12mo ago

Sorry but I will say this as I see it

I love Louis and I've been following his videos for a long time. What he does is supremely important to our messed up society.

But here's the thing: for the past few months, I've had the distinct feeling than each of Louis' videos is slightly more unhinged than the previous one.

I mean I'm fully aware Louis' videos are not mainstream, and until recently, I've always felt there was a clear method to the randomness. But lately, it¨s been more randomness than method for me, and it's reached a point where I feel it's doing a disservice to the causes of right to repair and sovereign ownership.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

I really hate to come out saying this, but I really think there's something going on with Louis, and beyond the causes he fights for on our behalf - and goodness knows I'm eternally grateful for what he's achieved - I'm honestly a bit worried for him.

4 comments

I would consider myself a casual watcher of his. I used to watch more but I think his videos tipped over into a weird feeling place for me when he started putting a giant banner on the bottom of the videos about not buying LG TVs.
I guess I missed whatever that was about, the video I was watching had nothing to do with LG TVs so it must have just been a past grievance that has sorta carried on into the video I was watching.
I think he’s right about a lot of the positions he’s taking but I also think that spending all your time aggravated and calling out shitty corporate practices causes your outlook to change.
If I’m recalling correctly the video I saw was about shark vacuum cleaners and I clicked it because I have a shark vacuum cleaner and I’ve watched his content before. If I’m recalling correctly the thing that had him upset was that you couldn’t purchase replacement parts on their website. And yea, that sucks.
The thing is a lot of life sucks. In fact it’s by design, if people are seeking profit the only way you can actually generate profit is to sell something for more than it’s worth, sorta by definition. Profit seeking corporations wanting to sell you a $200 replacement vacuum instead of a $40 replacement part makes sense with the incentive structure of the world around us, even if it sucks.
My mom used to tell me to pick my battles. I think he has sorta lost sight of that, everything is a top tier outrage. And the thing is, I don’t know if he’s even wrong, these things all suck and they are outrageous practices and companies shouldn’t fuck over the customer.
That said, if you spend a majority of your precious and finite time existing being angry about that instead of finding some amount of joy in life, did they win or did you. The guy at shark vacuums that got a bigger salary and bonus probably doesn’t care if Louis is giving himself a rage stroke over their lack of replacement parts. 99.9% of the people buying the vacuum weren’t going to buy a replacement part, roll up their sleeves, and fix the damn thing. It’s a throw away culture, and that sucks too, but constantly being upset by the conditions you find yourself in and that are largely out of your control is a recipe for misery.
- I think this puts it very well.
  Additionally, if every problem is worthy of a rant video, the rants lose impact. He's not wrong, but at this point I almost feel like it would be more useful for him to make some sort of wiki site where he documents these problems, then just do like a weekly summary video. Of course still do the videos on current happenings too, but just... slow the roll a bit and make an easy way for people to look up these issues at a glance before they make purchasing decisions or something.
  One of his "recent" videos was a rant about how one of his former employees got banned from a hardware repair subreddit, and it just felt like useless shit flinging. I can understand and appreciate him using his platform to shout out a friend and try and help his friend build an audience, but I highly doubt any of his viewers needed a reminder of the shittyness of Reddit and all its little tyranical mod fiefdoms. Just point people to your old videos about it, give a sentence or two saying "it's only gotten worse since then".
  I completely understand the autism spectrum (fairly certain he's admitted to being on it) and engineer need to explain everything out deeply and explicitly but it just gets exhausting to watch/listen to. And for all his ranting, he didn't do the one thing that would be actually useful/positive: point his viewers towards reddit alternatives like lemmy.
I really haven't followed Rossmann at all, to speak of. I remember watching maybe one of his videos about the tractor right-to-repair court case in the U.S. a while back and thought "I should really watch this guy more." I think I've seen maybe one other video about repairing Apple devices since then.
But very shortly thereafter, Grayjay came on my radar. (Grayjay is a Youtube/other-streaming-service client app for Android made by a company called "Futo" that Rossmann got involved with/employed by pretty recently.) And that got me looking into Futo.
Futo says all kinds of good things about user sovereignty and stuff out of one side of its mouth. It really bills itself as champions of consumer rights in tech or whatever. But out of the other side of its mouth, Futo has really kindof gone out of its way to sabotage all things Open Source. They've released a lot of app(lication)s under licenses that don't meet the Open Source definition while calling them "Open Source". They've talked a ton of smack about Open Source. And when they got blowback and finally decided to walk back and apologize for being assholes about Open Source, their apology was a non-apology in which they still derided Open Source.
And at this point I'm convinced their only connection to "Open Source" and to user sovereinty over their devices/software is a cosmetic PR patina that they're leveraging to dupe people into giving their fully-for-profit enterprise more money.
And Rossmann having anything remotely to do with that has really soured me on him specifically.
- from the apology link above
  Source first” is a new licensing standard that we will be using to describe some of our software.
  
  Source first software will: * Allow users to see the source code of all of our software. * Ensure that you can modify the source code for your own use, and redistribute it. *Ensure that our software is not limited to use by a particular organization. * Demand that any client we release that requires a server, also releases the server software under principles as free as the client software. * Avoid the integration of crypto scams. * Reject “the customer is the product” as a business model. * Most crucially however, source first software will not force programmers to let others, especially the tech oligopoly, profit from their work for free.
  I disagree with your conclusion. It seems they're trying to do something new that addresses some of the issues with developers not being compensated for their work. If you believe that the open source community is healthy and not in need of change, i understand why you might not trust anyone trying to upset such an important foundational part of the software ecosystem. I think they are trying to thread the needle of having accessible open source but in a manner that large companies cant build their fortunes off of, while those that built and maintain key parts of the corps codebase aren't compensated for their efforts.
  I don't fault anyone for being weary of outfits using an established term like, 'open source' in a way that doesn't conform to how most of us understand it. I'm glad people complained so Futo had to address it. But I dont feel like they're shady as much as i think think they made a bad call and were made to adjust and clarify their position.