The thumbnails LTT uses tells you everything you need to know about his content and company.
I've always found the titles to be clickbaity and uninformative. If I want to look up their videos again I would have no idea what the title is to look up.
It doesn't help that the titles get changed a handful of times throughout the release day so even if you remember the name it may not be the same if you want to re-watch it.
Yeah I think LTT content has really declined over the years. They're spread so thin now they're churning out a bunch of low quality content rather than a few accurate and entertaining videos.
To be fair, this is how the YouTube algorithm requires big channels to act to maximize views, ads, and money. They've got way too many people reliant on that income to do anything different than exactly what best optimization strategies work
If your organization is too big to act with integrity then maybe it’s time to downsize a bit.
It's been clear for quite a while that they've focused only on growth/expansion with more channels, the lab, so many new employees, etc and at the same time you can see the sloppiness getting worse with lack of preparation, lack of quality control to meet deadlines, etc.
The Billet Labs thing is absolutely inexcusable. Shitting on the product despite LMG being the one responsible for not even having the correct GPU for it, giving it a bad review, then doubling down when called out over a couple hundred bucks of time? The auctioned off prototype is so much worse as well. Not sure of the Canadian terms but in the US it'd potentially be theft by conversion. Literally sold someone else's property. Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and accept it as an accident, it seems like more evidence of whoever is running their logistics department being incompetent IMO.
One thing that bothers me about the billets stuff is they stand by their core point, which is that it’s a useless product.
But that’s not the only thing they’ve claimed. They also said it’s a bad product that doesn’t work properly, thus damaging the company’s reputation.
To most people that’s a significant difference for how they view the company:
“Useless” product that works well at what it does = hopefully this company will make something more relevant in future
“Useless” product that doesn’t even work properly = I’ll avoid this company in future
I really hope stepping down as CEO leads to Linus surrounding himself with people he trusts to call him out when he's missing something.
He strikes me as the kind of person who is susceptible to a few certain mental traps you kinda don't want to see in a leader of a large influential organization:
None of these constitute outright malice, IMO, but boy can they lead to a problematic working environment.
I'm sure there will be quite the flame war as a result of this, which I think is a bummer. Linus strikes me as someone who's acting in good faith, but has an unshakable habit of making rushed decisions without considering the full scope of their impact, and is (or has been) lacking the appropriate feedback structure to help him learn to either a) make more thoughtful decisions, or b) fully delegating those decisions to folks who are better equipped to make them.
Here's hoping this leads to positive change.
Linus is surrounded by people who can call him on his bullshit. Luke is very aware of the shit Linus steps in and lets him know. Linus just kinda sucks at publicly admitting it, at least not without getting his own jab in. Hence taking over the "Trust Me Bro" joke.
Linus takes all criticism on LMG as a personal attack regardless of his involvement. Hopefully, once Tarren steps in, he'll be able to wrangle Linus and just let LMG handle the public relations side.
This is the main issue I have with Linus. Doubling down on dumb takes.
Is it real that Linus publicly said that they can't justify putting in another half day to ensure the data is correct before publishing it? Why would anyone watch their low quality content which they admit to be worthless?
The weird part of that is the the amounts he's saying it would cost/time to re-run the test -- $100-500 (probably like that pay for a employee's day) -- are nothing in the context of a company. Especially one that was sold or offered $100million. My company run on like a $3million budget. A few hundred dollars is nothing to us. That's a staff lunch or our bar tab sometimes. If the retesting costs like $5000....OK, that's certainly something to pause and think about. But a few hundred? A day or half a day for an employee to re-do the test? That's too much?
Maybe to the average person, the average viewer, that sounds like a lot of money. But not to a business. Certainly not one as large as LMG.
Even more ridiculous when LMG could monetize that 500$ of time spent into another video and make the money back.
The video from GN had footage from WAN show where he said that, so yes. I have not personally looked up the context, but it also sounds very much in character for how Linus thinks these days, so I am not at all surprised.
I also think it's an excuse to cover up the real problem: complete disorganization and the extreme pace of production. In the video itself, Linus seems legitimately upset with his employee that didn't even realize they had the wrong GPU. He did not seem surprised, however, which is very telling.
My biggest problem right now with LTT:
He has literally admitted that they have too much to do right now (see https://linustechtips.com/topic/1526180-gamers-nexus-alleges-lmg-has-insufficient-ethics-and-integrity/page/27/#comment-16079025)
but at the same time he doesn't see the need to reduce the number of videos to achieve the required quality and just tells people to "stay tuned".
I find that very strange to be honest.
It's because Linus still has startup brain. He was squeezing blood from the stone for the first few years and his success then makes him believe that he needs to maintain that same mentality now.
Fortunately, he's also realized that he doesn't like running a large company and he's hired a CEO. Unfortunately, said CEO is still stuck in his previous role and won't actually be starting full-time for another few months. So now the company gets to sit in an awkward limbo of Linus checking out but Tarren not being ready to take over.
Once he is able to be a real CEO of LMG, I'm willing to bet things will start to dramatically change. Tarren has been running businesses as businesses for a while now and thus should know how to shape the company. He'll be able to adjust the goals and fix the spends to align with those goals. Since the company is privately owned, as long as Linus doesn't step on the process, it should go pretty well.
I watched the occasional LTT video, they are entertaining and helpful at a general understanding but I've often taken their data with a grain of salt.
Emily (formerly Anthony) Young was the one writer at LTT who stood out as really knowing their stuff. She also was their in-house expert with Linux! (*Note: nothing happened to her at LMG, I'm using past tense because I'm not up to date with the latest roles she might be in)
Linus has been way more focused on running the business than the tech, especially compared to his days at NCIX and some years after.
The Billet situation sounds like a fuckup. So long as they make it right with them I don't care tbh.
The data integrity issues and way too frequent post-edit corrections is imperative for LMG to fix, if they want their media to be trustworthy (like if they're hyping up their labs)
Luckily, they've said what the fix is themselves and it's relatively simple. All it really takes is them to either slow down with the rate of content to be able to carefully review it, or bring on more hosts and editors so that mistakes and errors can be caught and re-shot before publishing, and that due diligence is applied when preparing a product review.
Linus' response is just meh, not good nor bad. The one thing is I don't buy is Linus' line of "just talk to us". The community told them plenty of times, the writers and Linus themselves were very well aware of the problems of rushing and releasing half-baked content. Even if GN told them, the direction they were going with Linus Media Group and the new CEO and the buyout offer and all of that suggests where LMG's wouldn't be concerned with it as much as making sure the timing of their content maximizes revenue. Data issues brought to them by GN and the community would be cast to the wayside with just a footnote and silent correction, maybe with a couple empty words sprinkled on top.
So I'll say it again to Linus from a fellow Canadian, whether he'll listen or not: "Slow down, bud!"
Hey bud, no need to deadname anyone.
I use her current preferred pronouns, there are multiple Emilys at the LMG team and for people that might not recognize who I'm talking about if they haven't watched LTT for a while (since 3 months ago). I figured by adding "formerly", I was clear that it's a name she no longer goes by and doesn't feel represented herself well.
you were fine, some people just love to pounce on anything. one video is all that was released, it's completely fine to explain that in this context. if we were talking to her directly, sure.
Disagree. As a casual LTT watcher i had no idea who Emily was until they said her former name. I'm sure there are others like me who don't keep up with the latest happenings in every youtube channel. There's no offense in providing extra information for clarity.
I thought you had to refer to a person by their old name for that to be the case, not just mention the existence of a former name. I could be wrong though.
Wholeheartedly agree. Wverything else I can understand and maybe even excuse. But auctioning off a prototype that isn't even yours is so far beyond the line. They have turned into another soulless corporation just like Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. And corporations should never be trusted.
He's another tech bro. Wan show always seemed more like a soap box for him to try to make him seem like an aww shucks type of guy, but there was the whole discussing wages issue at LTT too that broke the illusion of the image he tries to depict of himself.
like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication
This is one of the main justification's Linus uses for claiming the journalistic moral high ground in that reply. First of all, correct me if I'm wrong, but the video in question didn't once claim that the cooler was "sold" - rather that it was "put up for auction". Which doesn't contradict or even misrepresent anything that actually happened. Secondly, a debate over whether it was sold for profit or auctioned off for charity is largely irrelevant anyway because the actual problem here is that LMG attempted to offload the product to a third party after receiving requests to return it to the manufacturer (and promising multiple times to do so). Linus is trying to use the charity angle to frame himself as the benevolent and misrepresented good guy just trying to do the right thing, but in the process is lying about what was actually said and is displaying a complete lack of awareness over what the actual problem here is. Signing off with this just makes him look even worse:
There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.
He's pretending he has the moral high ground, whilst continuing to take snipes and potshots, in a poorly worded apology where he admits he is in the wrong. The dude just sounds salty that someone dared to call him out. His ego can't handle it and now he's desperately floundering around attempting to find some way to damage the credibility of the other person.
Ahaha. He managed to write all that and say nothing, he really needs professional advice before making public statements, he can't help but jump in with his first thoughts. Classic linus though just deflecting "we got some really big things coming up guys! forget about this!"
To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us.
He wrote an entire article but still thinks his video cadence is good. Reminds me of my current CEO, as the sand empire he built for the past 4 years starts to crumble beneath him
Dam that response sucked.
This response at least answers the most important question. They are paying Billet for the prototype. Personally I think they should do more than cover the raw cost, but at least they have done something.
Linus commented on this later in the thread saying "Billet sent us a quote. I don't know or care how they arrived at the value. If they're good, I'm good." So hopefully that was all taken into account.
Great video, a lot of the benchmark stuff I was unaware of because I don't pay THAT much attention to the wider youtube review community, but I Did notice that waterblock review when it went up on LTT. Go and watch it, it's honestly embarrassing how unprepared and silly it was. As a comedy sketch it's fine, but as a review of a prototype it's really really embarrassingly under prepared. It brings to mind something like an Asmondgold hardware review... "I don't know, let's just try this".
To see they auctioned off a prototype device after that "review" is kinda disgusting (sorry for the hard word, but it's how I feel).
Tbh that's how almost all of their projects seem to be now. Woefully unprepared, full of jank.
not to cast doubt on anything he says here, but steve has increasingly been making 'dunk' videos for the past year or two. i feel like his channel has been trying to find (or create) exposés, because those are the videos that pop off. starting from the video of that NZXT case that caused fires.
again, not to cast doubt on the experiences of billet labs, but i question steve's intentions in presenting this. i hope this discussion doesn't end up revolving around gamers nexus.
because those are the videos that pop off.
Yeah, drama gets clicks,
But Steve did say at the beginning, that this video is unmonetized.
So I give him credit for taking that step.
not to come off overly negative- steve also does great work. i hope we hear from LMG soon <3
I felt the same and was wary to even watch this. Seems like something to discuss privately first. But it’s full of solid points, and I think the amount of public mistakes from LMG makes it a little easier to accept.
The last time something like this happened it was made clear GN was going to cover LMG as the corporation it is, not as an individual where you might hash things out privately first.
i watch ltt for alex messing around, and every now and then a video of linus wasting money on cool testing equipment for some reason. I've always assumed GN is superior for actual testing.
What a bunch of pricks.
I hesitate to blame them all. In GN's video, some of the clips show LMG people seeming (to me? Somehow I don't see anyone else pointing this out???) anxious to terrified of Linus. In one of the WAN Show clips there's this meek, near-mumbled kind of "Uhm... Linus sir maybe if you'd, um... just tested it properly that could've been maybe better I guess? <.< v.v;" sort of thing, and the person who grabbed the wrong card barely squeaked out a response at all, but Linus just never seems to give a damn about anything except making the quickest possible bucks.
I don't know what's keeping everyone else there but I think at least some of those people are just trying to get by without incurring some kind of wrath as Linus himself repeatedly makes (or causes) a mess then arrogantly doubles, triples, quadruples down on it (or has someone else do so, or maybe other arrogant pricks are involved?) up to a point of "Okay, I messed up and I'll own that now everyone forget about it" after which business-as-usual resumes until the next mess. It seems like no one else has time to learn from any mistakes (or "mistakes") and those who do (presumably a hierarchy-related privilege) are unwilling or incapable.
Now, they may in fact be a bunch of pricks. I just feel like some of those people (such as the one suggesting that testing the water block correctly might made sense (before potentially killing a startup unfairly)) try to help but have no power to inhibit Linus's pompous profit-driven pissheadery.
Clickbait used to be reserved for the title/thumbnail, but now it’s ingrained in the content itself and goes hand in hand with the drop in quality.
Before I stopped watching them I noticed the drop in quality. Can’t remember which video, but there was one with so many corrections it was absolutely ridiculous.
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