“You don’t own a community; you influence, co-create and curate it.”

✌️ Hello again, it is I, your friendly newsletter purveyor, here with yet another high-calorie info snack*
Issue #176: goat herding, job hunting, and zooming out
By Harris Sockel

The internet is a story of people using things in ways their inventors didn’t intend. Take the early internet, which was a private network of government agencies, meant to help researchers share classified info. Soon, people were chatting and turning punctuation into faces. Texting was originally invented to help people get updates from their phone carriers… but we’ve since come up with more delightful uses for it.

Anyway. Take WordPress, which hosts — by their own estimate — 40% of websites. The service is so ubiquitous it feels like air (especially if it’s hosted your website for decades). But, last month, its CEO took aim at one of its largest users.

Here’s what’s happening as succinctly as I can manage. There are actually two “WordPresses”: (1) WordPress.org, a nonprofit open-source community software project that anyone can contribute to and use to build their own hosting service, and (2) WordPress.com, a hosting service built on that open-source project. WP Engine is a third-party hosting service also built on WordPress.org. It’s grown into a $400 million/year business, rivaling WordPress.com in scale.

WordPress (.org and .com) founder Matt Mullenweg recently called WP Engine a “cancer” because, in his view, it’s built a giant business on the back of an open source community without giving back. WP Engine contributes just 40 hours/week to the open source project; WordPress gids 3,948 hours/week. Mullenweg feels like they’re “fracking” a community resource while phoning in their contribution and diluting WordPress’s tools to sell customers “a crappier experience.” He’s worried these behaviors may catch on in the community.

(There’s a lot more going on here, too, including a trademark dispute, warring cease-and-desist letters, and a service ban for WP Engine’s customers. It’s not pretty!)

This is interesting to me because, while it’s super nuanced and unique to WordPress, at its core it’s the story of a conundrum every platform and community faces: How do you respond when people use the thing you made differently than you intended? How do you react when community members phone in their participation? Sarah Drinkwater has a great essay about this tension on Medium: “You don’t own a community; you influence, co-create and curate it.”

Community norms are fluid, fragile, and difficult to pin down. WP Engine is allowed to grow a gigantic business using WordPress’ tools — even one that overshadows WordPress itself. But there comes a point when you can follow the letter of the law while breaking the spirit of the law.

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• A creative career begins at any age: painter Luchita Hurtado didn’t find success until 98.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

Humans have a negativity bias, meaning we obsess over what might go wrong and overlook what could go right — or what could simply stay the same. If you’re worrying about something, expand your timeline. Ask yourself: How will I feel about [whatever’s bothering you] in a week, a month, a year?

*Does anyone get this joke? If you can tell me what TV show it’s from, maybe you shall win… something.

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