My personal thoughts
At first it came off a bit whiney, but I watched the entire thing and I’m glad I did. It shows a pattern of carelessness and in some cases complete douchebaggery of LMG.
What they did to Billet Labs is absolutely un-fucking excusable. LMG and Linus, in particular, needs to be mercilessly shamed for that until Billet Labs gets a clear and unequivocal apology and paid restitution for damages. Fucking shameful. What a bunch of pricks.
Video Description
This video is not monetized. This video covers our serious concerns regarding the data accuracy of Linus Media Group, including Linus Tech Tips, ShortCircuit, and TechQuickie, particularly as it relates to rushing content out the door to favor – by staff’s own admission – quantity over quality. As the company continues to expand into its LTT Labs direction, the importance of accurate data increases; however, even as ‘only’ entertainment, there are still certain responsibilities to the consumer and the manufacturers to report fairly (and to have defined corrections processes in place). We tried to approach this as objectively as possible and hope that viewers are able to listen to the evidence we present, particularly as it relates to significant and frequent data errors that now present in nearly every technical review video.
The thumbnails LTT uses tells you everything you need to know about his content and company.
This is judging a book by its cover. Not really helpful to any discussion.
There are cases where a book’s content matches its cover. They are saying LTT is one of those cases
It’s been clear for quite a while that they’ve focused only on growth/expansion with more channels, the lab, so many new employees, etc and at the same time you can see the sloppiness getting worse with lack of preparation, lack of quality control to meet deadlines, etc.
The Billet Labs thing is absolutely inexcusable. Shitting on the product despite LMG being the one responsible for not even having the correct GPU for it, giving it a bad review, then doubling down when called out over a couple hundred bucks of time? The auctioned off prototype is so much worse as well. Not sure of the Canadian terms but in the US it’d potentially be theft by conversion. Literally sold someone else’s property. Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and accept it as an accident, it seems like more evidence of whoever is running their logistics department being incompetent IMO.
Is it real that Linus publicly said that they can’t justify putting in another half day to ensure the data is correct before publishing it? Why would anyone watch their low quality content which they admit to be worthless?
The weird part of that is the the amounts he’s saying it would cost/time to re-run the test – $100-500 (probably like that pay for a employee’s day) – are nothing in the context of a company. Especially one that was sold or offered $100million. My company run on like a $3million budget. A few hundred dollars is nothing to us. That’s a staff lunch or our bar tab sometimes. If the retesting costs like $5000…OK, that’s certainly something to pause and think about. But a few hundred? A day or half a day for an employee to re-do the test? That’s too much?
Maybe to the average person, the average viewer, that sounds like a lot of money. But not to a business. Certainly not one as large as LMG.
IIRC, his justification was something to the effect of, even if the data presented is incorrect the conclusions were reached with the right data, so the conclusion wouldn’t change.
But how do we know for sure they used the right data for their conclusion? If they can’t take the time to fix issues during the edit, how do we know that the entire process isn’t flawed?
He thinks hes got it figured out because he knows something we don’t know, but if we are to trust him, WE NEED TO KNOW.
I really hope stepping down as CEO leads to Linus surrounding himself with people he trusts to call him out when he’s missing something.
He strikes me as the kind of person who is susceptible to a few certain mental traps you kinda don’t want to see in a leader of a large influential organization:
- Taking an “ends justifies the means” mindset (e.g. stepping on the “growth” gas pedal and accepting sloppiness because it will get better later with Labs)
- Letting “objective facts” justify big subjective decisions w/o much consideration (e.g. thinking the Billet Labs video didn’t need to be re-shot because the “objectively” product rec conclusion wouldn’t have been different)
- Substituting actual solutions to problems w/ commitments to solving them (e.g. implementing “Accuracy KPIs” instead of slowing the pace of video releases)
None of these constitute outright malice, IMO, but boy can they lead to a problematic working environment.
I’m sure there will be quite the flame war as a result of this, which I think is a bummer. Linus strikes me as someone who’s acting in good faith, but has an unshakable habit of making rushed decisions without considering the full scope of their impact, and is (or has been) lacking the appropriate feedback structure to help him learn to either a) make more thoughtful decisions, or b) fully delegating those decisions to folks who are better equipped to make them.
Here’s hoping this leads to positive change.
I agree. I can already see a slight shift in his attitude since he stepped down, but clearly it’s not enough.
I watched the occasional LTT video, they are entertaining and helpful at a general understanding but I’ve often taken their data with a grain of salt.
Emily (formerly Anthony) Young was the one writer at LTT who stood out as really knowing their stuff. She also was their in-house expert with Linux! (*Note: nothing happened to her at LMG, I’m using past tense because I’m not up to date with the latest roles she might be in)
Linus has been way more focused on running the business than the tech, especially compared to his days at NCIX and some years after.
The Billet situation sounds like a fuckup. So long as they make it right with them I don’t care tbh.
The data integrity issues and way too frequent post-edit corrections is imperative for LMG to fix, if they want their media to be trustworthy (like if they’re hyping up their labs)
Luckily, they’ve said what the fix is themselves and it’s relatively simple. All it really takes is them to either slow down with the rate of content to be able to carefully review it, or bring on more hosts and editors so that mistakes and errors can be caught and re-shot before publishing, and that due diligence is applied when preparing a product review.
Linus’ response is just meh, not good nor bad. The one thing is I don’t buy is Linus’ line of “just talk to us”. The community told them plenty of times, the writers and Linus themselves were very well aware of the problems of rushing and releasing half-baked content. Even if GN told them, the direction they were going with Linus Media Group and the new CEO and the buyout offer and all of that suggests where LMG’s wouldn’t be concerned with it as much as making sure the timing of their content maximizes revenue. Data issues brought to them by GN and the community would be cast to the wayside with just a footnote and silent correction, maybe with a couple empty words sprinkled on top.
So I’ll say it again to Linus from a fellow Canadian, whether he’ll listen or not: “Slow down, bud!”
Hey bud, no need to deadname anyone.
I use her current preferred pronouns, there are multiple Emilys at the LMG team and for people that might not recognize who I’m talking about if they haven’t watched LTT for a while (since 3 months ago). I figured by adding “formerly”, I was clear that it’s a name she no longer goes by and doesn’t feel represented herself well.
Disagree. As a casual LTT watcher i had no idea who Emily was until they said her former name. I’m sure there are others like me who don’t keep up with the latest happenings in every youtube channel. There’s no offense in providing extra information for clarity.
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I thought you had to refer to a person by their old name for that to be the case, not just mention the existence of a former name. I could be wrong though.
Using the name is still deadnaming. Think of it like this. If you changed your name from Jim to John and saw a friend on the street, would you want them to say, “Hi John formerly Jim”? You’d likely just want them to call you by what your name is now. Add to that the likely dysphoria caused by some using a trans person’s dead name, and it is now causing harm for no real reason. When in doubt, just call people what they want to be called.
But it is natural to bring it up if you’re talking to a common friend that isn’t aware of the change of name. OP was talking to us comment reader instead of that person.
But your example just referred to someone by their old name. Not saying you’re wrong, but that’s a terrible example. Haha
Better example would be: Friend says, “Hey John, how are you! Remember when you used to go by Jim? Boy, those were crazy times back then.”
Is that deadnaming?
EDIT: my bad. Just re-read the OP post and your example is dead on. For some reason I had it different in my head. Never mind!
not to cast doubt on anything he says here, but steve has increasingly been making ‘dunk’ videos for the past year or two. i feel like his channel has been trying to find (or create) exposés, because those are the videos that pop off. starting from the video of that NZXT case that caused fires.
again, not to cast doubt on the experiences of billet labs, but i question steve’s intentions in presenting this. i hope this discussion doesn’t end up revolving around gamers nexus.
not to come off overly negative- steve also does great work. i hope we hear from LMG soon <3
I felt the same and was wary to even watch this. Seems like something to discuss privately first. But it’s full of solid points, and I think the amount of public mistakes from LMG makes it a little easier to accept.
The last time something like this happened it was made clear GN was going to cover LMG as the corporation it is, not as an individual where you might hash things out privately first.
Based, even if it makes high school me sad
