tumblr's place in the wp drama

So, Matt Mullenweg has become a big topic of conversation in the blogosphere lately, what with his series of fascinating choices. One thing that's been kind of lost from the conversation, though, is his behavior over on Tumblr.

It's true that Mullenweg is less of a figure over there. I've used Tumblr for...oh God, twelve years, I guess, and I didn't actually know his name until February.

Unfortunately, in February, he made himself memorable. The whole drama is summed up fairly well here, but very basically: a woman on Tumblr was complaining about Tumblr staff's response a campaign of transmisogynistic harrassment she was suffering, and said that she hoped Mullenweg "dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." Mullenweg, who was supposed to be on sabbatical, interpreted this as a death threat and deleted her account. Then, in the ensuing pushback, he tried to defend himself against claims of transmisogyny and in the process revealed a bunch of her account information that would not typically be made public. He also took the fight to the user's Twitter account, and generally had something of a public meltdown over there. It was bad enough that Tumblr's trans staffers were compelled to put out a statement to try to clean it up.

All in all, it was a pretty bad look. The worst of it, in my opinion, was how uncontrolled he was in a public setting. I am terribly suspicious of anyone willing to act in such an obviously unmeasured way in public, because I can't imagine that they're more reasonable in private. He couldn't keep his calm in the face of a positively cartoonish statement that honestly doesn't even have enough direction to be considered a death threat, in my opinion, and he couldn't cope with being criticized in the wake of taking the nuclear option, and he couldn't restrain himself at any point from using the power available to him in a manner consistent with the rules and norms of his own company. I honestly am not familiar enough with the people involved to know how much of this came from a disdain for trans women, but even if it was a totally equal opportunity tantrum, it looked terrible.

When he turned his attentions to WPEngine, I was hardly surprised. This is clearly the sort of guy he is: unrestrained, to say the least.