediately putting WordPress in his mouth. Prince tweeted:
“Think this is a fair critique from @photomatt of EmDash.
I remain hopeful it’ll bring a broader set of developers into the WordPress ecosystem.”
What Prince did there was politely defy 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 just slapped him. In the context of the Oscar reference, it’s as if Chris Rock had responded to the slap by calmly saying, “I hope this incident brings more viewers to your next movie.”
Was that meant as understated irony? If so, it’s a master class.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Prostock-studio
