Comment by PaulDavisThe1st

> 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).