I'm kinda done with LTT, because credibility has been lost

[uk_uk]

I used to like watching LTT, but now I'm just annoyed and only watch videos that I find thematically interesting, but which are becoming increasingly rare.

 

For example, I find the "infrastructure" VIdeos (i.e. virtually everything that has to do with servers, networks, etc.) quite exciting, because interesting application areas are often addressed.

 

However, his "My House" videos are getting more and more on my nerves. Yes, we get it, you're rich. That's great. Yeah, "MTV My Crib" knockoff the third. Wow...

 

Basically an interesting topic, but for the "normal user" completely superfluous. "Here look, a sinfully expensive piece of technology. And this one is even more expensive. This part here? More expensive than the two devices together". Sorry, but not everyone is in a position to set up their own "cinema room" for several 10,000 dollars or euros.

 

No, I'm not jealous, but at some point this "Look what I bought now (or worse: look what I got for free to advertise)" is just exhausting.

 

Most "obnoxious," however, are the "Intel $5000 Extreme Tech Upgrade" videos.

 

You have to watch it at your leisure: A CPU manufacturer is now spending close to $100,000 (5k per video, we have easily 15 videos now if not more) to get exactly what?

Sorry, but no one can tell me he or she is "unbiased" on a topic when a site gives you $5000, or to all your employees. Aren't there laws in Canada to prevent media influence? Is bribery (and nothing else is this here) a proven means for journalists? If I give someone $5,000, I'm certainly not doing it because I'm pursuing altruistic goals as a corporation. But because I want to exert influence.

 

How can I take criticism of Intel from Linus or any of his employees seriously when I know that Intel has raised a lot of money to make the atmosphere "Intel friendly". I'd say the same thing if AMD was pulling this kind of nonsense. But maybe AMD doesn't need to bribe journalists (or those who think they do). 

 

Then constantly the "buy my stuff, buy my stuff" theme at in the Wan show.... Ok, some things are funny implemented in the videos (Banana for scale), but the WAN show has developed into a QVC copy, where a not small part of time is wasted on gibberish, how great the new backpack, the screwdriver or the LTT Strapons are.

 

I'm also only posting this here because I'm sure my post on Reddit would have been deleted right away by an overzealous moderator (Also: Rule 8 says no controversial topics)

 

So yeah... I'm out

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Yea its getting kinda stale tbh

 

I prefer just whacky experiments with pcs over the infrastructure stuff but thats just me, that kind of vid is really rare now, the last properly interesting one imo is the phase change pc

[flexmanco]

Agreed, those house videos not really what Im in to too. Moving funiture and piping tips aint my jam. Hes probably doing it from a sense of just sharing his joy to the world and thats totally fine

[Alireza]

I think Linus has milked his house enough that at this point he did not only not payed for his house. he even made a profit out of nothing

I'm getting bored too seeing him flexing his own money and success

I'm not saying its a a bad thing being rich and successful

just getting boring seeing him like this

the worst part of all of this is floatplane

I totally disagree with making exclusive content only for people that can pay

LTT was born and raised on youtube because of us and therefore all of its content should be on youtube (for us)

obviously its his channel and he can do whatever he wants but that is a MAJOR turn off for someone like me

why you cant do it like other youtubers

we don't need a lab

we don't need expensive merch

we were absolutely fine with LTT 2-3 years ago before you start screwing everything

LTT doesn't need to figure out how to pay for more then 100 people because they don't need to have 100 people

they don't need to necessarily grew this much

they screwed up in a bad way and I don't think they can recover from it

LTT used to be a fun channel that every video worth watching a few times

but now, I think Linus's worst nightmare is coming true

LTT finally (and unfortunately) is turning into a soulless media corporation that doesn't care about anything other then money and milking its own viewers

i really needed to get this out of myself

 

sorry for my bad English

[TrigrH]

31 minutes ago, uk_uk said:

Most "obnoxious," however, are the "Intel $5000 Extreme Tech Upgrade" videos.

I love these videos, the cringy shit they buy is quite entertaining.  

[Alireza]

32 minutes ago, uk_uk said:

 

Most "obnoxious," however, are the "Intel $5000 Extreme Tech Upgrade" videos.

 

the only thing i like about those is seeing inside of LMG employees house

that all

[Zalosath]

They're a hit or miss for me. Sometimes he'll do a cool tech video at his new house, and other times he'll be explaining his heating system.

[Danicron]

I really dont understand the point of this post, you say you arent jealous but then proceed to sound incredibly jealous .
Personally, I am really enjoying the content lately, also they have worked really hard to be able to afford the nice things that they have.
i dont see why you would try to make them feel bad about that.
 

[Waza69]

To be fair, not rarely do Intel extreme upgrade videos include a bunch of stuff that isn't even Intel related, or could even be the competition, like some people getting iPads in their Intel extreme upgrade for example.

The merch things are in most videos quite alright, as it's usually just a few seconds "waterbottle, lttstore.com", it's not even long enough to skip 5 seconds ahead, so I don't mind those too much.

The "this segway/segue to our sponsor..." is however more annoying if it's in the middle of a video, if it's right before the intro, it's easier to skip.

In terms of the WAN show, i tend to just watch it a day later and use the timestamps in the comments to skip through the ads section of the WAN show.

 

Ads have a negative effect on me. The more an ad annoys me, the less likely I'll buy your product. Ads that I see all day are almost entirely banned from any of my future shopping lists. I just freaking hate ads and if you keep shoving them down my throat, you're just making sure I won't ever buy that product or sometimes even the entire brand in the next few years. Not a single ad has ever made me buy that specific product.

[Roswell]

16 minutes ago, Waza69 said:

Ads have a negative effect on me.

Hate to break the news, LMG is an advertisement platform.

 

They make videos sponsored by one company, featuring hardware sponsored by another company while dropping ads for merch all wrapped up in even more Adsense ads. Anything that deviates from that recipe is almost always fully bought and paid for, infomercial style, by one company.

 

Why do people spend time watching 4 layers of ad inception? No idea. I guess it works on the uneducated or willfully ignorant.

[Waza69]

32 minutes ago, Roswell said:

Hate to break the news, LMG is an advertisement platform.

...

I do understand that fully.

But I've gotten to a point where a lot of ads don't even register to me at all. I obviously use ad blockers and the times I do see baked in ads, they barely register to me as I tend to skip through them, and if I don't skip through them, it's basically white noise in the background. Ads that are repeated too often, do get through though, and not in a good way, it makes me hate the product or even the entire brand and I'll put them on my "won't buy in the next few years" list.

This is however more of a problem to the brands who want to (over-)advertise their stuff, as they're losing sales the more they advertise to me, while it does help to keep LTT going and bring out some interesting videos once in a while.

The percentage of LTT videos (or any of their side channels) I watch surely has dropped in the last few years cause of this. There's some interesting videos, but there's also more videos lately that I'll skip entirely as they're of no interest to me at all.

[Alvin853]

LMG turned from a tech YT to an entertainment/marketing channel. The amount of what I would consider "quality content" has decreased vastly over the past couple years. But they're popular enough they get millions of views even on the worst videos. And many less tech-savvy viewers will probably believe everything they're saying in their videos, because the viewers don't know any better and LTT is considered a reputable source, because it used to be in the past.

[LAwLz]

I wonder if he has paid full tax on his house and the stuff inside it, or if he has avoided taxation by writing things off as "business expenses".

"The heating system in my house? Totally a business expense since I showed it in a video".

[flexmanco]

The channel that changed the most was "Tested". They literally tested new cool hardware and now its half Adam Savage talking about drillbits and half building Batman dolls

[LWM723]

They should start a new channel, LTT Legacy, and go back to the way it was several years ago, a tech channel, before it turned into an advertising-uninteresting channel.

[Middcore]

[Stahlmann]

I still enjoy most of the videos they do, but especially the cheesy sponsor segues and LTTstore plugs get increasingly more annoying. But hey, for every 20 people or so that participate in a thread like this there are 1000 people that like where they're going. And because of that it isn't going to stop. The reason why their videos look more and more like tik-toks (just look at the intros of the last 10 videos and you'll know what i mean) is because it pulls in a wider audience. In the end that is what matters to them because that brings in more advertising money, not pleasing their core audience.

 

Still, i think they're doing a good job at being the "gateway drug" of tech content. For anyone that has a deeper interest, there are other channels like Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus that do a much better job at in-depth content.

 

We'll see what happens if the lab ever starts putting out content. I really hope for another great purely objective review source like RTINGS, Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus. I still think Linus is going to force too much subjective stuff into their lab content rather than letting his test engineers do their thing. Time will tell.

[WildDagwood]

5 hours ago, Danicron said:

I really dont understand the point of this post, you say you arent jealous but then proceed to sound incredibly jealous .
Personally, I am really enjoying the content lately, also they have worked really hard to be able to afford the nice things that they have.
i dont see why you would try to make them feel bad about that.
 

Critiquing channel direction, which, to part of his point, seems to be pivoting away from quality information and more towards unnecessary displays of wealth and tech most will never touch, doesn't have anything to do with jealousy. It's more small-minded to jump to that conclusion while not really engaging in a discussion that you apparently don't agree with (which it's fine not to, that's your opinion).

 

This also has nothing to do with trying to make anyone feel bad about anything (why you're going there makes no sense). It's a community member giving feedback on their experiences over time with LTT. The end of the day LTT will make, for better or worse, decisions pertaining to their business models and content offerings. Some will be praised, others won't, but they need to live with the feedback that comes with it, no matter the case.

[Zodiark1593]

Videos are a lot more hit or miss for me as of late as well. I’ve gotten more and more into long-form content, and LTT (and tbf, many creators in general) does tend to leave me wanting at times, even with the more technical videos. 

That said, I don’t see the reason to make an entire thread on it. Linus does read feedback in comments, and keep track of analytics, so if something is going sideways, he doesn’t need me to point it out. 

 

Definitely eager to see what the Lab can bring to the table though. 

[Erioch]

6 hours ago, Alireza said:

the only thing i like about those is seeing inside of LMG employees house

that all

I really enjoy them and love seeing the stuff they've "stolen" from the office.

[Anghammarad]

Well you can't please everyone. 

As far as tech goes, there aren't as many so many new awesome for everyone things to show.

Building PCs was a thing a while until literally no one was able to afford a good midrange PC anymore and complains started, why so expensive wah... cancelled! wah...

Creating content isn't that easy anymore, to pump out as many vids as LTT does, yes there are some that are meh, others are plain awesome. 

 

Yes I sometimes skip a whole video... but hey... I don't need to enjoy everything they make, but LTT is still a good source for me for entertainment and let me think outside the box sometimes, or facepalm other times... which is funny too for me... 

 

So what, watch the stuff you like, and that you don't just don't watch. It is as easy as this.

[Yoinkerman]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I wonder if he has paid full tax on his house and the stuff inside it, or if he has avoided taxation by writing things off as "business expenses".

"The heating system in my house? Totally a business expense since I showed it in a video".

That's the MO of every small business owner, it's literally how the system is designed 

[Cubs7379]

I personally love extreme upgrades it’s fun to see the employees different personalities and preferences be showcased with there picks for an upgrade . 
 

I also love seeing the house upgrades I think it’s fascinating to see someone so smart build there home and I don’t view it as braggy at all.

 

i like the personal

videos they have a nice vibe to watching them 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Yoinkerman said:

That's the MO of every small business owner, it's literally how the system is designed 

I wouldn't say it's "designed that way". It's more about people abusing loop holes for personal gain. 

Spirit of the law vs letter of the law. 

 

Apple and other big companies are also abusing loop holes when they transfer money to tax heavens. Doesn't mean people can't get mad about it or that it shouldn't be frowned upon. 

[jeo]

I could not disagree with the OP more.

 

I love videos that focus on his house (both the new and old). Part of it is getting to live vicariously through Mr. Sebastian, what renovation and gadgets are included when the time and money budget is really high. In particular I love the server and network stuff, there is no way I could justify pursing a new epyc server to my partner (or myself). Instead I purchase used equipment which my from pov is functionally the same.

I also find the helpful in two ways; inspiration and future products.

A lot of the tech in Linus's house is currently out of reach for most of the audience, but we will see prices fall and in a couple of years it will become common place.

When I watch the videos I often see something cool which I would like to add to my own home. For example the using home assistant which person detection is something I am currently building out. I definitely am going a different route, but the end product and goal are the same.

 

Regarding the "Intel $5,000 Extreme Tech Upgrade", I don't see how it breaks any rules. I don't think it is possible for a viewer to not realize it is sponsored by Intel, which makes it extremely legal in Canada. It would be problematic if the videos did not disclose that Intel was the sponsor (last time I checked it was in the video name).

However I think there is a legitimate concern about the impact this type of sponsorship can have on editorial independence. I cannot speak for everyone (duh), but I feel their coverage of Intel produce has remained impartial (sometimes they recommend AMD, sometimes Intel). I think the best way a viewer can get comfortable is by understanding their testing methodology.

I also enjoy watching how the lmg use the 5k (Denis used it the best with the neon sign). It is cool to see different approaches based on different interests.

 

As for selling stuff on the WAN, it's how they pay the bills (I think, I don't access to their balance sheet). Most of the show seems to be Linus and Luke covering tech topics. But I love hearing the development history of their new products, it is something of which I have no experience and I think most of the audience enjoy watching some talk about something they are passionate about. This coming from someone who has never purchased anything from ltt (I have been considering the underwear and backpack).

 

To balance things out and attempt to show I am not a sycophant, I do think LTT has some misses. The roast video seem low value and some what mean spirited, but I might be an old fogey.