matt mullenweg is the ceo of automattic, the firm that owns wordpress.Com, of which he co-founded, and tumblr, the indefatigable social network she acquired from the wreckage of aol, yahoo, an artificial intelligence video generator (ai-porno.net ) and verizon. Matt will say that the world is a better place when the internet is open and immersive, and automattic creates and becomes compounds that make it possible. . This bet is probably most pronounced in wordpress itself. About 43% of all sites on the internet are powered by wordpress, which is free source code software that anyone can download and use for free. It's officially run by the wordpress foundation, but if you don't want the hassle, you can easily check out wordpress.Com and then pay automattic to do a lot of the work for you. This is an absolutely addictive bunny that obviously worked great and i wanted to know more about why matt set it up this way and what the problems with this framework are. I also wanted to discuss tumblr - this taylor swift's favorite social platform, and it's one of the elements that users supported no matter how many corporate owners tried to kill her. But, like any social platform, it has big problems with moderation. It's no secret that in order for the app to get into the apple app store, it had to ban pornography, which still outrages users. Matt and i have been talking about issues like this. One side note: matt mentions something called “gutenberg” a few times - it's a new build experience in wordpress, part of the platform where people actually build things. . This is long but deep. I think you'll love it. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Matt mullenweg is the ceo of automattic, co-founder of wordpress, and ceo of tumblr. Looking forward to the decoder. Very happy to be here. The last time we chatted was right after the tumblr purchase was completed. It was a fascinating conversation, but since it was many years ago, it means there is something to talk about. Automattic has bought many companies. You've released a lot of products - started with wordpress, which you obviously founded. You bought tumblr, you bought pocket casts, you got woocommerce. Start from the beginning: what is automattic? What does the viewer think of it? What companies does the buyer have? Of course. Thus, automattic has been a wholly distributed company since 2005. For 17 years we have been trying to make the internet a better place. We seek to democratize publishing in commerce. We've been talking about this for a long time, even before democratization was top notch. For training, we produce, buy or partner with things that make the internet more open and attractive. Pocket casts is one of the best podcasting apps out there. Is very consumer oriented it is the independent alternative to spotify and apple in the world. We just relentlessly improve it to try to give answers to fully satisfy all the requirements of readers and get it better. Most of our business models are based on the fact that citizens pay us, but not on advertising or other models. We provide all sorts of supplements and the mentioned regular income - we offer everything that allows us to come to work the next day. We are going to recruit 2000 full time people with automattic. He's just grown a lot, even since people last spoke. I think we hired over 700 people in 2019. 700 people. Where the customer hired them all? All over the earth. We now have personalities in 93 countries. Initially, and even more so last year, the most significant of the above great advantages lies in the fact that our company is not limited geographically to where we hire people. We firmly know for sure that talents are evenly distributed throughout the world, but time is not. When we provide opportunities in a place where there is usually none, we find really great people and they are usually great colleagues who have been around for quite some time. Another unusual thing we do is it pays at global wage rates, which helps with international recruitment, so we pay the same salary ranges no matter what country you are in. Sounds great. I just want to dive into the practice of that extremely quickly. You want to pay someone in this 92nd country and there is only one person in the fridge.Your compliance costs for being very high - the athlete must log into the government and be aware of their tax situation. How is the owner dealing with this? It requires a lot of overhead for such distribution communication. Yes. There are companies out there that can fix this for you. And in the us when we started, all 50 states have all sorts of rules in a number of counties have all sorts of principles and everything. Some actually work with the wage salesman. There are some international equivalents. Another answer, many people think is simple, is that many of these people are technically contractors who charge a fixed amount daily. This eliminates a lot of overhead, especially for places where you can only have one modern person in the country. It's a bit of a burden on people to pay their own taxes, and consultants usually register a corporation for contracts and such, but that makes things a lot easier. I've always liked the product. For many people who have tried it, it seems that there is actually some kind of complexity that you have to deal with. In practice, let's say my goal is to find the best podcast host in the world. How would i do it? If there is one modern person who is best suited for my role, who is located in luxembourg, how can i find him? How do you find these people? I think it's not enough for businesses to just promote their member base or promote their audience. There are probably 3 roles that you are actually trying to hire to verge immediately. Tell. Run ads for insects. You post ads for the average person - post ads for your flights. We try to put easter eggs in all of our products, which brings competitors to this job page. We tried to make all the “about the magazine” pages of our applications even better, like day one, pocket cast, tumblr. If there are people there, point them to your employment. Your existing audience is the best way to do this, especially if you are similar to us and have an audience of many millions of people in it. You started mentioning a number of other products: day one, tumblr, pocket casts, wordpress. What suite? Can you list them all? Of course. I'll name the essentials: wordpress.Com, woocommerce and our corporate business called wordpress vip are the drivers of the automattic business. Most people think of wordpress.Com as an easier place to host wordpress, however what they don't know is that it can actually run all the plugins and problems for wordpress, and such happiness is automatically replenished and automatically protected. Think of it as a place where you can run any wordpress resource - it's completely bulletproof, very secure, updatable and ready to get almost as much traffic as you can send enough. Listen to decoder, a show hosted by nilay patel of the verge, about big ideas and other issues. Subscribe here! Woocommerce is free source shopify. I believe this is the only e-commerce platform that is growing as fast as shopify. In 2018, woocommerce sold $31 billion worth of products, which i think is double the year in history. You get the ability to sell almost anything online, and it integrates with wordpress. Enterprise was attractive. Basically, it's like serious forms looking to use wordpress - hopefully over time the verge. A number of other sites apply it, such as techcrunch. What has switched recently is whitehouse.Gov, which is very exciting right now, considering absolutely everything that is being done in the international market. We can host any size wordpress imaginable and also make it very secure even today. In fact, it's like an enhanced version of the fact that our company does for our wide range of customers. It's something that drives business. I don't want to distract from these other things, but in our company, on top of that, at any time there was what our company calls “five for the future.” There is an idea in the wordpress community that companies are giving back 5% of resources to open source. The above only contributes to avoiding the tragedy of the commons. 5% of the 2,000 professionals work full-time, contributing to the development of open source. The ladies don't function with any of these commercial products or anything like that. I feel like this is the maximum minimum we can contribute to pass the community better. We also set aside 5% for new things - our version of other stakes, experiments or labs. This is why other products are included, such as day one, pocket casts and so on.Most likely, these are truly beloved products that have a very passionate customer base. Simplenote is another very common service, and in the distant past, the verge spoke highly of it. We are willing to move forward and use our long term investment to enjoy what may come. This is what woocommerce was seven years ago; it was not much, and did not bring a lot of finance. Today it is a power plant. Soon he will be as big as the rest of the company put together. Some other similar products, even day one, have this potential. You mentioned the tragedy of the commons. This is the optimal phrase. Which one do you have in mind, especially when talking about open source software? In fact, the tragedy of the commons is caused by the economy. This is history. There is a common field that belongs to this city, but does not belong to any person. If all farmers were to graze their sheep and cattle on this allotment, but none of whom invested in maintenance, it might be that they did not force their particular sheep or cattle to collect tubers so that everything, without exception, could grow again. The field dries up and dies. No more grass. Everyone loses. In the case of open source, it is easy and convenient for companies to adopt open source, you will agree, without contributing anything in return, but this is kind of the most promising of its features. We are not really in the strength to complain about the meaningless pastime thanks to this, that the license will say that the gambler can and must do this. But i think that companies that think more long-term are saying, “ok, i'm getting unimaginable benefits for this. I don't pay a dime. How can i be sure that this will happen within a few or several years? We've seen examples of libraries that the entire internet depends on viewing. Yes. We offer what i was aiming for. “Wordpress in the cms space now has 43% of all resources.” We also have open source examples . Tapes that reach the output speed. They turn out to be this positive flywheel - the more people use them, the more significant the amount of people who contribute to them. They turn out to be absolutely ubiquitous, almost like natural monopolies, but not evil, like monopolies - monopolies belonging to everyone, therefore they are beneficial. For example, it can be things like the chromium browser engine, which is used today in internet explorer, a microsoft product, a bonus to brave and chrome. Wordpress in the cms space now has 43% of all web services. It is growing faster than all the others combined. Is feasible, in the next decade this figure will reach 80-85%. Wait, you just predicted that wordpress is like free source, similar to wordpress.Com, i guess - will have the power of 85% of sites in the next decade. I think this is what visitors are able to do. When you look at the number of smartphones on the android operating system, it is about 85%. I think chromium as an engine will reach 85% or 90% of the browser share. Personally, you will always have ten or 15% of similar items, new goods and the like. What happens is if you get the opposite of the tragedy of the commons - if you take the abundance of the commons, it becomes a superfuture. As i said, this is a positive flywheel, where the cooler the players use everything, the stronger the people deposit their own game account, the more stable it becomes. Since it is absolutely free and belongs to everyone, you have more reasons to use it. Can progress very quickly. In case you think about the speed of evolution, then it simply surpasses everything, including proprietary competitors, which may have millions of billions of dollars behind them. They just can't match the magnificence of the world working together on the same thing. You said that there are now 2000 people using automattic services. You hired 700 new entrepreneurs last year. How does it work? Who works and how? We call ourselves the digital berkshire hathaway. I, as ceo of the conditions, and certain centralized services - specifically hr, legal, systems - are trying to serve these relatively independent teams that have a lot of autonomy in the problem of how to organize, manage themselves and iterate their product. This middle part of the company, let's call it 200 people, is doing everything necessary to eliminate barriers and help the rest of the company to work faster. Teams work like small mini-companies. They have their own key directors, executives and marketing directors. In fact they offer their own boards.Part of what is the centralized part, it broadcasts: “hey, the company is doing the same thing even in two places. Our company is producing a newsletter here for woocommerce and our staff is creating a newsletter for wordpress.Com. How do we combine this and find out which of them deal with different criteria and complement each other?” All organizational structures are a set of compromises. In this regard, we compromise for the sake of speed and autonomy, but sometimes we have to recover, and make sure that we work well enough with ourselves. The secret of the decoder is that, in reality, it's a show about organization charts. I don't know if anyone warned you. Really? Somewhere inside the show, every time there is a series of conversations about organizational structure. You read that right. I'm going to toss you this theory: the most revealing item you get a chance to give a ceo is “how did you structure your company?” Everyone must find an answer to this question, because its use must be understood. If you're looking for an answer to that question, you've uncovered something all too exciting about yourself as a ceo. While if i were to just come and ask you why you didn't resolve this moderation crisis, the answer may or may not be revealing but that's not the biggest truth about how you organize a company. This is my thesis. I'm curious and you think about it. It reminds me of a quote, i think picasso: “when art critics get together they talk about the philosophy of creativity and the rule, what is it.” Either this movement means – but when the artists get together inseparably they talk about where to get cheap turpentine and what kind of brushes they use.” The conversation gets really more tactical, but in reality, it's in the improvement that all this skill is contained. Is it true that when i meet with other leaders, we usually get hung up on organizational design, but what i learned there is that no one design is cooler than another. You choose a set of trade-offs, and the viewer needs to think about which trade-offs you indicate. Functional. Product design. Product design, yes. For many years, our company has actually been centrally designed. We have consolidated all designers into a central team reporting structure. There was a really amazing strong advantage. This has remained a part of improving the quality of the phenomenon that we are doing, however, once we have achieved this, we have the designers back in all teams and divisions. Some fractal. When you zoom in or out, it's self-similar. When the whole company consisted of 12 people, it was very similar to what a friendly team of 12 people looks like now. We are constantly striving to make sure that there is natural growth and separation between teams. It's exciting. You described three things as all work and a host of other items as other bets. When i look at other companies organized in this way, there is a natural tension - once other bets become bets? How do you think about this? How do you order when pocket casts will come out of other stakes and be a business opportunity? A simple threshold would be 10% of the company's income. If it is placed under the data, it is likely to become part of a different staking structure and may be subject to a normal leader or become a little abstracted. If it's more than that for us, it's a serious job, and then there's our own idea of what people will say about this fact to the board every quarter and so on. I'll talk to users about this. The difficulty we have in this - and even more so with the press - is a predilection for novelty. A new thing gets a lot of attention and you have to balance that. This year alone, we've launched approximately 30 new things on wordpress.Com that have revolutionized the user experience. Gutenberg redefines not only wordpress, but also cms states. And we are also going to post it on tumblr. There are some really exciting things going on, but not necessarily easily in line with the narrative. Don't worry, this show is all about organizational charts and decision making, and then we'll get into wordpress. And by the way, this is a decoder question: how do you get solutions? After you decide to centralize, and after decentralize the design, how does the student take it? Am i myself or an organization? Both how can the characters differ? There are definitely people in automattic who wish that i, matt, had the answers. They ask me a problem and say, “what is the vision of x, y, z?” And also something like that. But almost absolutely everything that our organization has done in developing the company communicates the rule that the answers are on the edge. Wisdom lies in the fact that representatives of humanity talk to visitors, work, write code, design things, conduct user tests. We want to make decisions come from the people who have the most information. I try to make as few decisions as possible, and i'm really saying, “how do we get this across to the teams? , Divisions, edges of the branches of the tree compared to the trunk? None of us are supposed to be as smart as the rest of us so in today's world we build it in? I'm asking for transparency so things get recorded, shared, communicated. I like the idea of decision logs. We're using this internal blogging system built on top of wordpress called p2. I meant [wordpress competitor] movable type. Yes, it's built on movable type. [Laughs] what's interesting about automattic is that there is no internal email. I receive several letters a year from my colleagues. Everything flows in such internal blogs. This leads to the fact that we have, almost, an organizational blockchain, where any specific solution, starting from more than 10 years, resides in one of these internal blogs. You'll get to know what each code snippet, each business choice, or each logo does. Everything in the others is there. “In fact, the catalog presents an organizational chain of blocks, where every certain solution, starting more than a decade, is in one of these internal blogs.”

Even if you and i decided something at the meeting, we would like to write it down later. It lives on our p2, so many people can participate here asynchronously. Future generations or future versions of ourselves who have forgotten why we decided can tell why we did it. ". We divide almost every decision into two categories. Most - 99% of the subtleties you do - are reversible. Sometimes things are really big. From whom you take funding, acquisitions - these things are difficult to get rid of, therefore, you should make these decisions very deliberately.

What decision comes to you, and you must make it regularly? It's absolutely ridiculous that, especially among 2000 people, problems come to me that everyone has not yet been able to solve. Ideally, the problem has to go through many layers of really smart, talented people trying to deal with it before it gets to me. This means that my work is never boring in any way. I see edge cases. I see something you never thought among 2000 users in 93 countries. They're new anyway. Let's talk about wordpress. This is a giant. Maybe it's the unnoticed giant you mentioned earlier. You just released this truly new update called gutenberg. How big is wordpress? How many people are working on this? The company probably has about five hundred people working on wordpress, just for all wordpress release like version 5.9 released in december, we list all contributors. . The people hired by automattic are usually 10 or fewer contributors. Wow! This is the first of the cool products in the wordpress community. Even though we had this commercial automattic company i started 17 years ago, the community has grown and thrived because of it. There are a huge number of thousands of plugins, themes, billions of dollars of business that are exposed through other manufacturers and the ecosystem. Unfortunately, that's what we're very consciously working on. When you look at platforms, be it windows, other oses, platforms that were real platforms and platforms that weren't. Were, - the ratio is usually revealed, that is, 1:20. The creator or main contributor to the platform, or their commercializer, or whatever you want to call it - if they make more than 5% of the revenue in said ecosystem, they are apparently choking the ecosystem. It's also interesting if you apply this to app stores. I would also say that more money can be made from app stores. Take care of every doordash delivery or every uber ride. While a 30% reduction seems blatant and probably unsustainable if you look at the overall value ecosystem built on top of android ios, in reality i would say they were made to be very successful platforms.Apple's share of total revenue is probably around 5% of the price they generate globally. That's what we're targeting. This is also the fact that distinguishes the wordpress ecosystem from proprietary competitors such as shopify, works or squarespace, which typically generate 50-95% of the revenue in a lived ecosystem. I think you can be our first free source ceo on the show, depending on when it launches. How do you get it? Wordpress is a huge open source project. Anyone can download wordpress and find the site. You have nothing to do with this. Income is not transferred to you. You can modify it and do whatever you want with it. Then there is what they put into the main code with free primary code so that you can release new versions. You guys can handle this. Then you have a business next to it. How many does it work? Is there a person who is in charge of wordpress and approves the changes being made? How do you manage this aspect as a student, and how much do you want to be and release? I was a lead wordpress developer before automattic started. This is the first hat i wear. You dance with whoever brings you. When i think about the long term, i first think what will be cooler for the wordpress community this year, 10 years from now, 30 years from now? What makes us the most resilient, the most resilient, the most antifragile?” I'm thinking about this first. I also manage automattic with this so that its economic interests are fully in line with this, which i think is best in the long run for the wider wordpress community. This covers crafts such as the technique we put together to ensure profit. For example, many open source projects create views with additional features when monetized. Of course they force you to upgrade. We are very clear: absolutely everything that a viewer can buy on wordpress.Com, a user can also buy from bluehost, wp engine or whatever. The problem is that you really buy wordpress from anyone. This is literally a product that anyone can sell you something interesting called wordpress. By the way, we put all the best in it, like gutenberg, which greatly expands the possibilities of wordpress. This is the core. It is without payment. Anyone can use it. And by the way, these are the details of what is so strong there. It is becoming the new standard. Our employees do not hide it, but often we need to charge for something. Where we offer this line and how other people we arrange this line is very difficult. I call this the stonehedge business model. There is a plugin called akismet. This guarantees your internet site from spam. This is the best spam prevention system online. Many don't know, but this is actually the 1st code i wrote after leaving work. The first commercial thing we did before wordpress.Com was akismet. This is possibly great. Mentioned is free for home use and then paid for merchant use. It's sort of an honor system. We don't really follow that much. It's a robin hood activity. We provide this free service that keeps 43% of the internet spam free, because basically every wordpress site uses it. Very, very, very small percentage of people pay it, but this modest share makes it sustainable. Thanks to this, we are now able to use, develop and fight spammers, fight bad guys for 17 years. Products that i have a moment, so it's woocommerce. Woocommerce is a payment stack with free primary code. It seems that the sites in 2022 are most often virtual trading sites. Mainly web activity, several news portals and e-commerce platforms. So the whole network. Wordle is the most unusual website in the last five years, thanks to that it is a web game. People went crazy saying it's an old network. Do you see anything personal going on using the services of this split? Now it's fashionable to say that the internet is dead and that applications are shaping the world, but in my opinion, the internet is quite healthy for at least two things: facts and shopping. I know what it is . Your bubble if i'm being completely honest. That's what's cool about the web, we have the power to settle in a bubble, and that's what everyone thinks. One thing i would definitely try to organize in 2022 is to make the internet weirder. That's great. I fully support this site. One of the fun things about working on wordpress and tumblr right now is undoubtedly that both models provide a lot of freedom.Tumblr provides ten times more freedom than the client gets on other social networks that are actually trying to make your portal and your profile look like the rest, so that it is easier for them to sell ads and so on. You can carry weird clothes on tumblr, including using javascript and other things. You have the option to make the wordle public on tumblr if you want. It's wild. There people do limitless-very tempting and interesting things. This is also gutenberg for wordpress. We're like, “let's just stop writing lyrics in a box. It's boring. How do we promise consumers the strictest layout control - the complete ability to create the same or similar offering of “snowfall” - that new york times article that blew everyone away? How would we express this creativity…” I want to mention that the verge filed an article on “snowfall” before times. Just my personal note. Actually, 100%. When you're all up and running - you're still doing it with your editorial features. This is amazing. Actually, there is a publication on our website called atavist that comes out only once a month. Any story is like a visual journey - like the best magazines, almost. We want each of your authors to be able to realize their plans in a couple of clicks. “We take fire from the gods and bring it to people.” This is part of that , which is optimal in a system like wordpress, sometimes i describe it as a promethean. We take fire from the gods and bring it to people. You created this fire, this cool design. There is probably a proprietary cms, but only the men and women who work in your company, or those who can license it, or something like that, have 24/7 access to it. How we treat these cool ideas and bring them to virtually the whole world - where, no matter what language you speak, no matter if there are banknotes and coins in an ordinary apartment, we are able to give you these cool tools? Before you is not simple news. There are so many personal options, so many personal blogs, too much art, so many artists to share them with. Beeple, who sold nft for 69 million bucks, is posting on tumblr every day. This is what he posted. That's where he started. Here in which he still publishes messages every day. I'm sorry the name eludes me but india's biggest movie star is suggested on tumblr every day. He created it for 4000 days in a row, without interruption. There are workers who share. It's extremely, very interesting to me because it's like a personal network. He is different, he is unique. I go to an article on medium or even to a substack article, read the publication and simply remember medium or substack. I actually forgot the author, due to the fact that all sites look the same. How do you get credit for not only editorial voice, but also visual personalization - that you actually happen to have your own apartment online? You don't always look like everyone else. I agree with them. I guess the news is too flat and too narrow a description. There just isn't too much of a weird web out there. A web that visitors might think of where i made a little web toolkit that mixes a diagram with another map. That early web2 spirit seems to have vanished into icons or social media features. I'm just glad, where are you looking at wordpress growing? Hopefully something weird. Maybe a lot of artists are going to sell their nft, but i'm just thinking about where you're going to get the money from. Looks like e-commerce is the place to focus the most. Yes. We offer a highly paid action to democratize the publishing industry. Wordpress is on the right track. As i said, i speculate that the share will be 85%. Now i'm so strongly convinced that images do the same thing for e-commerce because i think we need the same freedoms: freedom to publish, freedom to transact, freedom to use every payment system, freedom to have transaction fees as low, whenever possible, compared to an annual increase. We need open source alternatives, not just shopify but also amazon and etsy and others. By the way, these are still great services. I give amazon a significant portion of my own salary. I like it. In fact i would say it makes the world a better place, but we still need a free source code alternative to act as a free market check and balance for such established companies. What does woocommerce do for some? You have a snowboard shop - this is the usual story of the origin of shopify. In addition to building shopify, you decide to use woocommerce. How does everything function? This is a plugin for wordpress. The visitor has the ability to go to the wordpress control panel, search for woocommerce, place it with one click, and then you will go through a working mechanism that will help you set up a merchant account, set up your first products and connect them to delivery. Commerce is very complex. You have taxes, shipping, inventory management, but because wordpress is open source, there are tons of extensions for it. You have the ability to select and combine things to have your own personal online store. Even from now on, the client happens to have a point of sale. If you have a physical store, you may have a little woocommerce introductory program, stripe integration, and all the other hassles that come with any mobile thing. Representatives of humanity can click to pay, and it will be synchronized with this online store. You can do something pretty fun. Actually, the store we recently launched - sort of on the sly for tumblr's 15th anniversary - is shop.Tumblr.Com. We release virgil abloh-inspired, very limited editions of cool, high-quality items. Our firm was able to launch it on woocommerce in about 14 days, which shows that the viewer can actually do whatever they want. Now, which is why you preferred it over the main from these others? By the way, shopify is a quality product and a great company. Toby is an inspiring leader. I really like them. A few months ago there was harley on the show. I ended up saying, “well, i'm going to go get a job at shopify.” They are big personalities. I also believe that you are starting to notice complaints about their ecosystem. So many royalties flow through them and the telephone commercial expansion commitments result in more and more conflict with their own community. I think they were created by the community. In fact, what our firm has done with wordpress is what we now provide with e-commerce. Woocommerce is free. It's open source. On low quality, we easily ruthlessly commodify it. The average shopify user pays 1200 greenbacks annually. It's really expensive. It shouldn't be that expensive. It can be one tenth, or even a hundredth, in order to get any functionality. Woocommerce is one-tenth less than it is right now - and year by year it will become more democratic and profitable. When you say it is open source, can i just take it and use it for free?Yes. But no one does, for example. Most people pay you $120. We are trying to make it easy to find the payment. Woocommerce also differs from the wordpress comparison in that woocommerce remains wholly owned and operated by the company “automatic”. As a whole, by no means a larger community. It has its own community, but it is owned and operated by automattic. Another reason people leave shopify and look at woocommerce is the high level. There's a fencing approach here where we ruthlessly turn the bottom level into a product, and at the outer level we allow customization. In the end, the saas product always hits the ceiling. You have the opportunity to meet something that differs from your business model compared to the saas seller. Open source is real freedom, especially when your store starts to earn more than 100 million bucks per year - even small things that can be half a percent or a fraction of the development of a transaction start to really add up and amount to hundreds of thousands of “green” costs. That's why high-end stores are switching to woocommerce. I'm quite interested in this kind of competition. You never go to shopify 2, it's a different model and you can make a series of business, family and philosophical decisions that will lead you to our virtual pussy but not to theirs, however, in principle, you will have a number of the same problems. Apple is turning off app tracking transparency, facebook ad prices are plummeting as it becomes harder to target buyers. Now i get a lot of advertising spoons. I don't know what's happening on the pages of the site, but it's hard to find me, the only citizen in america who buys spoons on facebook. The little online marketplace that hosts the one hot pink spoon i'm looking for doesn't find me that cheap. They are falling apart. After all, shopify's stock prices collapsed. You can see that apple by disabling ad tracking transparency has had a big impact on the virtual trading stack. Did it hurt you? Woocommerce shops that advertise on facebook are probably affected, but the reason why people prefer wordpress or woocommerce is to build direct connections with valued visitors, but not entirely dependent from google, facebook, etc. Or through them. So they create mailing lists. Wordpress has the best seo in the world and woocommerce inherits that. These woocommerce businesses can be found in regular selection, not just in paid search. And because cartoons integrate so well with wordpress, they create amazing blogs and citizens subscribe to such blogs. This is what makes woocommerce stores more resilient to this kind of change. Over time, being part of the technology is almost always open source, we really err on the side of radical user privacy, radical ownership of data. We end up on the right side when there are rules or state of the art devices. Open source problems arise when the rules are almost written by characters - something like the following gdpr phrase. , Which is written so amazingly that it really benefits google and fb and punishes other market participants. It's tricky if you have that kind of regulatory takeover, but then again, i always think about these things in the long run. It may take a few years, but if you can in five, 10-20 years, ultimately, consumers and the economy will determine these decisions. Let's discuss tumblr at lightning speed. I think i understand wordpress, which is similar to a b2b product at the moment. Quite often people apply it, but the point is that all businesses apply it. They pay you, it seems like how much money they always want to pay you at any time. You have a large trading stack next to a smoking person. It seems pretty corporate. I'll tell you a statistic that a lot of people don't know about. Half of all users who sign up for wordpress.Com blog every day. This is amazing. They still do it. Frankly speaking within the organization: we assumed that many people come to our company for cms functions, and i believe that “russian railways” reindexed that more business side which you just described. This is also because we thought it would be higher than revenue, but when we split the data differently, we actually found that a significant portion of the registrations were purely related to blogs. I think it's nice that residents are still blogging. Yeah, me too. We are able to finish it here. My heart is warm. No more questions. Amazing. I'm happy something is still going on. The enterprise approach is exactly what i would call wordpress. It's more enterprise. One caveat that i will say about woocommerce is that it is currently a product for creators. It's like stripe or twilio. It's really geared towards developers. Right next to the smoking person is tumblr, which is the most consumer product ever. It's a super consumer. >But it's also a super consumer in the sense that it's a platform for artists and musicians. Taylor swift reads tumblr, and this is evident from the text. There is an operational connection between the lyrics of the tunes and the people from tumblr. This is insane. This is incredible. What's happening on tumblr is absolutely unique on any other social platform. Have it in your closet according to the wreckage of yahoo in the current situation. Then i asked you: “what are we going to do with the office?” You answered: “our company has great ideas.” But the first thing everyone could do was to ban all movies so you can get the app from the app liquor store. This happened before people bought it. It was actually run by verizon. It was run by verizon, sometimes it had to happen no matter what. If they didn't do it, you'd have to pull this off. I think verizon is very conservative. If the client looks at apps like twitter and twitch, you will see that they do contain an amazing amount of adult content, but they do it in accordance with apple requirements. Wanting to help, i'm aware that verizon has taken an extremely conservative approach to trying to get even borderline things - things that i would call art - out of software. They did it in such a way that they punished many legitimate users. One user contacted me after the purchase and said: “i posted a photo of my manicure.”The image of their hands - some algorithm thought that this was a lot of skin coloring. Their account got banned. Then thanks to tech support falling so far behind, not a single guy answered them for months. “What's the best way to kill social media? Ban the most active players - and don't reply to them for months yet. What is a convenient device to kill a social network? Ban the most active visitors and do not answer them for months. People will go further and find where to publish. But i'm just looking at our conversation back then. You're right. Verizon did it, but your position at the time was that verizon could have been more conservative, but you told us, “if you're thinking of big policy changes, put pressure on the app stores. No one has any leverage.” Yes. Is still correct. Tumblr was in the news in december. We climbed the cut before christmas because apple came to us, you must have seen where we had to ban these random tags. App store evaluation procedure can be unimaginably inconsistent. Sometimes whatever you've been doing for years, they'll come to you and say, “it's not allowed anymore.” Or: “we've been searching for this search term - and right now your app is blocked unless the person makes these drastic changes very quickly, right before christmas.” It's very difficult. That was really the crux of my question. You bought tumblr when you were crazy about app stores. Tumblr has experienced a special renaissance during the pandemic. People are using it again. It had rave reviews on the skin, but it's still open in my weird place because its brand is so consumerist, so crafty and wild that the player is met with a software supermarket moderation policy, perhaps more than any other product i can think of. Think. Like this. I think they mean more about this than about other products, which is probably why we have more problems. Maybe it's a backlash. When you have a drink with someone who has this process practically in both big app-based businesses, including twitter, they will tell you the same thing. Applications can be accidentally blocked one day, which you thought for a moment, and your team is trying their best to solve such a problem. There was a lot of noise. There were hearings. We had david heinemeier hansson ranting and raving on our show. There were a lot of apple checks. There are potential bills in congress now. Has apple and google's position changed in relation to such works, or has it remained the same? Hmm. A person does not daily hear about this fact in google. Given the above, i will say that the play store is much more consistent in their applications. Let's face it, apple has a hard job here, so it's like trying to moderate user-generated content. The secret is in the fact that the images moderate thousands of additions and the team behind it - i have no idea why it's big, but let's call it a minimum of 1000 people. I literally have no information. This is just a guess. The user will have new people. You may be making mistakes. This is only a small part. I really appreciate that home doors have been able to do everything so far. Any apps are still built in the app store. Sometimes we don't agree, but usually we can get us to follow the work we deem the regulations to be, and that seems reasonable. But sometimes it ends up delaying releases by weeks or months. This has slowed down tumblr, especially in the last three or four months. We're trying to run a lot of custom features, like tips and post , which are commonly thought of as subscriptions. We're looking to bring in some of those items, and we're trying to follow the rules that, according to expert opinion, are. If the tip goes to the users in full percent %, people won't have to charge the app store fees that a lot of other apps have. Share, apple won't take a share. This is an idea, however this feature is a bit stuck, so we're trying to get it's interface and how it's laid out and that's it. It's just reality. You live thanks to upstore, you die thanks to upstore. In that interview you did a few years ago, you said, “look, i know what people are saying, just run the web website.” App and to hell with apple, but apps are everything.” The first half of this conversation pointed to the popularity of open search engines and a lot of the rule that the open web is getting weird again, making these free source drinks competitive with these proprietary solution providers. Are you double minded?Are you walking around the building just arguing that the user is running an app-based business at the mercy of apple so you also run a completely free source publishing business there? Yes. I am a pragmatist. Everything we build goes towards a further open internet, and you always have to work with the reality of where things are going today. Guess what? Every person around the world in the next 20 years will have something like a smartphone. In these smartphones it will be like software stores, and you need to work in the modern world. I believe there are always open alternatives during this period. We need to figure out how to make security and more work while our people do it. We've done pretty well on the net. We've done a pretty good job for native programs for services like mac os and windows, so i guess it can be. I believe that google and apple are the two most interesting organizations in different countries with more money reserves than many states will cease to act as outsiders and start to act as managers, responsible to their communities and humanity, which they are, and to conduct their identity - more openly. we will insist on this. We will always stand for diligence. Personally, i am not someone who tries to influence change through legislation or lobbying. I prefer to do it in the marketplace. You are here online in a week since the sonos ceo was here on the decoder. Sonos clearly went to congress. A person is not trying to do this. It's just that it's hardly my personal specialty. I think it would be great if someone hired a lobbying organization to open web, so i have an idea at your service. We are doing our best to present these issues to the open web. We make an effort to be present because wordpress is, in a sense, the dark matter of the web. If you study the top 10 sites in the world, you will never find a huge number of millions of wordpress sites combined in a single name. People forget that a partner exists, but if you put it together, it can be the most diverse that exists. That's why i call it the dark matter of the internet. We're doing our best to defend it, but we're not perfect in this either. Our company with automattic does not represent the interests of every independent portal and developer. I'm doing my best to just say what will open things up and advocate for it, but i'm not trying to influence competitors or other manufacturers where we operate through legislation. It's just a feeling - just none of our business. Let's linger on tumblr for a moment. Tumblr is a social network, and, obviously, it is heavily consumerized. It's very exciting. Just being honest. It could be, again, your personal lens. I don't use it at all. I just hear what the representatives of humanity say to me, man. Parents have moderators, right? How do you moderate videos on tumblr? The person i used to think of on tumblr is amitabh bachchan. Amitabh bachchan. He is one of the most famous actors in india. He is an indian actor. Look at this. He just wrote now at 11:42. Day 5130 its daily updates. It's amazing. He is a daily active tumblr user. This will make my mom a daily active tumblr user. Same. One of my best friends is om malik - you know him. He was one of the first wordpress users and has always been my best friend. He's like, “matt, this guy is on tumblr. You should give it more meaning.” I'm sure half the audience here is going crazy. He is very important. How do you moderate amitabh bachchan? No. You just let him ride. He moderates you. Another thing that struck me about tumblr. For starters, this bike has had a few users, like this guy, who use it almost daily. Taylor swift is there. Most artists' most popular social networks are run by a team, but the artists actually use it themselves, due to the fact that tumblr provides something different than what you are going to take on twitter, facebook or instagram. Second, 60% of tumblr users are gen z. They are 13 to 24 years old. I assumed that its user base is made up of citizens who are nostalgic - people who used it, in the very early or near the end of the 2000s or early 2010s, are still using it. Many of them were still being born at that time. We have users younger than tumblr and it's wild. That's funny. Another thing that struck me is that 85% of users come to the app. Tens of thousands of people still sign up every day, about half of gen z, so tumblr is young. It is amazing. It is mainly used on mobile devices, but there is also a segment of experienced users on the internet. Online is still very, very necessary for employees. Moderating large instagrams is, frankly, quite difficult. You will never hear me lash out at fb or other people when they make moderation mistakes because it's hard. You have tens or millions of people - billions, in the facebook version. Absolutely everything that happens to people occupies your network and you have to try not to let it go wrong. One of the teams that we've especially expanded since tumblr's acquisition is support, trust, and being secure. When we bought it, tumblr had 80,000 support cases. Oh my god. We just blew them to zero a couple of weeks ago. Automattic is great in this area. Our other merchandise for are generally awesomely famous for the moment, and that doesn't destroy democracy and save healthy places online. To be honest, we've been doing a lot of catching up there with tumblr over the last 2 years, and the issue was more than i imagined. This restriction used to be in every post we did on tumblr. , People were saying, “oh, you launched this new feature. Why didn't you get rid of the 18+ bots and nazis movies?” So that our company could do it. There were porn bots and bad visitors to our site posted on tumblr and people did everything they could and still do to keep the online place healthy and positive. If i need to remind you that i wish tumblr was - beyond just an alternative, a new place where you get a great chance to go that is different from other social networks - this is a place for craftsmanship and artists. Art is necessary for society. Nourishes the soul. It is naturally transgressive. Art pushes the boundaries. We need to change how tumblr moderation works to cover this. This should be the best option on the internet for craftsmen and artists - a space where they will have direct connections with our audience and people are able to watch the events, and not an algorithm that tries to piss you off. we want so that visitors see what they want to watch, get inspired and create cool things. That's what tumblr will be like. Exactly what is available now for millions of people. We just - we need to equip it much more cool for this. It's, i'm saying that tumblr's moderation policy will evolve dramatically, which i can't fully announce just yet, but it's going to be a lot better. Come on. They were so close. Is it because i called tumblr horny? Did that make you change your mind? Right now, tumblr is incapable of being a place for porn. Purchase is not something we are able to compose. It doesn't function. It can be companies like mindgeek or pornhub, or other companies specifically designed for this. Big company 2022 last months with terms of payment processing, identity verification and everything else. It is not in vain that adult games have many characteristics and, most likely, a specialized dealing center should serve it. I can't say that people are bringing it back. I apologize. I'm aware that they want to say that. It's actually a natural list speech. I’ve been preparing for this challenge for a long time: “are you thinking of bringing back porn?” But virtuosity and artists are very, very strong on tumblr. My mission is to help it become a truly great place for art and artists so you can thrive and be creative. It looks a little more open, something that tumblr allows today, but that's not what the user will see on the resource. Let's get into tactics for a moment. You want to have a porn definition? Sounds like you're about to change the content rules for tumblr - is that right? Aren't you going to easily declare what it is? If you can on the other doors we offer, which list wordpress.Com, there are provisions that allow much higher than is currently allowed time. On tumblr. That's what we're going to normalize, then, that the electro-politics have not stood still, and repeated and worked wonderfully to help the statue of david or the birth of venus. Right this minute, it might have been deleted - or in the old tumblr it might have been deleted. This is clearly art. Is this compatible with apple? Yes, it is 100% compatible with apple. Okay. . I think our company can do this in a way where the community has a lot more control over self-moderating and self-flagging what they post in a way that provides content to people who want to see it, and also protect it from clients who don't have to see it - people under 10 years old and the like. We all agree that the application and addresses are not required to allow this, but the statement, how people implement it, i believe, may be even more dependent on the community. Right now we have algorithms that go to toys and they will never work, because, to be frank, as the supreme court judge said about the definition of pornography: “i will know it when i see it.”By the way, he regretted it. I just want to point this out. What is this? This judge regretted the rule for saying that and thought it was a mistake. Really? “It was a real bogey for me”. Is it really difficult to give a strict definition. I'm thinking even when you're talking to apple moderators, they'll point people to webster's definition or something. Yeah, don't they. Some of which can be seen in the eye of the beholder, but there are certain objective definitions that you can communicate about a piece of content that we can intelligently tag, and finally allow filtering of those tags. Just with in terms of tactics, how many moderators do you have functioning with respect to tumblr? Right now there are external moderators in tumblr as well. The real number, i think, is more than 400. Okay, and that's the whole portal? Now, interestingly, ours is actually much less our other services, which i consider to be very potentially profitable. Part of what is needed to form a truly effective moderation scheme is the organization of extremely good equipment for moderators, providing the ability to quickly moderate a large number of videos and do manipulations in the plan. And probably even another very, very valuable for accurate and fast moderation. One person who works 8 hours a day, and by the way knows how to defeat thousands or tens of thousands of tasks if he has auxiliary tools. Actually, i want to reduce the use of external contractors for moderation and turn to internal teams with quality tools that can be used here, in particular through the use of things like machine learning and ai, unfortunately not to use them for decision making - put them to empower people. The central approach you've probably heard of. Ai can spontaneously be bad, people are absolutely not as good as ai at some things, but if you only combine them you can really get superhuman results - better than all of them separately. One thing that our organization has heard a lot about is how bad the job is for the people who wave in these moderation centers. They leave the location with post-traumatic stress disorder. Do you think about it? Is it what's on your favorite mind that you have to decide? Can these tools solve a problem like this? I, frankly, think about this all the time. And by the way, the first thing i did when i joined the tumblr team was provide support, trust and security, and also travel with people who work with such content. I think the people working on this also remain the unsung heroes of the web, for being no different from the police or the veterans who sell something really tough and hard to keep others safe and let the rest live. In an unrestricted society. These are the internet equivalents of this and one of the reasons why we are trying to make this command part of the rest of automattic. I really believe that this is serious work, given the above, i have a lot of sympathy for the design, and because of this i also sometimes try to do it myself - so as not to violate the power of this essence, and also to know that we are happy to use products and applications to make it more efficient. I think it's great. I think that more social leaders should pay attention to moderation. Tumblr is great - celebrities use it, kids use it. In the end, you are engaged in content moderation. The basis of the business of tumblr, facebook, twitter and other companies is content moderation and ranking. Strange and you do it, but i'm glad the viewer does it. You all do it too. Your comments section - you must moderate it and maintain the structure, in the place you need online. We do. Do you know coral?There are permanent moderators here, from those who work with us in the verge. They are very good. Shout out to eric. We bought a thing called coral. If the client just look at how the software is expressed, it's the best tool for moderating comments. Cool. It has some custom features. It's designed for that, but coral's thesis is that the moderation screen is many times easier to use. Ah. I have to check it out. I'll paint a picture: imagine if the verge was built on wordpress and coral was an open source plugin. Everyone on earth is able to get such cool features and - the whole internet would be better at communicating. The guys from the coral project will surround me when this is published. You prefer great. I would like you to try tumblr again and send me your opinion. Wherever the user wants to follow, it's cool. Whatever bugs you found - I'll get them back on the right phone today. My blog has been a tumblog for a long time. We are able to reverse it - a field for your articles or podcasts. Just be weird. Being weird online again. This is exciting. I'll see if i can open my old tumblog. If you post something you like there and send it to me, i will let's raise it. Now it's a favor for use. I'll take a look. Ethics lawyers need to be checked. I've heard from my own gen z nieces and nephews that people all exist on tumblr. They have their top favorite musicians there. It's great. If we can create a third place on the internet that doesn't have an ad model left, you may have found that our organization has just launched a no-nonsense tumblr update. Twitter and fb never do this because their business activists don't help them. Congratulations, luckily since tumblr doesn't give a lot of attachments anymore we can afford it and pass it as a model. I think it's pretty cool. We have a really decent chance of launching a social network based on non-surveillance capitalism, which i think is impossible for actors right now. They only have golden handcuffs. I wanted to ask about pocket casts and i don't have a lot of minutes, so i'll ask you something else. You stayed close. You and the network have grown up together. You ordered wordpress. You there. We live in the midst of what people often refer to as the transition to web3. I feel like you have a lot of thoughts on the idea that there will be another version of the web. Are you in it? Do you own any securities on the blockchain? Do you have laser eyes? How are things? I'm always playing with new technologies, from what it is to something that i do for fun. I tried almost everything, including all the cms we specified - everything. Approximately every 10 millennia, homo sapiens try to write a fresh version of the internet. Basically, it's marketing. Basically it's a fundraiser, but there's some truth to this day and night. Otherwise we wouldn't mention it. It's just fun to talk about and argue about. “Oh, what is web3? Such a move is not web3. This is web2. I had a thread where i said: “all the subtleties you say were web2, there really was no web2.” This is exactly what came after web2. Web2 was actually completely open, and it included technorati, flickr, and delicious. It was all interoperable, had tags and open content. Then it was replaced by other things like closed social media. Web2 was the api era. All this i meant. You'll get a map, you'll get an api from something, and then connect the two maps together. Yes. What is to my heart is the fact that we call web3. In fact, this is exactly what our confectioners call web2, but similar technologies are used here. And i think it's cool. You know? Blockchain is not suitable for the modern, only for many things. Name something for her, besides currency speculation? Well, it solves the problem two generals. This is a dedicated global record that may be the most secure software ever created by mankind. Okay. I mean, the help space is rife with scams, so i'm buying you in theory, but in reality, it's probably not. I'm talking here about bitcoin and ethereum, about what i believe. Like hit blockchains. We've never built such a secure software for that. Fair enough. “We've never built such a secure custom software for so long”.Microsoft, apple - billions and grand fortunes invested in their wasps. They regularly have zero hours and root exploits. There is a huge reward if you can open bitcoin, and yet it is still going forward. I'm amazed by this.It's incredible. Bitcoin also plays open source. Another question, absolutely everything that i said about open source code is the same with ethereum. These are projects with free source code. This is an example of applying open source to a new era that is essentially money and completely transforms it. Open source makes the fact that humanity has never had the opportunity to do before. This changes the course of things. It affects not only his appearance, but also everything else on the market, which i think is pretty cool. Do i have laser eyes? No. A lot of things can be fixed with technology like this, but i'm convinced that the problems that people are talking about positively, like resource usage or a lot of things like that, yes, they are difficulties, so we will fix them. When i say “we”, i mean the technologists and engineers who work tirelessly to release the latest versions of such works every day, every day, regularly, year after year. You have bitcoin ? Do you have nft? I have a little bit of everything. In fact, wordpress.Com was the first major internet service to accept bitcoin. In the twelfth year we visited the cover of bitcoin magazine. Amazing. The article was written by vitalik, who at the time was the editor of bitcoin magazine. Journal. Wow. Vitalik is the inventor of ethereum, if he didn’t know anything. This is crazy. I've always been on the lookout for this. Technologies go through adoption cycles. They go through peaks and trials. They go through winters when everyone thinks it's the dumbest thing in the world, and in particular that's where a lot of innovation comes from. First of all with nft, to me it's a bit like ico in 2017 or something like that. You said that there are a lot of people who work in the field of this editor for the wrong reasons that deceive people. There are many issues that need to be worked on. But in fact, in the long run, i would bet on the fact that gives people more free thought, more control and opens up new opportunities for people. I will ask again, but i can be with this caveat, i am asking about web3. Not bitcoin, not ethereum as a currency, but web3. I would vaguely define it as a version of the internet where absolutely everything you make is a tradable commodity and we get paid for clothes much more often than we do now. This is the song that everyone gets. V. You are a musician, you release a song. It's nft, people can sell it. When they sell it again, the patient gets a cut. This resource has a token, and visitors buy the token. The part where you directly connect the technology with the cultural aspect of the web, i would call web3, if such a definition is even possible. Okay. So let's just accept this definition as true and i'll answer it. Okay. But just for the visitors who go crazy in the established machines: yes, i just made this up, but here's what i have. That's part of what makes it hard to discuss things like this. Persons will argue about the definition for hours. But let's just take the two nuances that you said. What was the first part? Is there an opportunity to sell everything? Yes, everything is for sale. Obviously, this will not happen. Basically, i don't think we'd like that. There are many circumstances why things cannot be the object of commercial transactions. I would say that maybe nft will, of course, but will everything go like this? Of course not. Second, i do not believe that the salary of authors depends on blockchain technologies. This is a separate trend that serves as part of the end of intermediaries among distributors. In essence, instant messengers have allowed people to act more concretely than before. This is, among other things, the option that the open internet has been doing for 20 or 30 years. Power is in the hands of creators. I like that the salaries of writers, editors and the like are going up. This value goes where the game was published, but it happens in woocommerce, substack and other things just like it does on each of the “web3 platforms” mentioned. I think you should really break out of said trends, understand what is orthogonal and what is bound to happen. Creators capturing more of the value they come up with will max out. What is absolutely not going to happen is that everything will become a commodity. I would say that the financialization of the internet is in full swing, and it may stop, or reverse, but immediately , all the energy is to fund a bunch of things. By contrast, i'll add that one of the mostmost celebrated amazing things about the technological revolution was there to enable an abundance economy, but not scarcity. Things become more valuable, the steeper the copies.The positive flywheel of open source has been pointed out earlier. Wordpress becomes more valuable the stronger the free copies. In the new century, more things are piling up here to bring scarcity and the significance of scarcity to the network, maybe even programmatically with things like nft. The difference, however, that has been accumulated before - from tens of thousands of inventions of our race - is that using the services of an online network of bits instead of atoms, you and i cannot have zero-sum prosperity. We both can benefit from the original and the same. We are ready to copy this software perfectly, but it actually gives you the opportunity to create completely new shoe business options that are so much fun. Or maybe it's not a sale at all, and that's okay. Not everyone should be aiming or taking advantage. If there is one warning to pass among our merchandise, i think something is exactly how we should end up. Matt, you gave me some extra time. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for coming to decoder. I appreciate it. See you in five to ten years and hopefully we can drink before then. Please. I'm dying of desire.