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.
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.
Yes, Rossmann is autistic. The “repeat the same point ten times in a row” trait he has is sort of a love/hate thing I guess. As I said in another comment, he was on a hot streak a while ago commenting on important and/or interesting topics and I didn’t mind it then. It’s only grating to me now because, as you say, not all of his current videos are related to interesting issues.