The recent criticism of Linus Tech Tips, explained::Linus Tech Tips founder Linus Sebastian has admitted to “sloppiness” in the hardware review channel’s handling of controversy that erupted over its recent review of a high-end watercool
Old news already. Doesn’t cover the Madison/sex abuse stuff.
This is the real problem for me, I can forgive the goofy bullshit and half-ass benchmarks, but that is straight up sexual assault and harassment. There’s no way I’m supporting them until they address the allegations professionally and without some stupid “sponsor” joke video apology.
Don’t forget the Billet Labs stuff. Obviously not as bad as the SA, but definitely worse than the shit benchmarks and bad reviews.
And maybe without disclosing information like the price of the Billet Labs prototype that Billet Labs did not want to show…
WTF, that entire work environment seems so messed up and sexist.
Ewwwwww ewww. Fuck Linus, hard unsubscribe
That comma working overtime 🥵
Just like all of LMG.
i could never make it thought an entire LTT video in my entire life. They are just so boring and bland and lack any depth.
No thanks,I’d rather read reddit or now Lemmy opinions from other people who are far more competent and open to opinions.
As someone who worked with computer hardware alot, Linus always came off as full of hubris and douchy to me. I was not expecting anything of this scale, but I am also not surprised to learn he’s greedy. Dude always seemed full of himself. The abusive mistreatment of employees is unexpected tho.
This and the gamers nexus exposé really do add up when looked at together. Linus deserves all the horrible things coming to him.
Lately there’s been this weird undertone of discomfort in Linus’ videos, and I think I now understand why. He does a great job appearing to be a decent and relatable guy who’s just being mean for a gag, but it’s becoming more clear that’s not a bit. His relationship with the people he appears with on camera only seems to work because there’s a back and forth in their quips and insults. Whenever he’s on with someone who’s not a staple of the channel, there’s this sense that he’s untouchable, that he can dish it out but grounds for pushback are shaky at best. Communication overall seems to suck, and there’s never not a Disappointed Linus moment when he’s involved in a project. You can really feel the unnecessary stress he’s piling onto the situation, and if it’s that obvious on-camera, how bad is it when nobody else is around? Or for the employees who feel like a bit of a squeaky wheel? It’s been clear for a long time that Linus is a cheapskate (he openly complains about relatively acceptable prices for the silly stuff he’s doing in videos pretty often) but for some reason in the back of my mind I thought maybe he wasn’t so stingy as a boss, where it counts. Wouldn’t bet on it now.
For someone who’s even a little bit out of place at LMG, I can 100% see how Linus has built a toxic work culture. It should speak volumes that nearly everyone, when given a chance to speak without Linus’ final say on the video, expresses much the same criticism toward his hustle culture. They don’t have the time they need to do good work, I don’t get the sense that they have a supportive and creative environment conducive to enjoying the process, and the output is clearly suffering.
Linus’ initial response dropped the ball harder than anything he’s dropped in his storied career of dropping things. But even if his response was heartening, the further reports of toxic culture and fanbase are enough for me to keep my distance. I’m going to miss their flavor of “tech nerd fun” videos, but the “Linus is a bad guy” Pandora’s box is open, and it’s going to take a lot of goodwill before I can just enjoy their videos again. Sad to see another titan of Youtube let it all go to his head, but this just goes to show that success doesn’t make a man better, it just makes him more powerful.
He does a great job appearing to be a decent and relatable guy
I couldn’t disagree more. He’s always come across as a hateful asshole.
… who’s just being mean for a gag, but it’s becoming more clear that’s not a bit
Exactly. The guy’s a prick. There are so many good choices for this kind of content out there. I never understood how anyone could tolerate looking at Linus.
I suppose younger guys might look at him and think “he sounds like he knows his stuff” or… maybe think he’s relatable, like you said above. Maybe?
But as a grown ass man, my take on Linus has been “fuck this prick” since the beginning. He always looks and acts like he has never taken a shit in his life, and today’s the day it’s going to come to a head.
I find some of the stuff they do entertaining, but have always found the technical information pretty… lacking and sometimes outright wrong. Seldom do they focus on what an item is engineered to do and instead just slap something together for content.
The billet labs stuff doesn’t surprise me for those reasons, but i feel like the GN focus on it just brings their incompetence to the forefront and made what I already suspected that much more visible.
I’m sure there are plenty of great people that work at LMG, but this ain’t about people at an individual level. It’s about a company that is literally built to sell you stuff. Whether it’s through sponsor spots, float plane(services), or through their own store. I’ve always felt their message was high and mighty and rang a bit hollow.
For their sake, hopefully they actually improve on the technical aspects and are able to endure not because I care about them, but because I don’t think this will actually mean anything once the drama is gone.
I’m sad about the Madison stuff, not because I care about LTT, but because working in that type of environment and watching your “heroes” not only implode but actively harm you has to be one of the worst experiences I can imagine.
My heart goes out to her.
I thought it used to be pretty solid. Not as solid as Gamer Nexus, but totally acceptable and significantly better than the vast majority of tech reviews. But that hasn’t been true for awhile.
That’s completely fair.
GN might be on a different level and can be a bit dry, so I can understand the appeal of the LTT videos.
I think you’re right with the “decline” since it doesn’t appear as though they consistently research the stuff at hand.
Call me when you find a company that isn’t trying to sell stuff.
Agree on the rest, though.
I don’t think you deserved to be downvoted.
I think you just might have misunderstood what I was saying, which is fair because I have little context.
I just meant that the criticism isn’t levied at the individuals, but at a company that’s pushing content out to sell you things.
So, while I’m sure in many of these contexts an individual shared partial responsibility, the criticism is leveraged against the company as a whole in this circumstance since I’m not going to pretend to understand what’s going on internally.
Appreciate the comment!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Holee shit. How have I not heard of this. Fuck linus. This is actually awful
I’m… I’m a bit skeptical of the truth here but at this point, anything could be true or false so it’s best to just wait it out.
LTT always came off as a group of scumbags to me. Good riddance. I hope the victims of their harassment get the justice they deserve.
This clown as lost 5k+ subscribers on floatplane since this began. That’s around $300k/yr
Just want to point out LTT has released a (maybe final) response to the whole thing here: https://youtu.be/0cTpTMl8kFY
Also before everyone starts having justice boners, just please remember they are human too and there’s a huge difference between knowingly defrauding their audience/vendor partners and being incompetent/overworked. That’s from a fan who used to watch all their main/spinoff videos but have stopped half a year ago because I noticed their quality dropping.
There’s also incredibly toxic work environment issues detailed by a former female employee that also went through sexual harassment in the work place while she worked there.
The situation as of yesterday, with the allegations by GamerNexus, was basically “OK, they’re not reliable or a good source of tech content, good to know.”
It didn’t matter whether they were “good people who are just overworked” or “Advertising-dollar addicted charlatans”. We knew that the average YouTube channel doing, say, graphics cards comparison probably had better methodology and would give a fairer review than LMG is capable of doing.
LMG is not capable of producing good reviews right now because it is so obsessed with quantity that it doesn’t have time to produce reliable accurate content.
Yes, there are humans in the chain, and humans make mistakes, but in LMG’s case, the mistakes are systemic.
This morning we have the added bombshell of the Madison allegations about the toxic workplace culture. This means it’s not just any more about avoiding being misinformed, there does, actually appear to be evidence that a sizable number of people at LMG are just awful, awful, people.
It is possible, but unlikely, these allegations are false: unlikely because they’re corroborated by Madison’s boyfriend who heard them contemporaneously, and because Madison left a GlassDoor review at the time she left LMG.
Every company is a mixture of sociopathic jackasses and good people who care about their work and want to produce things that people like. Any criticism of any company generally takes that into account: when we talk about LMG being irredeemably evil, we’re not saying that the janitors are bad, or that the team that manages their website are rotten people, but we are saying and have to acknowledge that the sociopathic jackasses are in control and are in sufficient power and quantity that the company itself is beyond hope.
For the first half of that, I suggest actually watching the video. They basically admitted to all of that and are stopping video production for a week.
Yes, I did watch the video, I’m not sure why you’re telling me to watch it again.
The fact they admitted that the processes were shoddy does not mean their processes are not, actually, shoddy.
You shouldn’t trust someone because after being criticized they own up to some of their mistakes. You should trust them only after they’ve actually fixed them. Owning up is only a first step.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/0cTpTMl8kFY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
