by tombert | 2025-09-06 01:47:11+00:00
> I do get a little tired of the woke stuff, but a Youtuber has to follow a specific pattern to get traffic. It's an important message.

Yes. This is why I called it a low effort grift.

The anti-woke stuff was overplayed in 2016, and it's even more tiring and stupid now. You're free to think it's "important", but it's not. It's just lazy shit he does instead of actual "journalism" (which I suppose is what he calls it).

> I'm sure he takes it at least a little personally that he is banned from forums, conferences, talking to various companies about their activities, has his technical achievements

> He wants to be a tech journalist but he is persecuted over politics.

He's not "persecuted" over politics. He's putting his opinions out there specifically to get a reaction, and then he pretends to be surprised that people actually react to his opinion. You could say it's persecution, but it's really not: everyone draws a line on this stuff.

For example: if someone was super public about lowering the age of consent to three years old then you probably wouldn't be super upset when he's no longer invited to conferences. That could technically be considered a "political opinion" and I'm sure that he would claim he's being persecuted and we would collectively roll our eyes.

Obviously Lunduke isn't that bad, at least as far as I know, but my point is that he's making provocative statements and unless he's the biggest moron on the planet then he has to know that.

It's something that bothers me; people like Lunduke will write shit specifically to be provocative (like writing a completely braindead thing about trans people not existing) and get a reaction. That is his goal. Then he acts surprised that people react negatively to the thing that he wanted and expected people to act negatively to. It's low-effort attention-seeking behavior.

I have said lots of provocative stuff throughout my life, it can be fun to make people uncomfortable. Some of it I am a bit embarrassed by, but I haven't made an entire career out of making people upset and pretending to not understand why they're upset.

> ignored due to irrelevant (and popular) political views

A viewpoint being "popular" pays no bearing on whether or not it's harmful so I have no idea why you brought it up.

If Lunduke has posted a very public negative opinion about a group of people that are active in a community (e.g. trans people in the FOSS world), then it's not "irrelevant" for people to not want to affiliate with him.

> I expect that and appreciate him taking the heat for saying what we all think.

We don't "all" think that. Pretending to be upset over a trans person working on software or purposefully misgendering people is not something I have ever really wanted to say, and even if I did I would just fucking say it instead of parasocially bonding with some wish.com wannabe demagogue.

Also, I'm not even completely convinced by his "achievements". I'm sure he worked at Microsoft and OpenSUSE, but that's not saying much. I used to work for Apple for several years. I didn't work there but I did at one point get an offer to work at Canonical. I don't want to give too much correlation data about myself but I have also worked at an extremely popular social media website. A lot of people on this forum can make similar claims. It doesn't make me or him particularly special.

Big tech companies hire a lot of very stupid people. They hire a lot of very smart people too, but even if he worked at Microsoft, even in the 90's, isn't an indication of intelligence or making major achievements, and frankly I kind of get the impression that he embellishes his achievements to try and make himself seem more credible, though I have no evidence of that.

Also, wasn't he basically just a spokesperson for OpenSUSE? I didn't think he was doing anything technical there.

ETA:

This is all to say, it's not like Lunduke has been cut out of conferences and the like just for voting republican or anything. I've met plenty of people in tech who are conservative, don't try to hide that fact, and they're not shunned or anything, so I don't buy the conspiracy theory that conservative voices are "persecuted" in tech spaces.

Lunduke goes a step further by being outwardly hostile towards LGBTQ groups, and then pretends he's not doing that. This is why he's been considered so unbelievably insufferable in the tech world: his entire way of speaking is dishonest.