this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024

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Louis Rossmann

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Louis Rossmann Community on Lemmy.world: For fans/supporters of Louis Rossmann and his work

About Louis Rossmann

Louis Rossmann is a repair shop owner and a vocal supporter of the Right To Repair movement. He runs a YouTube channel with a variety of content - from board repair videos, to news and updates in the technology space.

His insightful and reasonable opinions on technology and product ownership tend to attract a lot of attention.

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Sorry but I will say this as I see it (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

He seems the same to me, from following him since he was in New York; he has always been a leader, not a follower.

He moved away from New York, if you followed all that happened in that state and the many videos he released after that.

We are also going through political tribalism being at an all-time high due to the general election, again.

He is the most outspoken and really open person discussing and talking about the right to repair, IMO. I don't know that many that do what he does.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I think you might need to take a step back from what seems like the parasocial relationship you’ve developed with the guy. I have seen far too many instances lately of “fans” of YouTubers getting overly concerned

I'm not a Youtuber's fan and I have no relationship with Louis. What I see is another human being who seems to have begun a slow slide into incoherence. Being concerned for another human being is called empathy.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Implying he is mentally unwell based on the 10 minute videos

Kind of like, oh, I don't know... implying a Lemmy user you know nothing about has a unhealthy "parasocial" relationship going on with a random Youtuber based on a single post 🙂

he chooses to upload and then spreading this unfounded rumour across social media is really disrespectful and dangerous behaviour.

Don't reverse the roles: he's the one who puts himself in the limelight. If he didn't want people to make public coments on his very public videos, then he shouldn't make his videos public.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

You might want to look up a definition of "parasocial." It sounds like you're taking that term to mean something other than the common usage of the term. It's not any kind of insult or accusation or anything. ("Unhealthy parasocial relationship" might be, though Ilandar didn't use that phrase specifically. Ilandar is accusing you of making some logical leaps without any real knowledge of what might be going on with Rossmann. I'm not saying you are or aren't making logical leaps, but just the word "parasocial" doesn't mean anything like that.)

"Parasocial relationship" is just the term used to describe the relationship between a fairly well-known public-ish figure and their audience. (Though I think it usually tends to be used more when a "social-network-ish" platform like YouTube is involved than with, say, Hollywood actors.) If you've watched some of Rossman's videos, at least enough to know a little bit about his public persona and if he also doesn't really even know in specific that you exist (or if you're no more than a username he's seen on a bunch of YouTube comments or something), the proper term for that is "parasocial relationship" whether you're making logical leaps or not. If you've watched any significant number of Mr. Beast videos but don't know him beyond that, you have a parasocial relationship with him. I follow the Google software engineer Rob Pike on Mastodon and read all his toots. So I by definition have a parasocial relationship with Rob Pike and he with me. That's not to say Rob Pike knows I exist, nor that I have any special knowledge about him, nor that he owes me anything. (And in fact by calling my relationship with him "parasocial", I'm basically explicitly saying I don't have any relationship with him beyond consuming some content he publishes publicly.)

Kind of like, oh, I don't know... implying a Lemmy user you know nothing about has a unhealthy "parasocial" relationship going on with a random Youtuber based on a single post 🙂

Again, I'm not taking any position on whether there's any thing "unhealthy" going on with you. (I haven't watched enough of Rossmann's recent content to know whether any of your statements about him are justified or not.) But if he's a "random Youtuber" and you don't have any other relationship with him than having watched and maybe commented on a good handful or more of his videos, then I can think of no more perfect example of a "parasocial relationship."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.