"Sending lots of love to Vi Hart. May the world someday become a safe place for you to share your videos once again. Our students love you."
<a href="https://x.com/ChurchofMath/status/1886860186452943001" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ChurchofMath/status/1886860186452943001</a><p>Edit: I was going to post only this tweet, but I couldn't get it to fit in the character limit. It now occurs to me it might be unkind to circumvent the removal of all but one of Vi Hart's videos, presumably in response to an adverse experience. However, I also think the withdrawal of previously published videos is a problem with streaming video platforms.<p>I suppose I should point out the one remaining video (On Gender, from 9 years ago):
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmKix-75dsg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmKix-75dsg</a><p>I don't know exactly what happened, but judging by the video that remains, maybe gender-related harassment prompted ViHart to make the mathematical videos private.
She seems to have done this as a political statement on gender, which I personally support on its face but I do hope this doesn't have an adverse impact on students who once relied on her videos. She used to offer her videos as torrent downloads for easy teacher access -- I wish she'd left her website up to have the videos still accessible to those in need of them off of YouTube.<p>Other maths YouTubers will take her place and already have as she has not been that active in recent years anyway.<p>That being said, one thing is that I'm <i>certain</i> of is that she did not remove her videos due to online harassment, because this is something she's spoken about many times before. In her video "Feeling sad about tragedy" (the video I'm most mourning from this recent purge) she spoke about this topic over a visual of scrolling through a Gmail search of "marry me", showing off 100s of incels who had messaged her via the comments section inappropriately. I don't want to paraphrase everything she said, as this video is likely in the Internet Archive for you to see, but the quote that has stuck with me all these years is <i>"Why would I be worried about what I get on the internet as Vi Hart when it's nothing compared to what I get in real life as me?"</i> She also had a video about comments specifically, "Vi Hart's guide to comments", where she spoke about types of online comment abuse and the reasons not to respond to any of it. She ends by saying "I, Vi Hart, am... not scared at all."
Having watched the remaining video, maybe this is related/protest to the recent statements and policies of the US federal government declaring gender+sex as strict booleans and actively harassing and destroying any institutional existence that acknowledges or embraces any alternative to the strict model?<p>Type checker gone extreme-strict and having issues compiling in the face of real world and real humans.