Gamers Nexus alleges LMG has insufficient ethics and integrity

[RockerBug17]

5 minutes ago, Reclus said:

I just can't...

100 mil corpo and you are telling them that WE don't know how good we have it with them?!?!?

WE will be begging for them to come back?!!?

This just screams pitiful.

I really was not aware how low the fanbase of LTT has fallen, I really was under the impression that people watching LTT can really think for themselves and be critical of people they often watch and enjoy. Boy was I wrong. 

Alright, let's start being critical with you.

 

You roll in here, about an hour ago, for the first time and proceed to tell a successful business man (Linus) how he can do better.

 

Go back to Twitter. I've watched this man build this channel from absolute nothing, and he's maintained his integrity every step of the way. You new members should take some notes.

[jooroth18]

56 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.

But then why not wait and do do diligence before publishing a review? After the first mistake and second, why didnt you step back, assess the situation, and determine to have extra checks in place to ensure the accuracy of reviews through this growing phase. 

 

Like I said before, the goal of LTT in my mind is to make the best videos anf provide the best content and coverage on computer hardware. And yes, mistakes happen, thats okay, and we get it. But constant errors showing up in reviews, and leaving the videos up when they should have been taken down rubs me the wrong way, and demonstrates a higher priority of the youtube algorithm than integrity in reviews.

 

As i keep saying, it really hurts me to talk about this as im a big fan, but I know that construcive criticism is the only way for people you idolize to improve, and I want you to improve.

[MattHolwood]

Atone to Tech Jesus for your sins, Linus.

 

Jokes aside, I hope the constructive criticism is taken seriously. Linus seems like a sensible guy.

[VisibleXela]

Any bets on when "there won't be a big WAN Show segment about this" gets walked back? My money is on "not before Friday" but you never know!

[Silveraga]

You really sounds like you’re saying « sorry , not sorry » with that kind of answer Linus. You should assume the responsibility, this is not the first time GN talks about issues with the way LTT makes mistakes. Also you sound like someone who’s getting attacked even though this is a Concern that GN and the community is bringing.

 

we want you and the team to do better, not spit on you. Please make an answer with an explanation of all individual points Steve brought up in video, not everyone goes to the forum. And explain what really happened with the billet labs block.

 

(sorry for the bad english if some sentence are hard to underStand)

[Legitsu]

3 minutes ago, VisibleXela said:

It doesn't matter what Linus was trying to do, I couldn't possibly care less. What he (or his company, rather) did do was misuse a product, publicly drag it, keep their prototype, refuse to give it back, auction it off for charity, and only pay them back for it after a giant stink was made about it.

 

Oh, and then he complained that there was a giant stink made about it instead of coming to him quietly. Y'know, because when everyone was quiet they were so keen on paying Billet back for it.

at what point did he refuse to give it back? 

do you have the email chain back and forth no again you have steves word: 

 

no what you have is claims by a 3d party and a out of context youtube comment and steves WORD That they reached out 

again all of this non-sense from you people from gamersnexus relie on one fact

that steve isn't wrong/misinformed/doesn't have his own agenda

 

what makes you so sure that hes the one to be trusted?: what that hes got a pattern of calling out corperations bigger then him and publicly shaming them? 

uh buddy thats not a great leg to stand on 

 

~'Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

 

[hysteresis]

6 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Kind of hard to steal something when you paid for it. Billetlabs sent them a bill. 

I am really confused by the outrage here. Yeah it sucks that it happened but mistakes happen companies and people make mistakes. It sounds like LMG and Billetlabs are resolving the issue themselves. I haven't heard anything from Billetlabs, until I do I am assuming they are ok with whatever was arranged. (From the sound of it LMG just gave Billetlabs a blank check and Billetlabs wrote what they thought was it was valued at. )

If the person/company who was wronged is ok with it why shouldn't we be ok with it?

 

What exactly are we trying achieve here? 

1) They didn't own it when they sold it, so they could have exposed to buyer to the risks of possessing stolen property.

2) Linus conveniently left out how it happened, where it went (like did linus hawk it to another gpu cooler manufacturer to copy?), and the details of their agreement with billet (are they paying a huge sum for billet to keep their mouths shut?) ... we want to hear what actually happened not just the "Hi I'm linus and I'm rich so I'm gonna pay for this problem to go away" response we've gotten so far.

[Catsrules]

8 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

It isn't going anywhere since they decided to settled it, but they could have decided not to do it and pursue legal action.

That is exactly my point. Case closed as far as I am concerned.

[GeorgeBanana]

First and probably last post, was motivated to come here and give y'all some support after getting fed that video.

Steve Steve-ing.  About 8:40 is an obvious example that tells you all you need to know about him here.  Calling Gary a "former marketing director for Asus" with no other clarification is extremely telling, Steve knows full well who Gary is, but that's inconvenient when you're trying to craft a wink-wink nudge-nudge narrative and amplify mistakes and misunderstandings into something they're not.

As someone who's been around long enough to have enjoyed Gary contemporaneously as part of Anandtech, just wanted to say that seeing through Steve is easy, and at least one person out there has enough experience, both tech and life, to see him and his video for what they are.

Respect for taking the high road in the pinned post.

[VeryScary]

Just now, VisibleXela said:

It was an exceedingly negative review. Personally, I think the product deserved scrutiny, and not a small amount of it - even if it were used perfectly according to manufacturer's spec, I think there are valid criticisms to be made for it. But that's not even close to the thing I have an issue with anyway, it's everything after that - and I suspect you know that.

 

It was exceedingly negative? He said more positive things about it than negative things. But people hear what they want to hear.

 

Also, was it even a review? People keep calling it a review but nowhere in the video did anyone say it review. In the very beginning Linus says the video was made by two people that have never built a watercooled pc before. If it was meant to be a review you don't put two novice builders on the job. It was obvious the view was meant to show something interesting, not review it.

[jitteryzeitgeist]

1 minute ago, Legitsu said:

at what point did he refuse to give it back? 

do you have the email chain back and forth no again you have steves word: 

 

no what you have is claims by a 3d party and a out of context youtube comment and steves WORD That they reached out 

again all of this non-sense from you people from gamersnexus relie on one fact

that steve isn't wrong/misinformed/doesn't have his own agenda

 

what makes you so sure that hes the one to be trusted?: what that hes got a pattern of calling out corperations bigger then him and publicly shaming them? 

uh buddy thats not a great leg to stand on 

 

~'Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

 

Somehow the PC Gaming Master Race pfp in 2023 fits this.  Just, absolute chefs kiss of a perfect storm.

[Albal_156]

5 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Linus probably thinking "bro, why didn't you just call me"

Probably because its not out in the open would be my guess and GN Steve is very concerned about journalistic integrity.

[Wol0]

2 minutes ago, RockerBug17 said:

God, would it kill this generation to use proper formatting, because I have no idea what you're attempting to say.

 

What I am saying is Linus has built a highly valued business. He should sell it and walk away from all the jackasses who presume to tell him how to run his hundred million dollar better.

I wasn't aware we have a literary laureate present. Apologies!

 

No, that's not the part I'm referring to, but yes. That would be the Tom (From Myspace) move, and he should absolutely cash out and enjoy the rest of his life in reasonable obscurity or transition to mainstream media if he has the jollies for the limelight.

[bandainamcofan]

2 minutes ago, Legitsu said:

~'Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

 

Said the person convinced Steve is doing this out of malice.

[jitteryzeitgeist]

Just now, VeryScary said:

If it was meant to be a review you don't put two novice builders on the job. 

Yes, which is why this channel is a joke.

[Forbidden Wafer]

11 minutes ago, LGA said:

Finally, just whilst I’m here, one of my biggest pet peeves with the channel is the charts, there’s so hard to compare. Please use this style over the ones shown!!!! 

Don't get me wrong, but these can be confused with box plots, which are not meant to be used in this way.

Video frame delay time would be better, since it is an instantaneous measurement, but the high percentiles wouldn't be that visible.
A quantile plot would be more appropriate, but I doubt most would understand how to read it.

[AlwaysFSX]

4 minutes ago, RockerBug17 said:

Alright, let's start being critical with you.

 

You roll in here, about an hour ago, for the first time and proceed to tell a successful business man (Linus) how he can do better.

 

Go back to Twitter. I've watched this man build this channel from absolute nothing, and he's maintained his integrity every step of the way. You new members should take some notes.

The incorrect take.

[hysteresis]

2 minutes ago, Legitsu said:

at what point did he refuse to give it back? 

do you have the email chain back and forth no again you have steves word: 

 

no what you have is claims by a 3d party and a out of context youtube comment and steves WORD That they reached out 

again all of this non-sense from you people from gamersnexus relie on one fact

that steve isn't wrong/misinformed/doesn't have his own agenda

 

what makes you so sure that hes the one to be trusted?: what that hes got a pattern of calling out corperations bigger then him and publicly shaming them? 

uh buddy thats not a great leg to stand on 

 

~'Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

 

If linus wasn't in the wrong here, why would his response be "I'm paying for this problem to go away, don't talk about it please" ... if steve was lying about that, linus would be able to absolutely SLAM him for it. 

[Thaylese]

I have been thinking about this all day. As a member of both communities I felt very conflicted, because I could see multiple points of view here. It was a lot to take in. Steve is not wrong in his analysis and conclusions, and seems pretty clear that he and his team thought this out carefully. It was a bold video to publish. Is he right that there is a problem? I dunno but I judge things like this on the soundness of the argument, which I found persuasive. Should GN have handled this differently? I dunno, not my circus nor monkeys.

 

PS: everyone posting legal/law/lawsuit/theft opinions...just stop. You have no idea what you are even saying. Or don't stop, and continue to provide laughter for me - up to you.

[iAxX]

Just now, VisibleXela said:

Any bets on when "there won't be a big WAN Show segment about this" gets walked back? My money is on "not before Friday" but you never know!

Seeing as the reply Linus got is mostly negative, even here. I seriously doubt they won't talk about this again. 

 

Curious to see how this will be addressed and if. Seeing as this is the first real crisis for the new CEO. 

 

This would be such a stain for the brand it'll be hard to remove for years. I can see "$10m lab btw" sticking every time they make a mistake, which people will be a lot more aware of now and they will be fact checking pretty much every LTT video. 

[Loopers]

3 minutes ago, Legitsu said:

at what point did he refuse to give it back? 

do you have the email chain back and forth no again you have steves word: 

 

no what you have is claims by a 3d party and a out of context youtube comment and steves WORD That they reached out 

again all of this non-sense from you people from gamersnexus relie on one fact

that steve isn't wrong/misinformed/doesn't have his own agenda

 

what makes you so sure that hes the one to be trusted?: what that hes got a pattern of calling out corperations bigger then him and publicly shaming them? 

uh buddy thats not a great leg to stand on 

 

~'Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

 

The fact Linus has reached out to them to make it right? You're white knighting hard and it's cringe. Respond with a little less of an emotional response and less hate for another creator. You're acting as if you were the one attacked. Linus fucked up and he doesn't need you defending his honor.

You're full of conjecture yourself in so many posts while putting others down. Just stop and let Linus say his piece during WAN and allow things to play out.

[Drazil100]

13 minutes ago, RockerBug17 said:

If I was Linus I would call up whoever offered ONE HUNDRED MILLION, sell the whole operation for ninety million, and walk away because of all the presumptuous jackasses commenting in here, 'cause, ya know, a corporation would DEFINETELY come to their forums to discuss the state of internal LTT affairs, and they'd DEFIFNETLY take your criticisms into consideration.

 

They won't know how good they've got it until you're gone, Linus. It's a sad truth. Only then will they be begging for you and all your flaws.

There is defending someone and there is toxic supporting someone. Linus does a LOT of things right and he also gets into a LOT of controversies that are overblown and stupid due to poor phrasing during WAN show. This is not one of those cases. He has already publicly admitted fault for this one and he SHOULD take his lumps for his mistakes. Let him take his lumps, there will be plenty of controversies he SHOULDN'T be attacked for in the future.

[nbrowser]

5 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.

Not that my opinion counts for much but I thing it would be incumbent on you to sit in front of a camera and record a one take addressing what GN talked about today. Take a good minute to think about things and how you can do better with your company, things like more time for reviews...standardizing testing, the prototype incident, etc. and get something like this posted sooner rather than later and skip the sponsor spot...just something honest without the usual LTT razzledazzle. It's time for LTT/LMG to do better, the time to start is now.

[Emperor Numerius]

1 minute ago, Thaylese said:

I have been thinking about this all day. As a member of both communities I felt very conflicted, because I could see multiple points of view here. It was a lot to take in. Steve is not wrong in his analysis and conclusions, and seems pretty clear that he and his team thought this out carefully. It was a bold video to publish. Is he right that there is a problem? I dunno but I judge things like this on the soundness of the argument, which I found persuasive. Should GN have handled this differently? I dunno, not my circus nor monkeys.

 

PS: everyone posting legal/law/lawsuit/theft opinions...just stop. You have no idea what you are even saying. Or don't stop, and continue to provide laughter for me - up to you.

I agree the legal comments are hilarious to read just like drinking out of an LTT store water bottle LTT store.com

lol

[VisibleXela]

Just now, Legitsu said:

at what point did he refuse to give it back? 

do you have the email chain back and forth no again you have steves word: 

 

no what you have is claims by a 3d party and a out of context youtube comment and steves WORD That they reached out 

again all of this non-sense from you people from gamersnexus relie on one fact

that steve isn't wrong/misinformed/doesn't have his own agenda

 

what makes you so sure that hes the one to be trusted?: what that hes got a pattern of calling out corperations bigger then him and publicly shaming them? 

uh buddy thats not a great leg to stand on 

 

~'Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies

 

 

It is a fact they did not pay off the water block until after this all blew up. Either that, or Linus is lying to make himself look worse. Which do you think it is?