Comment by magistr4te
7 months ago
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.