Audrey Capital Employee Samuel “Otto” Woods Closed Discussion About WordPress Not Promoting Automattic’s Jetpack Plugin
Last week Automattic, the company from the head of WordPress Matt Mullenweg, announced they were going to contribute less to WordPress. In doing that, they complained that “we’ve observed an imbalance in how contributions to WordPress are distributed across the ecosystem, and it’s time to address this.” The credited author of the post is the Executive Director of WordPress.org. What was left unsaid was how Automattic benefits from WordPress over other companies because of its level of control over the project. We just ran into an instance where an attempt to address that wasn’t allowed predating the current situation with WordPress.
Last week, we wrote about how an Automattic employee who had access to non-public data on what top search terms for the WordPress Plugin Directory and their admission to changing the search algorithm for that to promote Automatic’s Jetpack plugin. That isn’t the only way that Jetpack is promoted in the WordPress Plugin Directory. From the admin interface of WordPress, going to the page to add a new plugin brings up a set of Featured plugins:
There are two commercial plugins, both from Automattic, included in that. Those Featured plugins are also promoted on the frontpage of the web version of the directory:
Going back to the admin interface, another tab shows Recommended plugins. Though, checking on several websites, they all showed the Featured plugins there as well:
We are aware of no explanation of what the supposed criteria are supposed to be for Featured plugins.
In July of last year, amid widespread criticism of the Jetpack plugin, it was suggested removing Jetpack from the Featured plugins on the Trac ticket for WordPress.org sites. Only an hour later that ticket was closed with the statement that “The featured and recommended plugins are not issues suitable for the meta trac.” That came from an employee of Audrey Capital, Samuel “Otto” Wood. Audrey Capital is an investment vehicle for Matt Mullenweg that also employs a couple of people that work on WordPress. The creator of the ticket responded asking where that could be brought up. There has been no response.
By comparison, when an Automattic employee requested adding a plugin to the Featured plugins in 2018, the ticket in the same system wasn’t closed, but addressed by the next day.
Later in July, Samuel Wood didn’t close down a ticket about a bug with the Recommend plugins in the same system, but responded with a question. Which doesn’t make sense if that was truly not the place to discuss that.
The simplest explanation for Samuel Wood action there is that there isn’t a legitimate reason for Jetpack to be a Featured plugin. Instead, it is a Featured plugin because it comes from his boss’ company.