Samantha Cole, reporting for 404 Media:

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic — and Mullenweg — could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

That does not seem compatible with a culture of trust within a company. Cole also reports that Mullenweg has made another buyout offer this week, and is threatening employees who leak to the press. This very report from 404 Media, under the headline “Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos”, is not going to help. The whole situation is just very depressing.