About ten years ago, when I first ventured into website design, the first platform I encountered was WordPress.com. Unfortunately, it wasn’t made clear that WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two different entities. I was misled into believing that WordPress.com was the true WordPress, when in reality, WordPress.org offers an open-source version that gives users much more freedom and control. This confusion seems to be part of a strategy by Automattic, and its owner, Matt Mullenweg, to push WordPress.com as the WordPress experience, which is misleading.Mullenweg’s approach with WordPress.com feels greedy and manipulative, capitalizing on the reputation of the larger, open-source WordPress project. The core of WordPress is its thriving community of contributors, yet Mullenweg appears to be sidelining the best of them—those who think independently and offer real value.Furthermore, the products developed by WordPress.com and Automattic, like Jetpack and Gutenberg, are poorly designed, not user-friendly, and add little value to the WordPress ecosystem. They tend to complicate the user experience rather than enhance it.In short, WordPress.com is a shadow of the real WordPress project, which thrives thanks to its contributors—not the unnecessary and subpar additions pushed by Automattic.
