“We want to make the best tools in the world, and we want to do it for decades to come. I’ve been doing WordPress for 15 years, I want to do it the rest of my life.”
The last time I chatted with Kara was in 2013 in the back of a pedicab in Austin. This time I got to sit in the red chair at Vox headquarters in San Francisco, and per usual Kara was thoughtful, thorough and to the point: we talked about WordPress and the future of the open web, the moral imperative of user privacy, and how it all relates to what’s going on at Facebook.
(As it turns out, Facebook also is turning off the ability for WordPress sites — and all websites — to post directly to users’ profile pages. The decision to shut down the API is ostensibly to fight propaganda and misinformation on the platform, but I think it’s a big step back for their embrace of the open web. I hope they change their minds.)
Kara and I also talked about distributed work, Automattic’s acquisition of Atavist and Longreads, and why every tech company should have an editorial team. Thanks again to Kara and the Recode team for having me.
I see it’s still possible to sign in to Atavist with Facebook – so the flow of data is in Facebook’s favour with Atavist and all the other sites that have Facebook login enabled. I imagine the next step will be for sites to reconsider the balance of whether to continue allowing Facebook logins.
I think that WordPress is an antidote to Facebook, Google and the like, with its strong purpose, commitment to open source and decentralised model.
But I fear this is changing as some of the big sponsors (WP Engine, Bluehosts, etc…) are buying their way into the ecosystem. It’s hard for me to compete with them when… these brands all over WordPress.
I’m worried about AMP too, with Google playing such a central role in what is, effectively, a big data play (under the hood).
Really insight-full Interview. WordPress is something Ive adopted for my web design in a big way. Great to hear some background and listen to the desire to keep building the vision for the web they want to see. WordPress a third of the web sites, wow!