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.

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.

I don't know about that psychoanalysis bit at the end, 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 and starting rumours about personal issues relating to family and health despite having absolutely zero insight into any of that stuff beyond what they see in the videos.

However I would agree that his uploads have been inconsistent within the last few months, which has stopped me from watching them as often. Like others have said here, sometimes his soapbox videos are not as relevant or interesting as he thinks. It's his channel so I guess he can upload whatever he wants, but I feel he was on a hot streak for a while there and that has come to an end.

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.