My biggest complaint is how Linus is still saying he’s not sorry about what he did, at least it doesn’t seem genuine, instead he is still apologizing that he didn’t realize what the community wanted.
He shouldn’t care what the community wants. He should always strive for accurate data, ethical partnerships, and correcting mistakes when they still make it through because they always will.
Linus is doubling down on his opinions, hiding mistakes, doing the bare minimum to fix them, and needs public outcry and the heavy hand of the other executives in LTT to see any course change.
im so out of the loop here, help anyone?
In one of their videos one of the employees said they do better and more accurate GPU tests than other YouTubers called Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed. Then of course those mentioned YouTubers started to hit back and show how often LTT is wrong and makes wrong assumptions, because they don’t do proper due diligence. Since they have to release several videos per week. Gamers Nexus also exposed that LTT auctioned off a prototype GPU cooler from a small startup. But they had no permission to sell the unit. It was only for reviewing. The startup even asked to get the unit back several times. Linus, the owner of LTT, then released a non-apology. Afterwards a former employee came out and told why she left the company and it turns out the work environment is very toxic at LTT. She also reminded everyone that pettiness by Linus caused his fans to harass a small YouTuber called MindChop. Who eventually committed suicide. He fell into a depression because of the harassment and later his mom also committed suicide. She couldn’t bear the loss of her son.
There is no actual proof for the suicide of the son and the mom, would love to see actual proof if you have it but i wouldn’t really use this as an argument. I admit his behaviour was too much but pointing the blame for the suicide of a child is also too extreme
found this twitter post about it: https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1691895748286177765 Just realized that Twitter account is quite stupid but I still can’t find any evidence for it being true or not
Edit: I don’t know if I want to believe if MindChop truly did what the reddit post is talking about, but I feel like Linus wasn’t at fault for his community bullying the Owner.
Another thing I just found: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/15sjv78/for_anyone_wondering_why_madison_stayed_silent/jwfeg5a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
This whole thing is very complicated and I am not trying to discredit the madison allegations with this, they are a completely different topic
“Several videos a week”.
Twenty-five (25) videos a week. Five a day, four if they work weekends which they likely do. Plus the WAN show and other social media. Their velocity is far too high for accuracy to be a priority. As their own employees said in their video, they wish they had more time. And as Linus himself said, their velocity is so high that the instant they publish a video it has to be forgotten because they have to turn to the next one.
Holy shit, I can’t wrap my head around channels that release more than one video a day
It’s still mostly one per day per channel, more or less. It’s just that they have many channels
Can you point to the comment by Madison about the MindChop thing? As far as I can see she never brought it up.
LTT fucked up hard, doubled down, worse things came out, tripled down
Fucked up hard = published numerous videos with inaccuracies and errors due to tight timelines and QA that was not rigorous enough. Also they fucked up communication and sold a prototype at auction. These are mistakes and journalistic ethical issues.
From what I can tell, they have owned up to most of that.
The more serious accusations come from Madison Reeves who not only claims she suffered from being worked like a dog, but also severe sexual harassment and other awful behaviors. LTT put out a statement that they had hired an external investigator and would take corrective action based on the findings.
Now, LTT is for sure in the wrong here, but what have they done wrong since? It seems they are taking the criticism seriously, despite Linus’ initial understandable but unacceptable emotional reaction. Curious to hear!
edit: not sure why my summary of events is garnering a negative reaction 😅
Perhaps I’m biased, but “hired an external investigator and would take corrective action based on the findings” translates to “distract folk until the spotlight is off us, so we can then sweep the problem under the rug and go back to business as normal.”
Mhmmm “we will investigate ourselves and find we’ve done nothing wrong.”
Could be! They said they are doing and internal review but also having an external one. I hope they do the right thing.
What could they do that is better than have someone outside investigate them?
Have a third party investigate and independently release the findings to the public.
Yea that’s true
Dude that’s what an outside investigator is
The problem with inaccuracies on a channel like this is they are basically purchase influencers. One of their wrong graph shown some GPU was 3 times faster than other while it was around 15% faster only in reality. They kept selling the trust me bro attitude on every media and it turned out you cannot really trust them. With big power comes big responsibility.
Madison’s situation is the way bigger concern in my eyes. The issue is, they shouldn’t have to hire an outside investigator, or they should’ve done so years ago. They were being told the issues directly for months and refused to do a thing about it until the spotlight was on them. You don’t get to grope someone and say “I didn’t know it was bad 🥺” a year later. You don’t get to work your staff like dogs despite numerous private and public complaints only to say “wow, we had no idea” once it starts to affect your image. If this “external investigation” doesn’t start with completely gutting the management and HR structure, and handing out appropriate punishments to employees who have received complaints, then it’s clear that they don’t care about their company culture as much as their brand image.
Video inacurracy i am fine with if they are on the right course to fix that. Auctioning off prototype that are not theirs and knowingly use a wrong spec for the review for me is not. First one no matter what intention it is thief, second one is just disingenuous. It’s fine if Linus admits he is wrong on it, but he double down.
I thought the video was a step back, not tripping down. They took actual action and they layed out a plan how they’ll improve. What would you have preferred?
Linus Tech Tips, a large YouTube tech channel, has faced backlash after GamersNexus posted a video detailing their increasingly flawed videos focusing on quantity over quality. LTT releases videos multiple times a week, but these videos almost always have errors that are later corrected or are not noticed by LTT. This results in lower quality videos that can sometimes be misleading (especially product review videos). These criticisms had been expressed by many viewers of LTT prior the GamersNexus video. GamersNexus is also a popular tech channel and amplified these criticisms with the release of their video.
Other criticisms of LTT are that their packed release schedule overworks their employees and their corporate culture is hostile towards stressed employees. These criticisms were merely speculation until a former LTT employee posted on X (formerly Twitter) a detailed account of why they decided to leave the company. Their allegations detailed overworking, harassment, and their declining mental health due to their job at LTT.
GamersNexus does probably more research than a video deserves though. I’ve always found the accuracy levels of the LTT videos acceptable; I think GN might be sort of spuriously demanding rigor here.
Harassment is no good and must be stopped, though.
As all this unfolds, I am more drawn towards the opinion that I don’t care that much about the GN call out, because those things can be fixed. I just don’t care that much about tech entertainment being dry as bones to ensure accuracy, but am a lot more concerned about the posts from ex-employee Madison about how she was treated.
Sounds like they have made themselves a bit of a mini Blizzard culture. Crunch and sexism abound.
This just confirmed my opinion of Linus as an utter twat and probable sociopath.
His reactions to things like Project Farm’s review of his overpriced screwdriver, and the constant, blatant submarining of Linux and opensource tells you what kind of person he is. None of the behaviour I’ve seen in this latest installment is surprising. Everything is done to get view numbers up, even monetizing the apology FFS.
But the fanbois gonna fan regardless, and he’ll come away with more money after this than before because of it.
“We fucked up, and that’s why I’m here to cry about people being mean to me on the internet again. Also I’m super not sorry and it definitely will happen again” -Linus
“I am truely sorry - for all the money I’m going to lose”
Really it’d be like, “I’m sorry… Just like this segue to our sponsor!”
They can’t put out a statement without a segue. It’s just not allowed! They love that word.
Even their apology video with the dbrand plug-in at the end, pretty cringey. They’re like that Key and Peele slap ass skit, they need to plug-in their sponsors like an addiction. If they wouldn’t have mentioned which sponsor, then yeah stupid joke to lighten the mood, but they had to mention dbrand.
I wonder why Dbrand would even offer? That’s pretty messed up and certainly makes me think less of them.
You got that from the video? The comment was hot headed, but I thought the video was the best they could have done.
"And a message from our sponsor! Just kidding…
DBrand did offer though. :D
You can watch our progress transparently… on floatplane"
Is all I loosely heard from it. Shame his newly appointed CEO has to deal with this, I feel like he should have been the only one in the video. It would have put extra value and emphasis on his message, and cut out all the blame passing and job title responsibilities; they could have dealt with all the other stuff separately. They shouldn’t need to put their staff out there to dry like that (even if they’re management), the issue is blatantly deeper rooted.
If they’re trying to address their accuracy, management processes, or talk about video content burnout that influence their staff and viewers, it should have been short and sweet They should have posted an update video too show us the progress. Not make promises and jokes and put half of it behind a paywall.
They wrote and uploaded their apology so quickly, they didn’t even let the fallout settle before more controversy came inevitably to light. Now they need to eventually address that in a video too seeing as there’s an investigation. Though it would have been hard to comment on year old incidences without an investigation to be fair.
I was told that when making apologies don’t use too many if at all any reasons… Justifying your action with excuses means you felt there was an exception. They shouldn’t have gone into specifics and just said “God damn we really ballsed that one up”.
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Im beginning to wonder, if Luke left the video production side of LTT because they truly were working staff like animals to pump out videos and he finally decided “yeah im going back into development type work again…” Then made floatplane and got LTT to be his biggest investor. 🤔
That was the first thought that crossed my mind when he started FP.
Then you were way ahead of me then, it hit me like a ton of bricks just now.
A comment I saw on another thread put it best. He should have taken the 100 million
He got offered that much for the company? Yeah, I’d be sipping cocktails on the beach by now.
If Linus was his own boss he’d have fired himself.
I mean, he did. 6 months ago.
I don’t watch LTT or indeed hardly anything on YT, so I’m not about to sit through a teary YouTube apology video.
I assume it’s the usual “sorry not sorry” arse covering job?
I’m probably missing a meme, what’s BP?
British Petroleum. The meme comes from the South Park episode lampooning the BP oil spill and BP’s response to it. The meme is making fun of the fact that youtubers use the same non-apology whenever they’re in trouble.
BP oil spill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
BP CEO hearing: https://youtu.be/X8p4s7EE6FY
South Park’s version: https://youtu.be/HQhmGIW7MVU
Edit: Here’s a better South Park one with the OP’s screen… https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/X8p4s7EE6FY
https://piped.video/HQhmGIW7MVU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
British Petroleum, if I had to guess.
They were largely (if not entirely) responsible for the oil that leaked/spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.
They rebranded to “Byond Petroleum” during their greenwashing campanges but yea
BYOND as in Bring Your Own Natural Disaster?
British Petroleum. That bit is about the South Park episode which originated the meme rather than whatever Linus did (of which I’m also out of the loop)
British Petroleum… You know the guys behind that huge oil spill several years back
He came a long way from the depressed linus meme of years ago
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc
https://piped.video/watch?v=X3byz3txpso
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
2nd video is a response to an idiotic forum post
Not their apology video
It’s kind of funny to me that a KYM page is now a valid source for news.
Sponsored by BP, Nestle and Purdue. \o/
I have a feeling of “I told you so” because I had mentioned how LTT always just felt like shills and something about Linus just didn’t sit right with me years ago when I first started hearing about the channel and decided to check it out. I couldn’t prove anything, you know. I just had this gut feeling about how things were presented, the way he talked, etc that things weren’t what they seemed and he’s probably a fucked up guy behind the scenes.
Turns out I was right.
That has nothing to do with being a shill. As far as I know, lmg still fiercely preserves is journalistic integrity, often cutting ties with brands that try to pressure them.
I get that this is just a meme, but comparing YouTube drama to the reckless behavior of a multi-billion dollar oil conglomerate causing incalculable amounts of ecological damage feels like a bit of an overreaction.
I think it’s only comparing the same impression of a fake apology, only to calm down the crowd.
Sexual harassment allegations are not “drama”. And anyways, the comparison is in the way they apologize and not the damage they have done.
Oof yeah was not aware of these at the time of my original comment.
You are analyzing an image macro
I think that’s… well, have at it I guess
It’s actually being compared to a South Park episode that parodies damage control.
