A fundamental issue with WordPress that has long existed, but hasn’t gotten the level of attention is deserved, is the inherent conflict of interest in Matt Mullenweg’s various roles. He isn’t alone in that. The Executive Director of WordPress “also leads Automattic‘s open source division.” Matt Mullenweg, of course, put that person in the role of Executive Director despite the obvious conflict of interest. Despite her obvious conflict of interest, she was going to produce a conflict of interest policy for WordPress that never was released. A code of ethics was also never released.

Yesterday, someone posted a link to our post about that on the WordPress Subreddit, /r/wordpress/, which was quickly deleted:

There is no reason given for the deletion, it just says “Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/Wordpress.” It also isn’t identified which of the moderators deleted, which seems like an important detail considering the conflict of interests problem one of them has when it comes to anything involving WordPress. Here are moderators of that:

Looking at the list of the moderators, one of them stands out. It’s a direct employee of Matt Mulleweng through Audrey Capital, Samuel “Otto” Wood. While we don’t know who deleted the post, he is definitely someone who has long had obvious problems conflict of interests in WordPress. For example, he was who you were supposed to go to if you had problems with the moderators of the WordPress Suppport Forum, while also being one of the moderators and, according to him, picking out most of the moderators. He has also misused his moderation power to delete a discussion he was involved in. So not someone you want involved moderation, but there he is on Reddit as a moderator for WordPress forum of all things.

There is another moderator that appears to be trying to shut down discussions of inconvenient to Matt Mullenweg, so they could also the culprit.

If you want some idea of the class of people that Matt Mullenweg surrounds himself with, we recommend perusing the discussion around his response to a fork of WordPress.

The lack of proper handling of conflicts of interest in the WordPress space introduces serious security risks.