Gamers Nexus alleges LMG has insufficient ethics and integrity

[coopa]

2 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

I feel like so much of this commentary clearly comes from people generally lacking real world experience, having an idealized view of how companies actually work because they've grown up with LTT, and/or are just jumping on bandwagons because internet drama.

A CEO, CVO, or whatever it may be does not have their hands in every single aspect of a company. Communication from LTT =/= communication from it's CEO/CVO. Companies don't function like that, when things go wrong the figureheads take the hit, but acting like he's going out of the way to personally make these decisions or sending these communications is naïve. 

="You don't know enough about this to criticize at all". 

Sorry, that's not how it works.

And Linus and his wife own 100% of LTT from a dollars and cents perspective. He "stepped out" to a "Chief Vision Officer" role, yet he's the one publicly replying to a public relations crisis instead of a PR team or the CEO? C'mon.

 

5 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

It's also naïve to believe that altering a self-imposed video schedule is such an easy move. That schedule may have started as some sort of algorithm related content driver, but it's also likely to be an incredibly important cornerstone in driving revenue to support the expanded team. Revenue to support a team matters, just because a company is valued at 100m by some unnamed organization does not mean there is 100m in capital around to pay employees and bills. We don't see their balance sheets, we don't know a fraction of how the company operates financially behind the scenes. 

Nobody has given a rationale for the upload schedule or the errors, other than Linus' half-hearted (at best) reply.

 

5 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

I believe GN took a lot of quotes out of context to fuel their video, while some of it is valid, a lot has been personally addressed by LS on WAN multiple times. He's acknowledge when his employees mess up, and he often says that's on him as he needs to train them better. It's easy for a team of 3-4 enthusiasts to "get it right" every time, but when you get to a certain size that certainly and understandably becomes more challenging and is reflected in companies of similar size all the same. I also feel the near immediate reaction video from GN highlights capitalization on the view momentum of the drama more so than anything else. 

I can't agree with the "addressed by LS on WAN multiple times" part, as what Steve from GN gave on his vid generally quoted the WAN show for responses, and they were generally unsatisfactory.

 

6 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

LS made bad decisions, he has to live with the fallout of those. Acting as if anything is intentionally out of malice or part of some deranged personality traits is likely misguided and only fueled by those wanting to take part in the online mob mentality and keep the outrage going. I don't see any reason why things can't and won't improve, even HUB stated this in their reaction video taking a far more measured response than most of the online community. 

That's what this entire discussion is about, he has to live with his choices, but Linus needs to own this. Not a halfhearted "human beings make mistakes, poor pitiful me", but an actual ownership that problems exist, these are the problems, this is how we're going to address them. He need not take everything on his back at once, but an acknowledgement that there are issues and a more substantive plan to tackle them in the days/weeks to come being made transparent would be massively beneficial to community trust.

[HiTechLowSpec]

55 minutes ago, yuck said:

For me, that's it.

You can not brand youself as the most accurate data provider and so on, which LTT has been doing, and refuse to retest stuff and having basic errors (without proper corrections since everyone makes mistakes) like the ones that GNs presented.

I think you're overstating the situation. They have expressed their desire to be the most accurate provider. LTT has been pretty clear that they aren't there yet.

[gottahavit]

3 minutes ago, ShadowDev said:

yet more content on linus and ltt being scum.

He's not scum, he's just a spoiled self-entitle little rich boy with an ego 2 sizes to big.

[suits]

10 minutes ago, batezippi said:

No no no only a genuine apology and a plan to change things would end this.

Would you believe a genuine apology at this point? This is a "prove it" moment. Not a "make me a video" moment.

[Anorax]

1 hour ago, mitcHELLspawn said:

I noticed that LTT hasn't released any videos today... So it seems like they must have put a pause on releasing videos for the time being... Can anyone confirm if that is actually the case? I didn't look at any of their other channels just LTT... Anyone have more insight? 

Content is still being uploaded to Floatplane. I logged in just then to check.

[Drazil100]

3 minutes ago, dight said:

a response on the forums isn't really enough. most viewers of LTT either don't use the forums or only use it for free tech support. u need to make a video on the main LTT channel addressing gamer's nexus' recent criticisms of you and LMG.

Looking at this thread, I think a lot more LTT viewers are using the forums than there used to be.

[Rulon]

Seems like a pivotal moment for Linus. Much love and respect Linus, please don't choose the dark side.

[JESUSARIUS REX]

Gwaymerz Nexwus Hurt Mwah Wittle Tech Tip :(

[LinusAuctionTips]

1 minute ago, Anorax said:

Content is still being uploaded to Floatplane. I logged in just then to check.

probably because its safe from criticism in the comments.

[UTiii]

8 minutes ago, Drazil100 said:

I mean you are free to think that. All I am saying is that if you want to convince people that Steve can't be trusted you would have a MUCH easier time if you stuck to the facts of what happened and didn't accuse him of stuff like being a stalker. Heck even if you DID accuse him of being a stalker, if you worded it in a more professional way and didn't randomly throw insults at the guy you would have done better. The Stalker Steve bit came across REALLY childish and hurt an otherwise good argument.

It was suppose to sound childish

[Drazil100]

3 minutes ago, suits said:

Would you believe a genuine apology at this point? This is a "prove it" moment. Not a "make me a video" moment.

It's a both moment. The initial reply was absolute garbage. That needs to be addressed by the end of WAN show this week if not sooner. Having a better, more thought out response is the first step of "prove it". After that you are right that they need to prove themselves with actionably doing better.

[LinusAuctionTips]

1 minute ago, UTiii said:

It was suppose to sound childish

so why bother.

[dight]

10 minutes ago, Lyre said:

HOLY

I edited my last post to reflect the change thanks!

holy shit it went up like -1k likes and 1k dislikes in the span of like 5 minutes

[suits]

1 minute ago, Drazil100 said:

It's a both moment. The initial reply was absolute garbage. That needs to be addressed by the end of WAN show this week if not sooner. Having a better, more thought out response is the first step of "prove it". After that you are right that they need to prove themselves with actionably doing better.

But he already said what he said, and it turns out he was manipulating the timeline and being dishonest. You want a fake apology, we already got the real response.

[Anorax]

11 minutes ago, DakotaCx said:

I feel like so much of this commentary clearly comes from people generally lacking real world experience, having an idealized view of how companies actually work because they've grown up with LTT, and/or are just jumping on bandwagons because internet drama.

A CEO, CVO, or whatever it may be does not have their hands in every single aspect of a company. Communication from LTT =/= communication from it's CEO/CVO. Companies don't function like that, when things go wrong the figureheads take the hit, but acting like he's going out of the way to personally make these decisions or sending these communications is naïve. 

It's also naïve to believe that altering a self-imposed video schedule is such an easy move. That schedule may have started as some sort of algorithm related content driver, but it's also likely to be an incredibly important cornerstone in driving revenue to support the expanded team. Revenue to support a team matters, just because a company is valued at 100m by some unnamed organization does not mean there is 100m in capital around to pay employees and bills. We don't see their balance sheets, we don't know a fraction of how the company operates financially behind the scenes. 

I believe GN took a lot of quotes out of context to fuel their video, while some of it is valid, a lot has been personally addressed by LS on WAN multiple times. He has acknowledged when his employees mess up, and he often says that's on him as he needs to train them better. It's easy for a team of 3-4 enthusiasts to "get it right" every time, but when you get to a certain size that certainly and understandably becomes more challenging and is reflected in companies of similar size all the same. I also feel the near immediate reaction video from GN highlights capitalization on the view momentum of the drama more so than anything else. 

LS made bad decisions, he has to live with the fallout of those. Acting as if anything is intentionally out of malice or part of some deranged personality traits is likely misguided and only fueled by those wanting to take part in the online mob mentality and keep the outrage going. I don't see any reason why things can't and won't improve, even HUB stated this in their reaction video taking a far more measured response than most of the online community. 

The Billet situation is unfortunate but in a just culture corporate environment, it's an outlier that reflects on poor systems, not poor people. 

It's easy and fun for some to bash people like LS. At the end of the day I don't see how that helps anyone. LS has specifically made comments about not wanting the toxic community traits that come with tribalism a la Team LTT or Team GN, hence his "Team Media" callout. Those paying attention have seen him make all of these statements prior to this blow up which demonstrates consistency in his vision, priorities, and messaging. 

They need to be better, sure, but they know that. It's a business, and this business won't maintain it's current state let alone it's anticipated growth if it doesn't make significant strides towards improvement. However, that is not going to happen today, or even tomorrow realistically - things take time. Just slow down and breathe, and watch something else for a while if you're so bothered. 

I don't subscribe the the notion that any PR driven apology is owed to appease an anonymous portion of the crowd here. Those who are owed apologies, that should be handled personally and I believe it is underway off the public forum. I believe that the true response of any measure or value will be seen in future process improvements and changes, or possibly lack there of. Time will tell.
 

I agree. I don't feel LMG needs to offer any "apology". If they needed to make a public statement all they need to say is we have noted the GN video and will improve moving forward. They have said this multiple times already after other video whoopsies on other occasions. But they need to make real improvements. If their video schedule is such that they cannot afford to slow down because they will lose money then that is a very slippery slope to be trapped on. If I was the CEO I would be carefully looking at their overheads and ensuring every staff member is giving maximum performance to justify their wages.

[Battlenat0r]

 

[DakotaCx]

7 minutes ago, coopa said:

="You don't know enough about this to criticize at all". 

Sorry, that's not how it works.

And Linus and his wife own 100% of LTT from a dollars and cents perspective. He "stepped out" to a "Chief Vision Officer" role, yet he's the one publicly replying to a public relations crisis instead of a PR team or the CEO? C'mon.

 

Nobody has given a rationale for the upload schedule or the errors, other than Linus' half-hearted (at best) reply.

 

I can't agree with the "addressed by LS on WAN multiple times" part, as what Steve from GN gave on his vid generally quoted the WAN show for responses, and they were generally unsatisfactory.

 

That's what this entire discussion is about, he has to live with his choices, but Linus needs to own this. Not a halfhearted "human beings make mistakes, poor pitiful me", but an actual ownership that problems exist, these are the problems, this is how we're going to address them. He need not take everything on his back at once, but an acknowledgement that there are issues and a more substantive plan to tackle them in the days/weeks to come being made transparent would be massively beneficial to community trust.

I see those acknowledgements in his response. The fact that they aren't "good enough"  for you is really irrelevant in my opinion. Situations like these are typically handled internally, those all fired up to the point of pushing this on and on, I believe, are just misinformed in how things tend to work because it's a YouTube personality vs CNN. 

[2dfx]

Beware to those looking for restitution.  

 

The lawyers will be crafting a response.  It will be crafted carefully to placate the masses into forgetting this ever happened.

 

Don't take what Linus or LMG says at face value.  Actions speak louder than words.

[mobriskie]

12 minutes ago, UTiii said:

I find it stalkerish behaviour. Hence stalker Steve.

 

I also think posting the video with months of stalkerish cataloging without contacting an associate of yours is snakey, hence Steve the snake.

LOL....  stalkerish....snakey.    Steve did some research for his videos...something LMG is not doing and then making errors and then having to correct the errors.    I don't know like I said before I like LTT channel, I like GN channel, I like Jayz channel and I like Hardware Unboxed.   If I'm looking to buy a particular product or part I try to hit all of their channels up to see if they have done a review of it and see what their individual likes/dislikes were which is the point of their channels...to give informative advice to consumers.    Regardless if Steve, as you put it, stalked LTT's videos for months to find the errors or he just took 3 hours to find them...the errors are there nonetheless and Linus doesn't seem to be too concerned that his company is pumping out these errors to consumers who are weighing decisions.   If you are going to make a channel based on hardware review for consumers then do it and do it well.   If you are going to just throw shit together so you can get 15 videos a week out there then at least put a warning message saying "Take everything in this review with a grain of salt because we didn't spend a lot of time making it accurate."

[NullValid]

3 minutes ago, eric79x said:

That's the thing that bothers me most about GN video. GN are constantly talking about their 'journalistic integrity', but the 45 min video and the video today are both heavily editorialized, with lots of supposition, assumption and pure unproven opinion. That doesn't mean any of the factual data was wrong or that LMG should be 'let off the hook' so to speak, but GN definitely being more than a little catty about the whole thing. It would have been better, imo, if GN had either a)stuck to pure facts or b)not pretended to be 'unbiased journalism' and just been honest about the real intent of the video, which was 'hey I took that comment personally because I have thin skin, so I'm going to roast TF out of you and your company'.

So many comments about GN not contacting LTT before posting the original video:  No, GN was not in any way obligated to do so. (even though that IS 'journalism' standard practice and GN does it frequently for other companies.) BUT, as a man, man to man with someone you've known and had at least somewhat of a working relationship with for a long time if not exactly best buds, reaching out with at least a heads up first would have been the right thing to do.

The bottom line is GN got their panties in a wad over an off-the-cuff comment by an enthusiastic LMG employee and responded with 1000 times more force than even what they perceived. As an analogy - Joe's friend accidentally bumped into Jim, so Jim beat the shit out of Joe. That's what happened. 

It's just the fact that GN was inarguably correct with their data driven criticisms kind of overshadows out how disproportionate and dirty their response was.

GN - responding to an accidental shoulder bump with a beat down
LTT - not accepting full responsibility and making juvenile counterpoints

There all acting like a bunch of children. If this was r/aita, this would solidly be 'ESH'.
Steve and Linus both RREEAALLYY need to get over themselves; both acting like bitches at this point. Bring it back down to earth fellas - I spot mistakes and hogwash in both of your content, regularly - and I don't get mad at you. (well except for the b.s. Electroboom/RAM/ESD video; that one was unforgivable.)

 

The biggest victim in all this is the LMG guy who made the original comment. Dude is just enthusiastic about his job and the company he works for, which is what you WANT in an employee; someone who is enthusiastic and believes in what their doing and the company they work for. It's just unfortunate the guy didn't think about the implication of saying that; almost as unfortunate as GN's severe overreaction. I can only imagine how shitty that LMG guy feels over all this, but it's not his fault it got blown so way out of proportion.
 

I don’t even want to think about what is happening right now to LMG employees.
 

I’d like to think that no abuse or whatever hasn’t been posted but it’s the social media age we live in. 
 

Like you say this is a case of everyone sucks here. 

[Guest]

Will be wild if there’s actually no main channel upload today. When was the last time they missed a day?

 

Not complaining if they’re using the time to put together a decent response for tomorrow.

[Drazil100]

2 minutes ago, suits said:

But he already said what he said, and it turns out he was manipulating the timeline and being dishonest. You want a fake apology, we already got the real response.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, it is clear no one looked over his reply before he posted it. It's about 50/50 for me whether he was the one to manipulate the information in a panic, or if he just didn't get all the details straight before posting. Heck it's possible an employee saw that he was furious about this and manipulated the information to him.

Whatever the reason is, you are 100% right that we shouldn't trust him at face value until he proves his intent to do better. 

I still want that "fake" genuine apology though. I want him on the record so we have more statements that we can hold him to.

[Blahx]

2 minutes ago, eric79x said:

That's the thing that bothers me most about GN video. GN are constantly talking about their 'journalistic integrity', but the 45 min video and the video today are both heavily editorialized, with lots of supposition, assumption and pure unproven opinion. That doesn't mean any of the factual data was wrong or that LMG should be 'let off the hook' so to speak, but GN definitely being more than a little catty about the whole thing. It would have been better, imo, if GN had either a)stuck to pure facts or b)not pretended to be 'unbiased journalism' and just been honest about the real intent of the video, which was 'hey I took that comment personally because I have thin skin, so I'm going to roast TF out of you and your company'.

So many comments about GN not contacting LTT before posting the original video:  No, GN was not in any way obligated to do so. (even though that IS 'journalism' standard practice and GN does it frequently for other companies.) BUT, as a man, man to man with someone you've known and had at least somewhat of a working relationship with for a long time if not exactly best buds, reaching out with at least a heads up first would have been the right thing to do.

The bottom line is GN got their panties in a wad over an off-the-cuff comment by an enthusiastic LMG employee and responded with 1000 times more force than even what they perceived. As an analogy - Joe's friend accidentally bumped into Jim, so Jim beat the shit out of Joe. That's what happened. 

It's just the fact that GN was inarguably correct with their data driven criticisms kind of overshadows out how disproportionate and dirty their response was.

GN - responding to an accidental shoulder bump with a beat down
LTT - not accepting full responsibility and making juvenile counterpoints

There all acting like a bunch of children. If this was r/aita, this would solidly be 'ESH'.
Steve and Linus both RREEAALLYY need to get over themselves; both acting like bitches at this point. Bring it back down to earth fellas - I spot mistakes and hogwash in both of your content, regularly - and I don't get mad at you. (well except for the b.s. Electroboom/RAM/ESD video; that one was unforgivable.)

 

The biggest victim in all this is the LMG guy who made the original comment. Dude is just enthusiastic about his job and the company he works for, which is what you WANT in an employee; someone who is enthusiastic and believes in what their doing and the company they work for. It's just unfortunate the guy didn't think about the implication of saying that; almost as unfortunate as GN's severe overreaction. I can only imagine how shitty that LMG guy feels over all this, but it's not his fault it got blown so way out of proportion.
 

i feel like GN is trying to pay for something, why not go after a channel with 13 million more subs. Its clear he put in time to the video and information delivered, but just seems very HEY WHAT CAN WE DO TO DRIVE SUBS here... especially the i'm turning off monetization bit .  sacrifice one video for 5% of Linus sub base to subscribe.  I'm probably wrong but this is the internet so here are 2 cents. 

[Wintyr]

oh man phone call with Steve I forgot about this wan show stream

[Wasabi.jp]

18 minutes ago, MagWick said:

I don't care what anyone says here. Apart from the data inaccuracies that GN said, the whole Billet situation is messed up. The Block that you so carelessly put up to auction, maybe somebody's life's work and dream. To get you to understand this, it's like putting up the prototype of LTT screwdriver for auction, when you actually sent it for early review. Let's say that you didn't MEAN to put it up for auction. Now that it's all been done, you never, ever uttered a word called, "sorry", that could've easily defused this whole situation in a minute. But YOU, being you @LinusTech fucked this up beyond repair. This whole situation may not mean much for general people, but to us, your subscribers, the ones that have been watching for the last decade, is deeply distressing. A very sad day indeed.

Agree, that need an serious explanation from LTT and also what measure they will take in the future.