As a trans person who pays the bills hawking my Patreon on this site, Photomatt's behavior has been disappointing to say the least. I hope staff can come to a more reasonable conclusion.
I think I speak for everyone when I say we would appreciate some insight and transparency into the content moderation systems.
Having a blog you've run for 7+ years nuked out of nowhere, with no communication, reason, or recourse beyond navigating a maze of broken automated systems, is pretty frustrating. I can't really blame users for saying some TOS-breaking shit, because sometimes it feels like the only way to communicate with staff here is publicly.
Matt for the love of God stop fucking posting and talk to your PR team.
matt is supposed to be on fucking sabbatical rn. the last time he refused to log off and caused problems swinging his dick around was on the wordpress.org twitter hawking a fundraiser for his birthday and claiming that as founder he didn't need to get permission fr marketing or otherwise worry about not offending people. this time he promised everyone at automattic he'd actually take a break (and become a chess grandmaster in 3 months, which, whatever, dumb techbro ego bs). instead he logged back in almost immediately, berated one of the apps teams publicly, refused to log off, then did a bunch of blog posts and interviews saying shit ranging from "Capitalism is, as Nicholas Stern says, the best way to take care of people we donât know." through "essentially [queer or Black groups are] tribes or identities that separate us. And so part of me really identifies with Martin Luther King being, I want my children judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin."
i am, thank fucking everything, no longer working for him, and yet. i quit before leadership could force my lead to fire me. a disproportionate amount of queer people have been fired or forced to leave in the last year, bc he has personally been sending messages pressuring all leads to pick a "weak link" and going on about culture fit in ways that are fucking loaded. and then there's the exodus of ex-leads who have been saying clearly that they quit instead of being forced to fire people, and the whole team of quality engineers that was axed late last year (oh but it's not a layoff, they all magically had bad performance despite great individual performance reviews, one of them being on parental leave, and all of them being blindsided), and so on and so on...
honestly it fucking sucks bc for a long time i was able to say, despite matt personally being behind half the bad ideas that have plagued tumblr in the last few years, that i think automattic was still doing a better job than most other companies who could afford to take on a liability like tumblr would do. and i thought that about wordpress.com too, and kept recommending it bc automattic's ethics were at least marginally better than most companies in the same space not built on open source. there were people i knew who were working on the transmisogynist moderation issue, but [gestures] decisionmakers have decided they're selling tumblr data (including private data!) to midjourney instead of doing anything but doubling down i guess. now that matt's weighed in it's not gonna get better. the queer staff remaining have used what leverage they had in every way possible and stopped being listened to a long time ago. support staff are paid far too little for what they deal with. i get messages from my ex-colleagues regularly because they're all trying desperately to jump ship. anyway usually i think people are misguided in putting the blame for corporate decisions directly at the feet of the figurehead ceo but in this case he is genuinely detested and keeps personally making the worst decisions and doubling down on them
