Gamers Nexus alleges LMG has insufficient ethics and integrity

[BlackSmokeDMax]

1 minute ago, harls said:

Read what he wrote.  He did not say He had agreed to a price with Billet.  He did not say LMG and Billet agreed.  He said we agreed.  Quite possibly meaning that LMG has agreed that they will pay what they need to to make it right.  Remember this all happened over the course of a couple business days.  

 

Sure, but at that time, Billet had not agreed that just getting a check was sufficient. Since then, that has come to be, now that they know the part is not in the hand of any competitors.

[atxcyclist]

3 minutes ago, FadedSpark said:

And that invalidates their voice?

 

I had 4 posts on here before this.

 

I made the choice to come here and take part in legitimate discourse, not engage with the trolls on BOTH sides.

 

To imply because someone has just joined that their opinion doesn't count is laughable.

 

The trolls on both sides can politely and succinctly disappear. They aren't contributing anything.

 

What should be happening is useful conversation between both sides so Linus/LTT/LMG truly sees how big an issue this is, regardless of their own opinion on the matter, the communities thoughts at large are pretty clear at this point I think.

 

And you are not who I'm referring to, because you've actually been here. You've at least taken initiative to have an account and show some interaction with this community prior to yesterday, these new joins don't have that, so I am going to view their opinion and criticisms as more of a dogpile than long-time viewer criticism.

[dege13]

1 minute ago, jooroth18 said:

I dont think firing himself is nessessary. The real problem is linus has been going at full speed for far too long, and desperately needs a break. In prior wan shows, linus has talked about how Yvonne has asked him to slow down company wise and spend more time with family, and frankly she is right 100%. Linus is far to wrapped up in LMG, both physically and emotionally, and needs to understand this isnt the small team it used to be. Every single time controversey arrises, he takes it personally first and foremost.

 

Linus needs a break, weather it be a few weeks to a few months, and let the team handle and fix this. They are talented and bright people.

Agreed. How many times can he make an 'I quit' video anyway?

[Vonplaf]

One thing for sure is that LTT / LMG is having damage control meetings .... and if not then they should start having them.
YES i dont agree with the way LTT handled this situation, but that how companies end up doing things when there is a large disconnect between management and those that are working in the company.
I dont think there have been any bad intent from LTT / LMG in regards to the auction of the prototype, I just think at the company have grown to this size people are not communicating about the different tasks and how to handle them correctly.
But again YES LTT / LMG should have handled this WAY better and they need to do some real damage control and do it the correct way.

Its a good thing that GN made the video they did as it does spark a fire in the community on all sides, how ever i still feel that all these types of videos from GN always have a very angry vibe / tone from Steve and it feels like it is done in that way to somehow get some loud people in the community to also respond in a angry way back to those companies that GN exposes in their videos.
Yes if they did it in a calm tone less people would watch the video, so that is the style GN makes these types of videos in "the angry at everything investigatory journalist style"
or maybe its just me that is more to the style of Coffeezilla, in any case I feel that GN could have done this in a different way that also would have involved them in  not having to have reached out to LTT / LMG.

But that the game of Youtube... Drama = Views 

And we all eat it up  

Any way LTT / LMG please do right and do it soon.

Thanks.

[saintlouisbagels]

5 minutes ago, SimonShipperd said:

Sure Linus trashed the product, but even without new testing his original point stands by itself. A waterblock that costs 800€ for a last-gen card, and by the time it would be released probably 2 gen old card, is not something anyone should buy.

But you're also missing the point. Linus bashes people and companies all the time on ethics.

It's pretty unethical to knowingly review a product badly because you've already made your conclusion regardless of the results.

 

He's not in the position to bitch about $100/$200/$500 of extra resources for additional testing. He constantly burns hundreds of thousands on LTT Store with random promotions, bonus bin items, and free shipping.

[ScoggsUK]

1 minute ago, Cosmic Emotion said:

In his reply. He made it look like the situation with Billet was already resolved and then he replied again saying he didn't care how Billet arrived at the reimburshment amount of money. This is pretty clear and that's why everyone had been talking about it like that's what was said by him.

 

If you want to play mind games, prove to me God is fake as well.

 

This is not in your best interests. Linus has to be held accountable, otherwise you're gonna have lesser content. And I really don't care about you in particular, but I do care about me.

I'll try for a final time, as I've asked multiple times. 

 

Please can you directly qoute (I.e. use the words Linus typed in his posts), where he lied?

 

It is a simple task, I'm not playing mind games, you seem to state a person is lying but are unwilling to give the proof.

 

They have made multiple mistakes through this, but to claim he has lied is a falsehood unless you can provide a qoute.

[Polderviking]

24 minutes ago, SimonShipperd said:

If losing 1 prototype can destroy your startup, perhaps your startup shouldn’t have been sending out prototypes half way around the world to be reviewed.

Maybe you're right.

Or maybe it's reasonable to assume this course of events would be out of the question for a techtuber with LTT's weight and a reputation and sending it the way to Canada is a deliberate choice.

After all at some point you gotta start sending stuff out to get attention.

 

But the problem is not just the losing after all, the lack of testing because Linus decided the thing is too expensive to make sense in any context is a really funny point coming from someone driving a Porsche Taycan.

[The_Poff]

Question Everything Right? Question Steve and his motivation, Question the practices at LMG and their motivations. You wont be surprised by Blind faith in businesses. Steve through GN is a business. LMG Is a business. One proved another has fault through an attack. Compartmentalize, Improve, Move on. its only massive if you dont solve it. 

[VisibleXela]

2 minutes ago, Nucleosynthesis said:

Agreed, but Linus' response on this particular topic was childish, and he was twisting the narrative. 

 

I think, for once, it is actually deserving of a barrage of criticism. 

Oh sure, the current responses are terrible, no argument. I just also don't see any way out of this without some sort of public apology - which is kind of like saying "there's no way out unless you walk through this mine field with snow shoes on."

[Norton0108]

22 hours ago, LinusTech said:

There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). 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.

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. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.

.......

With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient. 

 

We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.

 

Thanks for reading this.

Linus, I am resurrecting my scarcely used account here just to give some feedback; because I'm pretty baffled and dissatisfied with this response.

I am an LTT/LMG enthusiast and borderline fanboy. I have been watching LTT content since you were doing unboxings in a garage, and have enjoyed watching you become the tech-titan you are today. I think if the vision of Labs comes to fruition it will be an extremely important resource to consumers. I think the products you produce, clothing, screwdriver, backpack etc. are excellent quality with amazing attention to detail. I watch the WAN show every week with my wife, and I watch most main-channel videos. Yet, I can't ignore the feeling LMG content comes across as surface-level and rushed to a point where it is a detriment to the data presented.

This gets more apparent anytime a subject I'm actually familiar with is discussed. I am not as tech-literate as many viewers of LTT (or GN); and even I have noticed inconsistencies and errors in videos. I worry what information I accept as fact on topics I'm less familiar with. You've discussed the struggles with this on the WAN show and have been fairly transparent in trying to figure out a way to improve things. I don't want to discount that. It just comes across as though you're unwilling to do the most simple thing that seems like it would work; TAKE MORE TIME!

I understand (and sympathize with) the time crunch LMG is under in order to produce the colossal amount of videos you release weekly. There's a lot of mouths to feed, and the company keeps growing. Many of your viewers would prefer you to release a smaller number of core videos with a significantly higher attention to detail; as opposed to what we currently get. This isn't to say "UPLOAD LESS, BOTTOM-LINE BE DAMNED!" Instead, I am suggesting you use filler like the AliExpress videos, or Extreme Tech Upgrades to bridge the content gap in between less frequent, but well-refined reviews and coverage of products and larger projects. Your employees have stated they want more time to work on something, your viewers have said things would be more interesting with more time invested to do things correctly; yet you continue at the same pace and (lack of) thoroughness despite all of that. It is a strange dichotomy you've created where you promote Labs as a major (future) resource in consumer research and decision-making, but main channel LTT (using Labs data, no less) takes a "Just slap it together and call it good-enough!" approach. "Just fix it in post" can't be good enough anymore.

You've advocated many times that viewers should seek out multiple reviews of a product in order to make an educated purchasing decision. I agree, but think the onus falls somewhat onto LTT to make sure their data provided is as accurate as realistically possible; because a sizable majority of viewers won't do this. Simply stating "well our conclusions aren't based on a spec sheet" is missing the point. If you are getting something as easy as a spec sheet wrong; what else is wrong due to poor testing methodology and processes? In a perfect world, nothing, but I hope you can see where viewers are coming from when they list it as a real concern. Unfortunately, it isn't nothing because Steve had many examples of data being misrepresentative of products being tested. This is essential you fix if you want labs to succeed in the way you've envisioned. No one would take Rtings.com seriously if every other review they produced had core data completely incorrect.

Understanding the full scope of issues like with Billet Labs is a major disappointment. The handling of it, honestly, has hurt the way I view your integrity and that of LMG. I personally was not outraged by the original video. I understood the feedback given by the audience; but I can't say I disagreed with the premise that an absurdly expensive and impractical water block for a last-gen product is a bad purchase. I don't personally attribute any malice to the sale of the product; clearly there are communication issues internally which need to be addressed and processes put into place to avoid situations like this. I do find your response, especially with the additional context provided by GN today; rather slimy.

First was the weasel wording of "we didn't sell it, we auctioned it".

Auction (noun): a sale of property to the highest bidder.

Giving you the largest benefit of the doubt I possibly can, I pray you used this phrasing in a poorly-worded attempt to distinguish it being auctioned off for charity; vs it being sold for personal gain. Even with that concession, you implying that you'd reached some sort of agreement with Billet Labs appears to be outright dishonesty and a manipulation of your audience. Either that, or both Gamers Nexus AND Billet Labs are distorting the truth with the intention of hurting LTT; something wildly out of character at least, for what we know as viewers about Steve. I'm glad in the wake of GN's video LMG reached out to Billet Labs in an attempt to make things right; but presenting it as though this conversation was well underway when the news broke is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. LMG screwed up and you seem to be trying to diminish the scope of that mistake. This flies in the face of the transparency that LMG has attempted to brand themselves with.

You expressed disappointment that GN didn't contact you behind the scenes to express these concerns. You say you're "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." and thereby implying that Gamer's Nexus is stabbing you in the back by calling you out. That isn't how a team works; when someone is consistently dropping the ball it is up to the other "team members" to call them out and hold them up to the standard.

Please do better.

[thebakerman]

44 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I have seen this type of brigading on multiple other social media platforms and forums before [...] It's 140 pages now, I started into this thread yesterday, I have seen more than enough to base my opinions. There are plenty of trolls and drama-chasers here, I don't have to be selective to see that.

I have too, and it sucks. It does. And there's a fair bit of it here, too. What I don't think is this is an accurate representation of the contributors of new members as a whole.

 

44 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

it is up to the word of the new joins that they are long-time watchers of the channel, but they have no presence here until this goes down? It seems like a convenient explanation, but I don't really buy it for a lot of the new joins. 

I think you have somewhat unrealistic expectations. The vast vast majority of the revenue-generating community behind LMG would ordinarily have no reason to join this forum for any purpose whatsoever. I solely interact with LMG on YouTube, through my subscriptions. I get video, I click video. I do watch videos daily, I even write comments if something is related to my job and I can share some knowledge/information/feedback, I also watch WAN on VOD after it airs, and I have bought merchandise from the company, which already makes me a tiny tiny majority of the overall viewership. Most importantly, in an ideal world, this is the exact level of time commitment I'd like to sink into LMG. I get a cool video that is informative and entertaining, I watch it, rinse and repeat. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

I frankly have zero time or inclination to contribute to a tech support/PC building forum in any capacity -- I work as a software engineer in big tech, and I have literally no willingness whasoever to "talk shop" with strangers on the internet after I've already done my daily 8-12 hours of yelling at computers. In an ideal world, I would get my one video per day that meets the expected level of quality and I would never have to set foot in this forum at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you are all absolutely fine people, but I couldn't care less about most of the discussions in here.

 

You can be a perfectly cromulent member of the audience who is years-long a regular viewer of LMG content who even wishes to support the efforts of the people who make the stuff they watch without wanting to end up in a community about that creator. I am not even at a regular viewer of GN. I just thought that him voicing some of the concerns about the direction of LMG would definitely create a discussion here where I feel like my concerns, which would normally be downvoted or ignored by the community at large in any other scenario, could contribute to the discussion that was started.

[The_Q42]

6 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

 

Re-read what I wrote, you are not the type of person I'm calling into question. You've been here for years and have previously engaged in this community, that's not 'a day old account with no posts' situation like I'm talking about. Lots of people here rarely post but have been here a long time, but that shows at least a level of involvement in the community that proves they have some prior knowledge of it.

 

The people that signed-up at 10pm yesterday and have dozens of posts just shitting on this or that, it's very hard to point at their comments as more than just brigading and drama-seeking.

 

What I'm saying is that you can't discount NEW accounts either because there aren't 1 - 10k comments per topic in the forums like there are for each video.  Simply put: a MASSIVE part of the genuine community (that might actively contribute via YouTube content/comments) is just not represented here typically.  Calling them out for signing into the ONLY place in which Linus responded is shitty.  It's the only avenue they've been given to weigh in on this topic.

[Skipple]

4 hours ago, Skipple said:

Given GN's latest follow-up on this. I'm really upset the way you portrayed this. You specifically said that Steven should have spoken to you and that you had agreed to payment... however, the agreement to payment didn't happen until AFTER Steve's video was published. 

 

Linus, I have been a pretty big defender of you when I thought defense was warranted, but this is kinda disgusting.

You have really let us down here. 

I'm sad.

I want to expand on this thought, because as a long time supporter of LTT I have many thoughts at this moment. 

• I choose not to believe that Linus would go on his own forums and purposefully mislead his audience in order to make himself look better. I don't believe this is something that Linus would intentionally do. THAT SAID, given Billet Labs most recent statement, and given that Linus himself was the one to communicate with Billet Labs after GN's video went live, I finding it very hard to not feel like that's exactly what Linus did. 
   
• I truly, honestly, don't know why Linus has this incessant need to defend himself. From the random Twitch comment during the WAN Show to this drama, Linus has shown over and over again that he has an issue with simply accepting criticism of any kind. I honestly don't get it. This entire situation would have gotten shutdown with a simple:
  
  "re: Billet Labs: We fucked up. We are working with Billet Labs to help remedy the situation best we can and ensure something like this doesn't happen again. re: Mistakes / Inaccuracies: We recognize consistent issues with our current editorial standard. I don't know how we are going to fix that just yet, but it's something we have acknowledged in the past and we are continuing to work on improving."
  
  There you go Linus. Within 4 sentences, I saved you from PR clusterfuck. Instead you have to go defend your ego(?) and dig yourself into this fucking mess. This isn't cute. There is no "trust me bro" tagline for this one. 
   
• Linus is right. This isn't something he should address on WAN Show. He needs to address this directly, tactfully, and promptly. Stop what you are doing. Gather Sr. Leadership at LMG, discuss what happened. Get to the truth and film a scripted video, publish it on LTT. Timeline exactly what happened, where you failed, and what you are doing to fix it. 
  
  Listen, you can put out a video within 24 hours of LTT getting hacked and taken over. You can do this too. 
   
• Someone said (either here or on Reddit, can't remember) that this feels like an assassination attempt from Steve.
  And you know what, it does...
  and it's working.
   

Man the fuck up, Linus. 

Whether you like it or not, people are swinging. You better be ready to swing back, duck, or get knocked the fuck out.
Your fans are watching.

[Leksi T]

3 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The issue is Linus overly was calling out GN for not contacting him to get the facts.  The fact is Linus acted like some of the stuff he did after the video was somehow done prior to the video.  That makes it a major lie, not just unprofessional but one where he's spin doctoring the narrative to try making himself look in the right.

Yes. That is a valid opinion to have, as I stated.

[Lagonas]

2 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

 

And you are not who I'm referring to, because you've actually been here. You've at least taken initiative to have an account and show some interaction with this community prior to yesterday, these new joins don't have that, so I am going to view their opinion and criticisms as more of a dogpile than long-time viewer criticism.

Once more, this forum is a separate platform from YouTube, made by the company that hosts the YouTube channel. The whole issue is based on YouTube videos. Most of us are long time viewers, and not having an account on this completely separate forums has nothing to do with anything.

[daydreamfaze]

2 minutes ago, Amaninacity said:

From a journalistic standpoint, this sentiment is wrong. Publishing a defamatory piece (whether the defamation is legitimate or not) requires a request for comment from the target of the piece. It’s important for maintaining your journalistic neutrality as well as making sure you don’t get sued. It’s also important for making sure that your reporting is accurate and fair.

 

Requesting comment is important in journalism. If the comment is shitty, that strengthens your piece. If it recasts your criticisms, acknowledging it also strengthens your piece. This isn’t a small point even if Steve’s piece is 100% factually correct. And I find it compelling and find Linus’s response lacking.

Requesting comment is NOT important in journalism when the content speaks on damages already caused to the community or customers. As Steve said, HE did not need LIEnus's comments on it because he already had them, and Lienus proved Steve right yet again, by quadrupling down on his ignorance. 
He did not reach out to AMD for comment, or Nvidia or Intel, ect.. when the damages had already been caused.. 
Thats called gaslighting... "were the victims, even though we caused the damage" 

[TensorVortex]

22 hours ago, LinusTech said:

There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). 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.

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. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.

Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.

 

With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...

 

I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.

 

Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip.  I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.

 

Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).

 

With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient. 

 

We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.

 

Thanks for reading this.

Oh no Linus is stopping the drama right here, that's NOT OK.

 

I'm thirsty for drama

[Ooooffff8732]

floatplane subs dropping every second rn

[Hezkezl]

6 minutes ago, harls said:

Again he did not say it was already resolved. 

I mean, saying "we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype" when Billet didn't actually give them a figure for compensation, just more of a "dude that thing cost us like 9500 to make wtf?" line and Linus interpreting that as an actual "we need 9500 bucks to make this better" figure, which doesn't take into account the loss of time making a new prototype and other potential damages, comes off as lying to the average person. Since it wasn't a formal "hey, we need X dollars" request for compensation.

 

The fact that you're trying to nitpick this hard over something that most non-fanboys can see is pretty telling. "We already agreed to compensate them for their prototype, why are you guys continuing to harp on and on and on about it?"

 

 

[Adventnevda]

This feels like the Artesian Builds moment for LMG

 

[Blademaster91]

18 minutes ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

Is it really that hard to read? The cost of employing someone is entirely different from what you pay them. You need an office building, utilities, insurance, tools and equipment, etc. The costs really add up quite quickly if you add it all together. And sure, it varies per country and role, but generally for a technical position you can assume it's really that much an hour in a western country to get skilled white collar work done in an office, and only a fraction of that sum goes to the employee.

Yet we don't know what the cost of employment really is either, given that Linus refuses to let his employees form a union but wants his staff to rush out a video every day regardless of errors in the videos.

[VisibleXela]

Just now, Ooooffff8732 said:

floatplane subs dropping every second rn

another clever commenter here (I forget who, sorry friend) threw together a website where you can watch Line Go Down

 

https://grafana.elizabeth.codes/public-dashboards/10023c4c479744e191760225708c0124?orgId=1

[harls]

 

 

4 minutes ago, Lagonas said:

 

 

 

Those are 2 different things, chief.
 

Yes and he did neither of them. 

[dege13]

5 minutes ago, OuterMarker said:

The Billet Labs situation has distracted many from the most important part of Steve's criticism... the quality of LTT videos. 

 

I am way more concerned about the poor quality of the testing, the many mistakes that are allowed in videos, and the overall rushed and unprepared nature of some of the shoots (the Billet Labs video itself).

 

Steve hit the nail on the head when he said the root cause is the self-imposed deadlines and upload schedule. Linus has to decide what the purpose of each video is. Is it a review? Is it showing off an ambitious tech project? Or is it mindless tech entertainment? Right now, I don't think they are doing any of those videos well.

 

If the goal is to be a review video, accuracy needs to be the number one priority. If that means you delay a video or pull a video down, so be it. An asterisk is not good enough. Sometimes the corrections are on the screen so briefly that I have to go back and pause the video. Who knows how many I missed when I wasn't looking at the screen.  And how can I expect to trust your conclusion if so many facts are corrected days or weeks after you recorded the video?

 

If it's an ambitious tech project (like showing off an expensive water block that looks cool). Put the product in its best light. Most of us are never going to play with those halo projects. You are our chance to see what they can actually do. And I really don't want to hear, "We aren't going to treat this product with respect because we don't think you should buy it." If that was the case, we would all be gaming on a 5-year-old CPU and last gen card. Sometimes we like to splurge on our hobby rather than only buy stuff with the best performance-to-dollar ratio. Wouldn't that suck if you couldn't find a serious review of a Porsche Taycan because the only youtube review of it said, "A Honda Civic will get you to work just as fast and is cheaper, so rather than taking this Taycan to a track, we are going to see how many bags of groceries it can carry."

 

But my biggest issue is Linus's refusal to do anything that will hurt his channel's performance when he knows there is a mistake. I get it, youtube crushes your video if you delete it and re-upload a similar one a few hours later, but that's the price you pay for your current level of quality control and workflow. If you don't want to delete videos, give your writers and production crew more time. You would call out a tech company that knowingly shipped a defective product, so why shouldn't your viewers treat you the same? It is completely unacceptable to build a media company that can't afford to remove a video or miss an upload if the video is full of errors

YES to all of this.

[silentdragon95]

Holy... I was on vacation the last couple of days and am only now catching up on this whole thing.

 

I have many thoughts in my head right now but the main one is what the hell  @LinusTech?

 

You need to reconsider your attitude. This isn't about what happened with the waterblock anymore, because mistakes were certainly made, but those can happen and can be fixed. This is now about how you handled this whole situation, which, if I may say so myself, was pretty much in the worst way possible. I never considered you arrogant or out of touch before, and I know that you have a tendency to speak too quickly but without bad intentions and make people mad. That's fine. This time however your extremely dismissive and seemingly arrogant reaction to the systemic issues Steve pointed out in his video (and that you and your staff are clearly aware of) is truly horrible.

 

Please, take a step back and take another look at the whole thing. If I wasn't wrong about you then you will realize how badly this whole thing was handled and how your reaction looks right now. If that happens, I truly hope that you can find the right words and (most importantly actions) to fix this.

 

If not, then I suppose I was wrong about you standing behind your ethics and in that case I will strongly have to reconsider any ongoing or future support of LTT. And, judging by the response of others, I won't be the only one. This could be a very big hit on LMG and its credibility and I really would hate for this to happen, because I want your vision of Labs to become true.