Taf the Ghost

So, does Samsung Store apps get hit?

Everyone having a good idea of what needs to change, even trying to change it, but it taking a long time isn't surprising. Even being in the works. What is required to implement it quickly? Well, exactly what happened: a multi-day shut down of the content pipeline, finding out what "page" everyone is on and getting most of everyone in on the right "page". If makes a lot more sense the issue if you look at something like manufacturing. If you're selling a product with a defect, if it requires a new mold to be made, that takes time and then you have to produce everything. A "simple fix" in CAD could take 6-9 months to show up in a physical result. Same type of issue, realistically. Also, I imagine LMG employees needed at least a day or two to think deeper about the problems, as they "in their mind" but not "on their mind". You also need energy and "mental space" to think through the complexities. The YT algo enforces either Clickbait or anti-meta Clickbait titles & thumbnails. I follow one smaller news-type channel that, after working with some consulting firms, started putting the reaction-face in their thumbnails? Result: about 50% increased click through. Unfortunately, it's not going away, but there are steps to be taken to not over do it. They changed an entire part of their inventory management. It was in the video. Billet was dealt with directly and, per Billet's own post on Reddit, see the issue as resolved. For the video, what needed to be said is what Linus said: this shouldn't have happened and large changes are made so it doesn't happen again. The one thing the Drama Spam Bots do it completely screw up the ability for people to understand there's very little, publicly, either party can ever say. Canada has pretty strict anti-reprisal laws on employers. Something even Linus has mentioned a few times on the WAN show. Defamation is the likely answer you're looking for. Canadian Company and a Canadian citizen former employee. They're under Canadian law, in that regard. If it was Americans, you can get away with a lot (even if they're lies) before you risk losing a legal case. Since most are used to American Social Media, it's easy to forget the oddity that is American Defamation laws. (Thanks, SCOTUS. Sullivan was a terrible precedent.) I've mentioned how vague the malfeasance accusations are and Madison is a professional in the Social Media space. That vagueness wasn't an accident. But the issue is if she did "name names" and any part wasn't remembered right, well, that's a big problem. But the vagueness also leaves open the motivations for the Thread in general, as it's massive zeitgeist PR damage at minimal context. Because there's still a couple of ways this massive blows back on Madison. Its entirely possible, due to her declining mental state, what she thought she was reporting and what actually got reported are different. Then, the issues actually came out as she left, which lead to some dismissals. I think people clearly missed Linus all but telling everyone, in the video, that they fire a couple of people a year. This entire issue is far from over. Which is why you don't do this stuff on social media.

Linus has specifically mentioned a website being part of the project on the WAN show. Which, on background, is a big driver of the friction that arouse with GN & Hardware Unboxed. If the Labs is making a massive supply with data and it's bad, it was going to be a nightmare for everyone else in the space. They'd get flooded when the data conflicts and it's hard to overcome the overwhelming difference in media scope of LTT compared to everyone else in the space. That also tied in to the rather flippant first response Linus made. There's a big issue if this isn't done properly or rolled out before its ready for "prime time". The one thing I was a little surprised of was how many dedicated haters LMG actually has. They were going to get community backlash and then the bandwagon followers, but the actual dedicated haters were a tad larger than I'd have expected. That complicates matters and Linus' emotions in the video weren't acting. When Madison's thread was still being typed, I was in the thread saying it wasn't going to end well and Twitter wasn't the place for it. I know enough of the information gathering spaces on the internet that a full profile of everyone that worked in her section could be worked up in under an hour. Probably a full doxx of everyone in 2 hours, given everyone's online "surface" in the company. I was hoping it wouldn't lead to even more harassment, but by the video it seems to have. Hopefully the people that went over the line face proper consequences. As for cancellation & attempts, "anathema" is the big word of art here. Both meanings apply: you're both cursed/heretic and excommunicated. And, yes, most of the time is really is on religious principles. Though the main problem is few are prepared for the Horde when it arrives. It's really more in the fear that gets the target in trouble than the horde itself. (In most cases.) Main thing is to never apologize then figure out some of the ringleaders and nail them to the wall. For any American, the important phrase is "tortious interference". There's actual liability (even criminal in a few spots, depending on specifics) for interfering in the business of others. If you can be shown to do material damage, you can be liable for that damage. Though far too many don't realize when they're in a knife fight until well after they're being cut up, which is its own problem.

Taking Madison's Twitter Thread at completely face value and assuming the context in her favor, most likely abusive other employee(s) were female. The vagueness of the accusations of malfeasance made it hard to sort, but it was far more "mean girls" than "toxic men". That's why the lack of actual context matters. (Or the lack of simply naming names.) There's a couple of views on this. The kind of obvious one is she didn't "make anything up", so much as the declining mental health meant she remembers everything wrong. The environment didn't work for her and her mind simply mixed information, things she'd seen or heard at other places. This happens all the time to everyone, it's just a question of degree of information mixing. If she was to the point of stabbing herself to convince her mind to do something proper, it's entirely possible she imagined some part of the accusations in her dreams and her head simply has mixed them. (When the twitter thread first dropped, I specifically mentioned the mental health for this reason. It's not pleasant, but the reality is that someone in that bad of a mental state isn't a "reliable narrator" to their own experiences. It doesn't mean it's malicious, but it's a harsh reality.) Another view is that she had an actual axe to grind because she failed. She said herself it was her dream job; she got removed from camera and had to go take another job. While the circumstances around that (and the leg stabbing) are ugly, the reality is that it is a failure for her. She also clearly feels it hurt her streaming career from a lack of support that she thought she was going to get. See what she said about the contracts. And, because she's a streamer, she gets asked pretty regularly about it and why she left, which she's only vaguely talked about (apparently) until this point. Thus, her time at LMG is a constant source of irritation and this was a great opportunity to unload her complaints. However, absent the malfeasance complaints, it's a job she wasn't ready for, shouldn't have taken and was, clearly, not in the capacity to handle at the time. If she came to axe grind without the accusations, she'd have gotten roasted for it. So, it's very easy to view her has having a reason to invent accusations. What's the reality? Unsure. She vague posted so hard on the accusations that any or all of them could actually fly back in her face depending on context. There definitely was a clear problem that no one noticed how bad her mental health was getting, though this was during that weird COVID period. So maybe the problems were also enhanced a lot by mask usage, from the inability to read faces. (She doesn't seem like she's BPD, but one of the notable symptoms there is the complete inability to read faces, which leads to taking every statement in either the most positive or negative way possible. If she was in a bad mental place, it's entirely possible, when talking to other in masks, she was completely misjudging statements.) The one that stood out was being asked to twerk, because we've all but seen James completely naked on screen. So, if they were throwing out ideas for background shots for that type of scene, it's entirely possible it came up in a purely professional manner. The no context for accusations but specific details for what are fairly petty things strikes me as either pulling back because of fears of actually naming names or putting far more complex situations into the most favorable light for sympathy. Or both. Or more. Madison is a professional Social Media person, and it was a well constructed thread. For Madison's sake, I hope she's in a better place. But a Twitter Thread was absolutely not the place to have dealt with the grievances.

In the interest of actual, rational feedback from someone that's watched a long time, been around these parts a long time and invariability gets asked to help a lot dealing with complex problems, some thoughts. While he's probably been doing it, Linus really needs to do a bit of soul searching for why he responded so badly to the GN piece and, at the same time, completely missed how epic of a chain of terrible decisions had to happen by his employees such that the Billet Labs part ended up getting Auctioned off. The reason the firestorm went off after the Forum Post is the radical disconnect that happened around Billet. It was such an all encompassing failure that it can't just be brushed off. It wasn't just a Red Flag Waving Event, it a university marching band in a parade with Red Flags waving down the street for a mile. Short Circuit's channel role has slowly gone everywhere. Is it a Showcase? Is it a Review? I don't mind if they're "short reviews", though some of the videos have gotten as long as primary LTT videos. Which might also be where a lot of resources have quietly gotten drained to. But some clarity would really help. The brain drain that happens with the loss of older, veteran employees matters a lot more than most realize. Taran would be hard enough to replace given his vast experience, but Brandon leaving might actually be the most impactful. He always came across as someone that was incredibly particular on details, and that feels like a lot of what has gotten lost. There's clearly been QC issues and pipeline checking that has to be very much re-evaluated. That's likely been happening, but it's needed. Also, an editor needs to be able to request On Screen Talent do replacement voice over/voice inserts. It might be a little wonky in places, but it would improve the videos where there is some massive mistakes in something that was said. GN should have been a lot more clear on the topic (and Ian at TechTechPotato I think might have gone a little far in his defense of the Labs' Lead), but there is real issues with Conflicts of Interests and PERCEIVED Conflicts of Interests with LMG Labs and highly technical testing. There doesn't have to exist any quid pro quo, but the perception alone can be an issue. I honestly think the Framework stuff has been handled well, but, since LMG now has a lot of employees with time at upper levels of other companies, it's important to note, even at the end of a video, about that. It's like "Handy Tech under $100". Same vibe is needed. People take different jobs, but that doesn't mean it can look wrong, depending on the situation. This could very easily come up with a product that Labs tests as being subpar from a big brand. Ian touches on it in his long form video, but automated Gaming Benchmarking, at scale, is basically going to be a full time job for probably 3 highly paid employees. And there's still open questions about whether consistently repeatable results can be extracted from all games. That really isn't a small detail. It can probably be overcome, but it's going to be basically a constant fight for the Labs folks doing it.

When one of Yahoo's many CEO's came in, they pulled an analysis of the WFH logs and found a lot of employees were not exactly working even their normal hours. Some job types can work remotely without much issue, but it really depends on the personality types that job class tends to attract. The employees have to be comfortable working as a remote team, or the work is fundamentally a single person contractor type. The reality for a lot of companies is that employees aren't worth the same salary in a WFH situation. Team coordination projects can be far slower and lots of little time losses add up when you can't quickly interact with everyone. It's also a lot harder to manager personnel remotely in a number of industries. (And that's before dealing with the very impersonal nature of most digital communications.) Now, if only high flying companies didn't view having an office in the most expensive commercial real estate locations in the region as a "prime" location, we might start to see a lot more logic involved in dealing with hybrid models, haha.

On the TechTechPotato / Ian video, if you aren't used to an academic setting, you likely won't quite understand what Ian is doing. This is very much akin to a Peer Review Edit in a journal article. You take everything chunk by chunk and go over the details. There were notable issues with GN's original video and Ian goes over them pretty well. GN really needed to carefully flesh out some of the optics issues, rather than just putting them in a few sentences that can be taken as shots.

It's a thing that happens on Youtube. It's normally not malicious and just database errors. However, they can turn up or turn down the "check for bots" setting on a channel. Along with a couple of instances of a hot, new channel getting people added as subs that hadn't viewed the content. In the case of LMG channels, it's probably due to the traffic they're getting/height in the Search settings and some sort of bot checking activity going higher. The official line has always been BS and they know it. The unofficial line is a lot more complex. As much as we talk about the Almighty Algo, YT has a bunch of algos that do a lot of different things. They break things constantly, and the teams seem to have to fix major issues on a weekly basis. Normally when you're getting unsubbed it's because the channel has gotten caught up in YT's information suppression systems. Given Susan was prone to going to conferences and getting the lightest amount of criticism then ruining entire chunks of the platform, it's always a little fishy the way they like to act. The funnier one is always being subbed to a channel you've never seen. That one appears to, normally, involve crooked employees. Which is the other unsaid aspect to a lot of social media generally. Do you think those Bots really are all manually setup? A couple of insiders in different areas really opens up access. Some marketing agencies have gotten the ability to hyper-pump channels before, though it's not been that common of an occurrence. Oh yeah, there's one other issue that causes unsubs. The App being a spaz. The problems kicked up a lot more often as people went to mobile. I think it just causes more desync issues, but could also be as dumb as the sub/unsub button being easily activated on a swipe. Or a phantom activation on a swipe. I do wish they'd fix whatever bender the recommendation algo is on. Because it actually served me a video about why it's been getting so bad lately. Then it served it to me again after I'd watched it. It's like the Algo itself it crying for help.

There's a few chunks of Twitter that shared these Blocklist systems. So if you liked a random Tweet, you could actually find yourself blocked because section A of a sphere of Twitter doesn't like people in section B. (The one I've seen personally is "Comics Twitter", but there's plenty of others.) It walled off chunks of the platform fairly significantly, which is really what they're removing. Twitter went really down hill when Tumblr banned adult content. The Tumblr-types need their "hugbox" to stay on a platform, which they replicated on Twitter after the mass migration. This could be viewed as a move to drive away the Terminally on Twitter types, especially since they're the ones highly unlikely to pay for Blue. I wouldn't put that as a primary reason, but I could definitely see Twitter corporate viewing it as a solid way to remove user that don't help them. They might literally be trying to get them to go to Threads, which would be hilarious.

Only useful spaces online are pay walled or highly moderated. Normal social media is basically dead for that. As for what Elon is doing, eh, Mute is still a Block. And I can see why they're doing this. Because someone could always just open an Incognito tab to see your content, and the "block chains" that some sections of Twitter have historical used causes a lot of monkey wrenches in the information flow. Or, everyone has to be in the Thunderdome, but you can ignore people.

You're making the assumption most of the people still in the thread aren't basically 3 influence agents just making posts and arguing against themselves, which is normally what topic like these end up as over time on the Internet. Though this thread is basically at end until the new one when LMG gives their next official response. I'll end my time in this thread in noting that Madison's Twitter thread was a very well constructed social media attack. Everything that we would consider a work place environment issue is devoid of context or specifics of the actors, allowing others to fill in the gaps with their preconceived notions. If you re-read the thread, we don't even know if the person(s) Madison had negative interactions with were male or female. Both "horrible jock culture" and "mean girls run amok" fit her statements. ("Mean Girls problems" actually fits most of the accusations better, as it's a very weird conversation where a man would ask her about her boyfriend's sexual history.) This allows for maximum discussion cycles without any details intruding on people's self-inserting of experiences. As we see pretty constantly in this thread (and in any other charged, vague topic generally on the Internet). With some of the further contexts and tidbits, I stand by my position this isn't going to end well and Madison should have gotten proper legal counsel a long time ago. Catharsis can be achieved in many ways. Let us hope this one wasn't the wrong one.

While I find the subscription model for cars (and other high utility items) abhorrent, it also kind of pushes you further and further into only Leasing. Which might be the real point, in the end. Jailbreak and Phone Home Delete kits being a "thing" for cars is getting strange. On the assisted driving tech, I'm still worried that while it might be net "safer" by some miles driven metric, in the rare occurrence events it's going to regularly be more dangerous because the driver is actually distracted since they've been lulled into a state of slow response times.

You seem to have missed the several years that Depp was publicly "drug through the mud" and the loss of work opportunities for what was, as decided by jury decision, defamatory and libelous actions by Hurd, resulting in a large damage award. We had a massive, live televised court case, so you can go watch all of the messy details. If you want to make a point about media/flying counter narratives/assumptions of truthfulness, that's one thing. But Depp / Hurd is absolutely not the example, unless you're actually an account here to push SEO stuff.

Has Madison's Twitter Thread done PR damage to LMG and/or Linus? Yes or No? Whether Madison is perfectly legally protected or wildly defamatory doesn't change that. Welcome to reality. Also, you're just rubbernecking as well, aren't you?

Pretty sure my Canons have also done this for years?

Aside from being off topic, the stuff about Depp / Hurd is objectively false.

Part of the issue with Linus' Monday response to GN was completely missing the massive issue with how their entire internal system could have Billet Lab's Prototype end up in the charity auction, after it should have been shipped back to them over 2 weeks before. It wasn't about the price/money. It was about the "big picture". "Deep legal issues" is real. Madison has done at least a couple of million CAD in Brand damage to LMG and some level of damage to Linus personally. Just because LMG is in internal & external review at the moment doesn't change that damage. Just because it isn't in court at this moment, doesn't mean that liability doesn't still exist. Oh, and there's also still the issue about required reporting under BC employment law for management.

No, he said her comments didn't fit his recollection of events. "I was in a state of shock reading through these allegations, plain and simple. They aren’t consistent with my recollections. They aren’t consistent with our internal processes. They aren’t consistent with our company values." https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/16/23834190/linus-tech-tips-gamersnexus-madison-reeves-controversy While all of the LMG statements given about the situation are clearly lawyer checked, Linus hasn't lied. He hasn't actually said much, but it isn't a lie.

There's also the issue of what Colin's technical position within the company was and any legal reporting requirements he would have had with knowledge of harassment/bullying/sexual impropriety. While the thread is getting flooded by "derailers", a lot of folks clearly don't understand why lawyers tell you to shut up when you're involved in deep legal issues. There's times that isn't the best course of action, but it's the general rule for a reason.

Part of me feels like, as this plays out, we're about to see what happens when people are used to American Online Culture but don't have American Legal Protections. Colin went from Madison's original thread sounding like what he heard at the time (hearsay, in the technical term) to active knowledge/engagement with other LMG staff over the issue. Colin actively worked with Linus, on videos, regularly. There's a lot of logical questions to ask after Colin's tweets. Though the one observation I will make is this: LMG would have assumed Madison made the Glassdoor post, which is why the response was structured around BC Employment law and referenced non-retaliation rules & that no one had filed a formal legal complaint. Which means there's absolutely files & paperwork on her time at the company and issues that arose. I think it's safe to assume that Linus and upper management were aware there were issues and they clearly actually did make response from the information set they had. I repeat my points about "this isn't going to end well" and "don't do late night Twitter threads".

She's technically both a social media manager and a "face" streamer. She's experienced and skilled in the Social Media space. She also made the thread in chunks, taking time between parts, so it was not just stream of consciousness tweeting. Which also means not naming the people in her section that caused her trouble was intentional. As I keep repeating, this isn't going to end well for anyone.

She was very specific in details about minor stuff, like the special notebook. Though probably because humans do like to fixate on small things that annoy us. Though, basically, everything anyone is going around about is academic. Madison's and much of LMG's future hinges on whether she told the owner of a small-ish company, that has 2 young daughters and is hyper protective about his company's image & PR, that she had been bullied/sexually assaulted/harassed at his company. And then he completely ignored it, in violation of Canadian Employment Law. There's a reason I keep coming back to "don't do late night Twitter threads". There's no winners here, only damage.

I have no clue what position Colin was in at the company. But, two things. First, "Oh yeah, I heard there's sexual harassment going on, but I did nothing!" is a PR move I'd never in my life want to make. Second, if he was any management position in the company at the time, he had a legal requirement under Canadian employment law to address the situation. Again, not something I would want to publicly state, but I don't know if he had a management role. There's a reason hearsay isn't admissible evidence. But it works great for making a Narrative by Tweets.

From what's gone around, the meeting the audio comes from happened because of a 3rd party exit interview with Madison. Which means there was some review after her interview and it was decided to have that meeting to make sure everyone knew how to go around reporting problems. Which actually really hurts Madison's accusations, rather than helps them.

"what I remember hearing"... so, second hand hearsay, minus the fact I'm pretty sure not reporting issues you know about isn't exactly a great sign of the quality of your testimony about second hand information.