Gamers Nexus alleges LMG has insufficient ethics and integrity

[the9thdude]

Just now, divito said:

LTT isn't a hardware review site. I'm not sure why people are prone to conflating these things.

If these issues exist when Labs launches their infrastructure and data, then people will have more contextual points.

Labs may not be standalone at the moment, but their testing results are being used in review videos and roundups regularly. If they wanted the excuse of going through teething pains, they should have launched the Labs channel quietly to start gathering feedback while keeping the review process separate while they figured out their methodology.

[VisibleXela]

12 minutes ago, Coatesy said:

You don't have to wait for a response but it would be in the interest of the public and wider story to understand the suppliers perspective or opinion.

In much the same way, GN could reach out to LMG with his observations and gain some more insight. It might not change the video at all but at least the is a deeper understanding of what has been going wrong and what the supplier (or LMG in this case) is doing to control for those issues.

LMG may have told Steve that while they don't agree with his assessment, they are aware their quality control has not been up to the standard we should expect (which Linus has admitted in his statement). That in itself adds significant value to the conversation which was missed in the GN video.

It wouldn't change the reality either way, because as a consumer (of content on YouTube or computer hardware I'm purchasing) I should still know that LTT has a history of factual errors, regardless of whether or not Linus Sebastian himself has blessed the information before it reaches my ears. His content is still on YouTube. If LMG doesn't want to be criticized for factual errors, it shouldn't post factual errors. Is that impossible? Absolutely! But that's the nature of having content online - people are going to criticize it, and they're going to criticize it publicly and on massive stages. Comes with the territory. Either you fix your shit and get back on track or you continue to fuck up and go out of business for publishing things that are wrong, win/win for the rest of the world either way.

 

Not that any of this matters, because Linus clearly only wishes it was private so he didn't have to resolve the Monoblock thing. Unless someone from Billet Labs would like to comment otherwise, it's pretty transparent that the payment magically manifested after getting dragged publicly. He only wishes Steve came to him privately so he wouldn't have to do that.

I'd be happy to be wrong on this one, but it seems pretty clear from where I'm sitting.

[CradleGames]

14 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

If you're new to the channel, I understand why you might not know this, but we are extremely committed to improving our accuracy to the point where we are building out a $10M+ facility jam-packed full of equipment and engineering know-how. It's taking time, and this kind of aggressive expansion has been a learning curve for us, but to frame our recent actions as "sacrificing accuracy" is misleading at best. 

We need to make a lot of process changes to get to the point where everything is water-tight. That's a big part of why we added our new CEO Terren to our leadership team, but once again... things take time. He's been full time on the job for less than a single quarter and he's getting up to speed on all the things we are doing right... and yes... all the things we are doing wrong.

 

Trust me, we know. But we are making major investments in improving all of this and we won't stop.

You still are missing the point; NOBODY gives a shit about your fancy toys if you're pumping fast-paced garbage content. 
Right now, you're sounding like you're jerking off to those new shiny hardware at the expense of your staff wellbeing and content quality. Are you that out of touch?
Who care about your "major investments"? We ain't your shareholders. At no point in everything you've written today did you manage to understand the real issue.
Your lack of self-awareness is impressive, claiming Steve lack professionalism by not contacting LTT, while you trash two small companies without giving them a shred of decency to own up to your own mistakes in your own content.
Can't be bothered to pay a few hundred bucks to fix the content, but let's blow millions in hardware.

[Texbobcat]

4 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.

Most gas lighting apology I've read from a youtuber.
We DiDn'T SelL It BuT AucTioned It FoR CharITY - What's the damn difference either way you gave it away for money when you weren't supposed to.

[CMAN69.420]

4 hours ago, Srius1 said:

Steve is lame for doing this piece on LTT for someone who linus called his friend. I can see lots of other creators not dealing with GN any more for this. I bought over $400 of product from GN but will not spend another penny there due to this.

 

zero need for this BS hit piece . There are tons of other stories he could have done and this is dumb and just starting a fight and drama for no reason. Linus has said multiple times LTT videos are entertainment first. They never said they were 1000% accurate . This is like being mad at McDonald’s for their burgers not looking the exact same as the picture…

I made an account just to let you know know stupid you sound. This is literally my first post. Congrats sport. 

[Anorax]

1 minute ago, divito said:

LTT isn't a hardware review site. I'm not sure why people are prone to conflating these things.

If these issues exist when Labs launches their infrastructure and data, then people will have more contextual points.

That may be so but they sure do spend a lot of time commenting, criticising, and producing graphs of reviews of product. If they are not a hardware review site then they should not do hardware reviews. If all they want to be is another NCIX then they should make it clear that is all they are, ie. an online retailer that promotes and sells product and provides variety entertainment.

[jitteryzeitgeist]

1 minute ago, VeryScary said:

Majority of GN videos has around 200K views. This video about LTT has 1M videos in 8 hours. I wondering why he decided to make this video.

HUB already dragged LTT.

 

It's not jealousy, it's watching the biggest name in the space dilute the credibility of all review outlets by putting out half-baked and inaccurate reviews.

[WillHeard]

3 minutes ago, VeryScary said:

Majority of GN videos has around 200K views. This video about LTT has 1M videos in 8 hours. I wondering why he decided to make this video.

Sorry but if you don't see why Steve would feel the need to make this you're uninformed or not paying attention. Steve is one of like 5 people on earth with a platform big enough to make a video like this, and not lose their job

edit:

and with the credibility to do so. which he definitely has.

[ThousandBlade]

4 minutes ago, jitteryzeitgeist said:

Didn't they?

 

"OH THE RESULTS WOULD BE THE SAME ON A 3090, TRUST ME BRO, ITS GARBAGE."

"it's garbage" is just his opinion, there's nothing really wrong with that part. that being said, test it wrongly is a huge mistake.

People watch his videos will come to their own conclusion about a product based on parts of information in the video. 

Because people sometimes do buy stuff solely because of one aspect of the product, and nothing else. I know there are stuff I bought purely because it looks nice, or purely because I think it's cool.

Though I'd never buy that cooler, I'd totally see someone wanting to buy it just because It has average performance but is cool as hell. And the same person would not buy it if it barely functions at all. Misrepresenting the performance would obviously effect people's decision regarding it in this case. 

calling it garbage it's no problem, but misrepresenting the performance is a HUGE PROBLEM.

[CMAN69.420]

1 minute ago, CradleGames said:

You still are missing the point; NOBODY gives a shit about your fancy toys if you're pumping fast-paced garbage content. 
Right now, you're sounding like you're jerking off to those new shiny hardware at the expense of your staff wellbeing and content quality. Are you that out of touch?
Who care about your "major investments"? We ain't your shareholders. At no point in everything you've written today did you manage to understand the real issue.
Your lack of self-awareness is impressive, claiming Steve lack professionalism by not contacting LTT, while you trash two small companies without giving them a shred of decency to own up to your own mistakes in your own content.
Can't be bothered to pay a few hundred bucks to fix the content, but let's blow millions in hardware.

I was going to type a response to @LinusTech,  but you summed it up perfectly. Thank you

 

I found this on Twitter (X) and came to the forum just to discuss this. 

[blademagic]

14 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

If you're new to the channel, I understand why you might not know this, but we are extremely committed to improving our accuracy to the point where we are building out a $10M+ facility jam-packed full of equipment and engineering know-how. It's taking time, and this kind of aggressive expansion has been a learning curve for us, but to frame our recent actions as "sacrificing accuracy" is misleading at best. 

We need to make a lot of process changes to get to the point where everything is water-tight. That's a big part of why we added our new CEO Terren to our leadership team, but once again... things take time. He's been full time on the job for less than a single quarter and he's getting up to speed on all the things we are doing right... and yes... all the things we are doing wrong.

 

Trust me, we know. But we are making major investments in improving all of this and we won't stop.

I think you're missing the point here. Accuracy in this context is not just about the accuracy of your test results and numbers. Mistakes happen, sure. Both your testing methodology and company are relatively new and still growing, so that's expected. However, it doesn't matter if you have a $10 million lab or $10 billion super lab if the final presentation of your results (your videos) contain mistakes that should've been corrected properly. Having an editor put in a note in every other video indicating a correction is not the proper way to handle mistakes. Imagine if Apple or Microsoft consistently found errors in their presentations to the public and their solution to that is to slap a note saying that this was an error. If you want to be seen as credible, then re-record voice lines, re-make slides, re-shoot videos, do whatever it takes to push out a quality product rather than aiming to meet a deadline. That's the real gist of things. We know you're not okay with giving our inaccurate results to your consumer base—that's why you have those editor notes as corrections—so why don't you put away the bandaid fixes and properly handle your errors? We as consumers/fans would like nothing more for both your video and content quality to remain high, which I can't say it is right now with all the things that seem rushed. 

[Legitsu]

1 minute ago, jitteryzeitgeist said:

If I don't do my job properly I get fired because clients who pay us a lot of money get angry.

 

Linus does his job improperly and has a massive band of merry men ready to keep his coattails from settling on the dust.

 

Nobody is above criticism and you aren't helping anything by pretending they are.

ok

so what about steve? 

why didn't he reach out to linus before any of this

 

you are so quick to judge linus but this is essentialy a he said she said fight and the guy picking the fight came out of left field for no good reason

 

which make this look like exactly what it is petty jeliously thinly vailed with half truth 

 

 

[divito]

2 minutes ago, HunchoGang said:

The simple fact that your response was immediately directed toward jealousy and LMG attempting to move into more hardware tests to "directly compete" with GN just shows the drama and sensationalism on your end lol.

As alluded in a previous post of mine, if GN was truly concerned with 'tech Youtube' and its accuracy and standards, the video could have included a dozen popular tech channels that also consistently have errors and call on all creators to do better for the sake of the niche. However, this was a singular callout on LMG. This is not a random decision, and speaks to psychological issues.
 

5 minutes ago, HunchoGang said:

If their focus was on financial competition in any regard the video that they just made in regards to the Accuracy, Ethics, and Responsibility of LTT would be made monetized- But it isn't. 

As it's more of a complex, the motive doesn't have to be purely financial. But even so, while they claim that video isn't monetized (to which we have no way of verifying by the way), you think there will be no residual traffic to other GN videos as a result of this video? Their most viewed videos are the result of calling out companies, channels and controversies. 

[hysteresis]

4 minutes ago, divito said:

LTT isn't a hardware review site. I'm not sure why people are prone to conflating these things.

If these issues exist when Labs launches their infrastructure and data, then people will have more contextual points.

But they make reviews and more reviews ... that's like saying "Apple isn't a laptop company they make phones!!!!" and leaving out the part where they also make laptops. 

[K007]

25 minutes ago, stayupthetree said:

My problem with this that GN does this while pretending that they themselves aren't an industry member. Like they are some sort of outlier above the fray.

Not sure why you have a problem. GN is basically 5-6 people...that doesn't have a self imposed daily video goal, as they take a lot of time to investigate before jumping in. Remember the 40 series melting? Jay2cents jumped the gun hard on that, 0 testing, just straight up jumped in. GN contacted users impacted by it, paid full price for the gpu/cable and did full stress testing with data.

This is something GN is known for, facts. 

[jitteryzeitgeist]

1 minute ago, ThousandBlade said:

"it's garbage" is just his opinion, there's nothing really wrong with that part. that being said, test it wrongly is a huge mistake.

People watch his videos will come to their own conclusion about a product based on parts of information in the video. 

Because people sometimes do buy stuff solely because of one aspect of the product, and nothing else. I know there are stuff I bought purely because it looks nice, or purely because I think it's cool.

Though I'd never buy that cooler, I'd totally see someone wanting to buy it just because It has average performance but is cool as hell. And the same person would not buy it if it barely functions at all. Misrepresenting the performance would obviously effect people's decision regarding it in this case. 

calling it garbage it's no problem, but misrepresenting the performance is a HUGE PROBLEM.

Agreed fully, and my quote was more about him magically knowing the thermal properties of the device on the card it was designed for when he never tested it, so I think we can agree on that point.

[Tomataso]

“You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain" 
 

I was always a fan of LTT, I loved everything, its philosophy, its history, and all that. I know that not everything is black and white, but lately it seems that LTT is suffering from a very common problem in many companies that grow very quickly, which is that their quality control is going down the drain, it happened to Pizza Hut for example.

But I think Linus's explanation was not enough, at least for me, it's going to be weird to live without a float plane or LTT for a while, but techno Jesús has a point.
 

[hieuphan005]

4 hours ago, LinusTech said:

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.

I thought the point of a review/showcase of a product was to give more information on the product as intended to be used to give the consumer enough information to make an informed purchasing decision?

 

Sure, it may not make any sense to buy to you but different people have different sense. Like a $10,000 AI compute unit that is basically as 4090 does not make sense to buy for an average person but what about a business that uses it to make money? People would have different reasons for making a purchasing decision make sense, they just need then information and the reviewer's recommendation would be the tipping point for people on the fence.

 

Sure, as the person showcasing the product, you can have opinions on the product and provide your own recommendation and that is completely fine and fair but to misuse the product then tell everyone not to buy the product saying the results do not matter is not giving the user enough information to make an informed purchasing decision.

 

From my understand from watching LTT videos over the past 10 years and also the recent videos about the labs, it is to provide consumers with enough information to make informed purchasing decisions and yet what LTT did with the Billet Labs' water block video is completely contrary to this belief. In that video LTT did not use the product as intended providing no information on the product whatsoever and then saying not to buy the product, trying to enforce the decision on the consumer without providing any information.

 

Is the vision of LTT no longer to inform consumers about products so they can make informed purchasing decisions?

[Middcore]

10 minutes ago, divito said:

LTT isn't a hardware review site

 

What is the standard to be a hardware review site? They do hardware reviews for every major new CPU and GPU release and lots of other random products.

 

The consensus among posters here and on the subreddit may be that their reviews are not to be taken seriously. But they do make reviews, and a lot of people who don't post on this forum or on reddit undoubtedly do take them seriously and likely don't consult any other reviews.

 

If your reviews are shitty enough that nobody "in the know" pays attention, then you don't qualify as a "review site" and therefore are absolved for misleading people who aren't in the know? Is that how it works?

 

LTT has also, as Linus keeps reminding us, invested huge amounts of money into facilities and equipment for testing and reviewing hardware. 

[jitteryzeitgeist]

Just now, Legitsu said:

ok

so what about steve? 

why didn't he reach out to linus before any of this

 

you are so quick to judge linus but this is essentialy a he said she said fight and the guy picking the fight came out of left field for no good reason

 

which make this look like exactly what it is petty jeliously thinly vailed with half truth 

 

 

I personally don't care who he reached out to.

 

And I'm not quick to judge Linus.  He's been on a sliding scale of credibility for damn near a decade, friendo.

[WillHeard]

1 minute ago, Legitsu said:

ok

so what about steve? 

why didn't he reach out to linus before any of this

 

you are so quick to judge linus but this is essentialy a he said she said fight and the guy picking the fight came out of left field for no good reason

 

which make this look like exactly what it is petty jeliously thinly vailed with half truth 

 

 

You do not understand the reality of Steve, Gamers Nexus, LMG or the role they play in the youtube tech space if you seriously believe this

[McCarthy]

6 minutes ago, xCSxXenon said:

What's sad is I was really looking forward to a trusted source for future purchases,  such as cables and other tech items.  Currently, it seems like another cloud in the fog, clogging the internet up with more unreliable junk information. Big loss

 

Every content creator that became relevant and wants to stay so, will be biased eventually. If your criticism exceeds a threshold, you won't keep early assess to samples, and you will lose audience due to delayed reviews. Many reviews on YouTube are even paid for, you do the math.

 

As a matter of facts, YOU are the product for both sides, as a viewer and as a consumer.

[Middcore]

4 minutes ago, Texbobcat said:

Most gas lighting apology I've read from a youtuber.

 

And no ukulele. 

[Domi060288]

6 minutes ago, divito said:

LTT isn't a hardware review site. I'm not sure why people are prone to conflating these things.

If these issues exist when Labs launches their infrastructure and data, then people will have more contextual points.

They make regularly reviews of hardware new GPU, CPU if new one relaeses, SSD and many more Hardware get Reviewed or looked at 

[ZombieMan762]

1 minute ago, octothorpe_rekt said:

Absolutely.  Why even publish a video showing this level of incompetence and lack of preparation?  Linus dropping the occasional piece of hardware is funny, but posting a 21 minute video, most of which is trying to cobble together and improvise a build because they broke the motherboard they intended to use, rather than an evaluation of the product screams incompetence.  Pumps with loose fittings, radiators with missing fittings, a motherboard that needs to have half of its chipset heatsink cut off, and a mis-mounted reservoir means that you either don't know what you're doing, or you don't care.  Just like the Verge.

 

The sad part is he has defended their conclusion/review twice now. Once on WAN and in this thread. They didn't even review that product besides 'it costs too much' and excused their lack of testing because no amount of performance is worth the price. 

 

It's a damn niche product and intended for people who aren't strictly looking at price:performance. If they sold 200 of those I'd be surprised, and this was not some mass market product. Everyone knows that waterblock is not meant to be a 'value' or compete on price. It's for a small segment of consumers where price is not relevant, and it was a prototype to see if the design even worked. Linus instead chose to take that prototype product, make a fool of themselves not even having the right components on hand, and then defend it by saying our shitty video where people are laughing half the time trying to be as immature as possible for the camera is ok because it's too expensive. Just baffling.