Comment by nebulous1
7 months ago
You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture.
Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
The author's response is perfectly calibrated to drive someone up the wall. Sling some mud and then hide behind "help, I'm being cornered."
Imagine doing this in the offline world. How well would this kind of behavior go over with people at the grocery store, do you think? Why is it acceptable online to behave like this?
As alternative perspective in terms of power dynamics: The Kagi CEO is a somewhat powerful figure as the CEO of a well-known tech company. The blog author is a random person from outside the tech startup culture.
The internet levels the playing field so the random person has the power to post criticism of the more powerful person and be heard. It doesn’t make sense to compare with the offline world because this wouldn’t be able to happen outside the internet.
In response the CEO is attempting to force them into a different context where he once again has power. The author recognizes this and therefore refuses.
But you’re not talking about Tim Cook, this is a guy running a company of ~10 people. Someone on the internet, with a following and an audience, has written an essay about how Vlad is a bad person, and now is implying the latter is abusive for trying to have a conversation.
This is psychotic behavior.
There’s a huge spectrum between NY Times writing a sourced article about a powerful business magnate and someone disparaging an SMB owner on their blog. If I took the posts and emails of someone I knew in my life and posted them online, I would probably get a call from the police.
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One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications - because you really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way.
Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
You missed out a step. Shit all over them, then block them, then tell them that you blocked them (steps 2 & 3 may be reversed on some platforms).
> One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications
Ummm dating and breakups?
Another thing you don't quite seen in real life: strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to later post it for the whole world to see, to point and laugh.
The Internet has turned us into sociopaths.
>Another thing you don't quite seen in real life: strangers that record a serendipitous conversation, to later post it for the whole world to see, to point and laugh.
In the thread linked above, I think his reasoning for posting the email is reasonable. I find this similar to what the Apollo dev did when discussing with Reddit people. If he didn't record the conversation or make it public, his words could have been twisted.
This feels very similar to the trope on X, where someone makes an inflammatory or stupid comment, people angrily respond calling them stupid, and the original person then claims they're being harassed/were just joking, and ultimately neither side actually communicates. The people who like the original poster continue on believing that they were being harassed, and people who thought they were being stupid continue on believing they're being stupid.
I feel that Vlad is justified, even if I personally would've just considered it to be a lost cause and just kept receipts in case it became necessary to publicly respond, similar to how the Apollo dev released receipts when Reddit tried to make him out to be in the wrong.
Vlad is justified to reach out and try to start a conversation but when the author says no, you drop it. That didn't happen here and it's a bad look.
Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business.
If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.
If someone tells you to stop emailing them after 1 email don't send 2 more. It's that easy
Sure. But the first time they said "don't email me any more", it was actually more like "Don't email me any more... and another thing! X Y Z." playing an equally petty game of "who gets the last word".
After posting a blog entry specifically targeting and naming someone, their business, posting it on the internet and starting a Mastodon thread.
I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being civil, but context please.
You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while pretending you're above interaction with them, then play the victim when they respond and universally and unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the last word in.
If you want someone to not e-mail you, tell them (if that) and block them. It's that easy, unless you're baiting
Is it so weird that I 100% agree with both you, and the parent comment yours is replying to?
It all had the usual flame-bait "look at me" vibe as much as any substance. I feel that Vlad fell for the bait more than anything.
So does the author. But then I also don’t care about the author and don’t pay them for my search engine :/
Tldr: you can't just spread a very negative opinion about someones hard work and then plug your ears shut for any kind of non-symathetic interaction.
In my eyes this rationale would make sense if there was no backstory to this. If there was no preceeding blogpost, I'd consider Vlads messages pure spam.
But the context here is different: The author wrote a very critical, and clearly opinionated blogpost. There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Now the author seems to want to avoid responsibility, while Vlads attempt to react to a public hit piece with a respectful conversation was honestly the best way to handle this.
You are right... up until maybe the second reply.
Vlad saw something critical of his hard work and wanted to put in the effort to clarify his stances and mend a relationship. I can absolutely understand that, your work is a reflection of yourself and nobody wants to be judged on misunderstanding. He might've even felt like he let someone who cared about Kagi down and wanted to make it right. Again, all understandable!
However, twice, the blog post author said they did not want to engage. At this point, regardless of how you feel about what was said, you should probably move on; they said their piece, you tried to engage, they rebuffed, oh well, do something else! To continue on is both incredibly annoying and a bit unhinged.
If Vlad absolutely felt like he needed to respond to this, he should've digested the main points of the original blogpost, reflected on them, and written his own blog post to a more general audience. Not necessarily in _response_ to the author, but understanding that more people probably feel this way as well and want to hear clear answers. Perfect examples of this would be an "Our stance on privacy" or "How we're ensuring Kagi's future," again factoring in the criticism from the author.
I write all of this as someone who pays for and likes Kagi. I think it's a good product, if a bit scattered at times. But the blog post does hit on some concerns that I have (privacy being the biggest) and seeing the follow up leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject. In fact, that is generally how most critical writing has worked, for centuries. If you're unhappy with the review of your restaurant in the paper, you _might_ be able to convince them to publish a short owner response, once, but they're certainly not going to engage in a dialogue about it.
> You can criticise something without obligating yourself to have a conversation with the subject.
That's the fundamental premise of telling people that they are sealioning.
Not everyone agrees with it (I suspect age plays more a role than anything else).
Your historical example doesn't really map very well to today, because control over the ability to put some text somewhere that others can read it is very, very different than it was historically.
None of this excuses the Kagi CEO's failure to back off when asked/told to. They should just have used their own blog or equivalent to respond.
Still, generalizing to a broad claim about raising an issue in public creating no future obligations seems somewhat wrong to me. You don't have to speak in public about anything at all. For me, your choice to do so creates some limited obligations towards future engagement (though I'm not sure quite where the limits lie).
>There was clear intention in engaging with this subject.
Yes, and then that engagement - which very much took place - did not give the author any confidence that FURTHER ENGAGEMENT (via email) would change the situation.
If I talk to you back and forth about an issue I have and feel like I'm talking to a brick wall, so I then write a critical review based on those issues, why should I be forced to not be a brick wall, in return? If Vlad wants someone to listen to him, he should probably take some time to engage with (not just 'listen to') what is being said on it's fundamental merits (not whatever surface level bit he wants to latch on to).
Recontextualizing an issue is not addressing it. Explaining an issue is not addressing it. Describing a paradigm that contextualizes an issue is not addressing it.
There's probably some backstory between Vlad and Lori there.
But beyond that, there's some irony in that exchange. If Vlad had simply stopped engaging when Lori asked, it would indeed make Lori seem like more of an asshole for rejecting an appeal to have a simple conversation. But then Vlad transgressed that wish, making Lori's case about not wanting to engage.
Um, no. In general, if you tell someone to stop messaging you, they get to send one more message to react to that and tie up the conversation. "OK. You still haven't addressed points A, B, and C, so I still disagree. Let's wrap it up here then." That's perfectly reasonable and polite.