mthoms

You answered a different question than the one I asked.

There is emotional abuse and there is physical abuse. It’s obviously not physical abuse, so can you articulate what makes it emotional abuse?

Wouldn’t emotional abuse require both a perpetrator and victim?

I hope you’re right but this is exactly what I thought about his first term. Yet, here we are.

Important distinction: Google’s official, publicly declared policy is to follow the government names. Apple has never publicly declared any such policy. It was a choice.

(If Apple have indeed said this somewhere I’m happy to be proven wrong)

That's not what a "right" is.

Privacy requires immense trust. Ignoring user preferences the minute there’s some money to be made erodes that trust.

One of primary reasons people value online privacy is because advertisers are incessantly “nudging” them to do things that aren’t in their interest.

It’s exhausting.

People don’t want to be nudged. They want to be respected.

Well, if that's the bar we're arbitrarily setting, then I guess so.

It's slowly getting worse. For instance, the update nag for Pages and Numbers Applications towards their newer subscription-capable equivalents can't be disabled in the MacOS UI. Selecting "Not Now" still results in the nag appearing every. single. day.

The frog is being slowly boiled.

The principle of respecting user autonomy.

In all sincerity, people take it seriously because it helps them sleep at night.

I'm stuck in this dilema too.

This is one of the very techniques under which the entire Apple Empire has been built. They take the "sweet spot" for $product and intentionally offer options on either side of that sweet spot. They also nerf the lower-end option in other ways (i.e. fewer ports) so to make the upgrade more enticing. This enables them to offer "Prices starting from...." that are dead-end options (like 8GB RAM or 128GB HD's).

Lots of companies do this across various industries. But it works best when the brand name is really strong and/or the competitive landscape is very weak.

I've grown to accept that it's just how they operate.

If you understood the history then it would make more sense. Mullenweg is himself a notorious bully. There have been Mullenweg related uhh... "controversies" going back roughly two decades. People are tired.

Is the WP community toxic? No, it's absolutely lovely. But there is a dark cloud over everything when it comes to the project's direction and governance.

Mullenweg yields enormous power and is famously vindictive, so people can't speak up in healthier ways. I think this is the result; when a leader constantly wields his power to destroy critics, they tend to move underground.

But nobody posts this stuff "with glee". Quite the contrary.

(For the record, I think some of the critique goes over the line as well, but that's just the internet. I don't think it's as prominent as your comment seems to imply).

>We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.

I strongly disagree with the premise.

Aside from that, "WordPress" is 100% controlled by one guy. A guy who has repeatedly demonstrated total and complete disregard for the community. Ergo "we" don't "have" WordPress; It's something we're allowed to use (until Matt decides to ban us for an arbitrary, petty reason that doesn't even require articulation).

That's not something that belongs to a proverbial "we". That's the point.

Dinosaur is often used to describe someone who has grown out-of-touch with their industry. It aptly describes the technical skills Matt was just breathlessly boasting about.

In case you missed it, Matt's boast was part of his attack on people like me who disagree with him ("stupid people swayed by bots") and his direct personal attack on YouTuber Theo Browne, whom he described as having "two brain cells".

In the context Matt established himself, "dinosaur" is pretty tame, no?

Yes, two wrongs don't make a right. I'll tone it down. But if you're going to police the comments, kindly consider applying the policing equally. Just because someone is a quasi-famous tech celebrity, it shouldn't give their behaviour a pass.

Edit: I just noticed that elsewhere in this thread he calls his opponents (myself included) "idiots", yet there's no policing on that comment. Apparently, it's only "dinosaur" that crosses your red line.