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Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

When was the last time Rossmann had anything nice to say? He seems utterly miserable. I don’t doubt this is an important issue, but when he inserts himself into a dispute, it only gets more overblown and vitriolic on all sides.

(The ridiculous NYC to Austin thing is pretty representative. Complained incessantly about loony liberal New York, moved to Austin, now he complains about Texas. Sorry! Turns out there is no utopia for pathological contrarians.)

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He's just like Steve nowadays - he built his entire brand on being angry, so he has to be angry or his core audience will leave. And if that's what you like then fine, but for me it's just not interesting anymore.

It's the sad thing about field experts who become YouTubers: to keep up the viewership, they undergo self-Flanderization.

I was sad to watch Sabine Hossenfelder devolve from a level-headed critic of how research is done, into a loony crank who selects the contrarian angle on every issue. I'm sure the YouTube analytics inform her which topics perform better.

...or, or(!) maybe things really do suck right now? I don't think this is a controversial view. There's reasons to be upset and demand change regarding intellectual property legislation and computing and related technology's hardware.

Of course, but they get to choose what their channel is about, and we as viewers choose if we're intersted in it. Louis specifically used to put up videos of really interesting repairs of apple products and he just doesn't do that anymore. I'm not saying he should change or that he chose a wrong path - I'm just saying I'm not interested in his channel anymore, just like I stopped watching Gamers Nexus once Steve decided that his entire personality is just going to be ranting for 60+ minutes every video. Some people love that, I don't. That doesn't mean his complaints don't have merit or are not worth doing - just that consuming content(and it's very much content) takes time, which we all have in limited supply and I'd rather watch someone being happy with something rather than being angry at everything. If I feel like being angry I just open the news.

His rants were more palpable when he blasted the design of PCB visible on screen, or vendor that didn't want to sell replacement parts, when viewer could see the damage at the same time. Now he is just another guy with mic. And while he fights for good cause I find his videos at least 5 times too long considering the actual content.

Yeah he's often not in a good mood, but at least he points out these things, and I understand it can get you worked up if you're investigating these things and come to these concerning discoveries. I'm happy someone is doing that work, even if it's not fun. And he seemed to have taken up that job, and I think he's doing it well, albeit he is sometimes a bit intense, but I would forgive him that.

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