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.
I’ve always found the titles to be clickbaity and uninformative. If I want to look up their videos again I would have no idea what the title is to look up.
It doesn’t help that the titles get changed a handful of times throughout the release day so even if you remember the name it may not be the same if you want to re-watch it.
Yeah I think LTT content has really declined over the years. They’re spread so thin now they’re churning out a bunch of low quality content rather than a few accurate and entertaining videos.
this is a YouTube problem, not an LMG one unfortunately. nearly all successful creators will A/B test various titles and thumbnails until The Algorithm™ is happy
To be fair, this is how the YouTube algorithm requires big channels to act to maximize views, ads, and money. They’ve got way too many people reliant on that income to do anything different than exactly what best optimization strategies work
This is judging a book by its cover. Not really helpful to any discussion.
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.
One thing that bothers me about the billets stuff is they stand by their core point, which is that it’s a useless product.
But that’s not the only thing they’ve claimed. They also said it’s a bad product that doesn’t work properly, thus damaging the company’s reputation.
To most people that’s a significant difference for how they view the company:
“Useless” product that works well at what it does = hopefully this company will make something more relevant in future
“Useless” product that doesn’t even work properly = I’ll avoid this company in future
I would disagree. Linus has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth or probably say he phrases many of these discussions in very bad ways. You see this with him talking about “Is using adblocking piracy” or “Warranties are only trustworthy as the company you buy them for” (Trust me bro) or the many other controversial views he has had. Where at the face of it it looks pretty incendiary but if you ignore what he said initially and look at what he is actually meaning to say. I think the whole Billet labs’ cooler thing was a stupid video and they should have done it with a 3090 TI FE as it was meant for but Linus meant it was a “bad product” because its a $900 cooler for a last gen cooler on a 1800+ GPU. Anyone willing to spend that amount of money is probably going to spend it on the newest thing, that being the 4090. Now where this comes to bite Linus in the ass is they have a preorder for a 4090 fe (for the same price as the 3090 ti one) here Which is set to release around next month or November. Now its clear many things weren’t discussed but off the broken concepts that Linus was presented/or at least absorbed he isn’t wrong that noone would want a exotic cooler with a last gen gpu but its clear there was a major breakdown in the communication pipeline here.
Edit: Haven’t had any comments yet but I will say LTT really done fucked up with the whole auctioning off the prototype and its clear there is some issues with the organization of LTT. I don’t think they did this out of malice more they had a contact who didn’t talk to the logistics team or the team handling LTX. So out of mistake the prototype got sold even though they said they would send it back. That is pretty god damn egregious. I can understand why there was a fuck up but man they really screwed the pooch on this one.
I think needing to write a wall of text to say Linus said this but he actually meant… shows a need for Linus to move away from off the cuff segments, and stick to scripted content.
It’s not just a Linus thing, but for those who are strongly associated with a company brand it’s the better move to start distancing personal opinion pieces from what can be associated with the company. He’s not just some random employee of LTT who can have their thoughts hand waived away as not representing the views of the company. LTT has a way to go before everything stops being associated with Linus when it comes to the good or the bad.
How do they know it’s a bad product if they didn’t bother to test it under the conditions it was designed for? It was a prototype, not a final product. In the original video, Linus is surprised (and maybe a bit upset) that the other guy didn’t grab the right card or even notice that he didn’t get the right card.
And to the point of the comment you replied to: it doesn’t matter what the cost of the cooler was. If it was the best of the best then it was worth showing that. LTT does not seem to have a consistent viewpoint of “practicality”. Even if we ignore that, saying “this product isn’t worth the cost” is very different than the “useless” comment they ended up with.
The whole situation is what I like to refer to as “fractally wrong”. No matter the perspective, how close or far away, it’s always wrong.
The problem I have with this is that if he’s known for these things and he knows it, why not hire someone to do the communication for him instead of making the same mistakes every time. Or is he too stubborn or not smart enough to realise the damage he is doing to his brand?
Now, selling a prototype that was sent to you to make a video on is not good obviously, but as long as they get compensated for it, it should be no big deal. Logistical fuck ups happen and this isn’t new or uncommon. The whole idea of Linus ruining their public image based on a “bad faith” representation of the product has little standing in my mind. The crux of his assessment of the product is spot on and you also touched on this. There’s like 4 people willing to spend as much on a cooling block made from billet copper as their GPU. Regardless of current Gen or last Gen. Most people are just going to save that money to buy the next generation graphics card or upgrade elsewhere in their build where the price/performance is much more reasonable.
Stealing and selling their best prototype also means they couldn’t send it to a better reviewer to demonstrate it isn’t a bad product.
Honestly atrocious behaviour from them over this. Any 1 bit of this would be bad, but all of them together could absolutely ruin a start-up. And all because Linus didn’t want to spend “up to” $500 worth of people’s time.
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.
Linus is surrounded by people who can call him on his bullshit. Luke is very aware of the shit Linus steps in and lets him know. Linus just kinda sucks at publicly admitting it, at least not without getting his own jab in. Hence taking over the “Trust Me Bro” joke.
Linus takes all criticism on LMG as a personal attack regardless of his involvement. Hopefully, once Tarren steps in, he’ll be able to wrangle Linus and just let LMG handle the public relations side.
Linus takes all criticism on LMG as a personal attack regardless of his involvemen
I mean, AFAIK he built that company off the ground - yes likely privileged, I saw a video where it’s mentioned he and his partner lived rent free in his dad’s house. And yes, likely not alone. But still.
Makes sense he’d see criticisms of the company as attacks that he needs to personally take on. It’s not the best approach, but totally understandable. Lots of people’s livelihoods at stake by now, too.
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.
The video from GN had footage from WAN show where he said that, so yes. I have not personally looked up the context, but it also sounds very much in character for how Linus thinks these days, so I am not at all surprised.
I also think it’s an excuse to cover up the real problem: complete disorganization and the extreme pace of production. In the video itself, Linus seems legitimately upset with his employee that didn’t even realize they had the wrong GPU. He did not seem surprised, however, which is very telling.
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.
My biggest problem right now with LTT:
He has literally admitted that they have too much to do right now (see https://linustechtips.com/topic/1526180-gamers-nexus-alleges-lmg-has-insufficient-ethics-and-integrity/page/27/#comment-16079025)
but at the same time he doesn’t see the need to reduce the number of videos to achieve the required quality and just tells people to “stay tuned”.
I find that very strange to be honest.
It’s because Linus still has startup brain. He was squeezing blood from the stone for the first few years and his success then makes him believe that he needs to maintain that same mentality now.
Fortunately, he’s also realized that he doesn’t like running a large company and he’s hired a CEO. Unfortunately, said CEO is still stuck in his previous role and won’t actually be starting full-time for another few months. So now the company gets to sit in an awkward limbo of Linus checking out but Tarren not being ready to take over.
Once he is able to be a real CEO of LMG, I’m willing to bet things will start to dramatically change. Tarren has been running businesses as businesses for a while now and thus should know how to shape the company. He’ll be able to adjust the goals and fix the spends to align with those goals. Since the company is privately owned, as long as Linus doesn’t step on the process, it should go pretty well.
His comment didn’t address two key issues for me:
- The “crunch”/tight scheduling of projects which led to sloppiness to begin with
- The constant need to correct, ranging from simple mistakes to very problematic methods.
I’ve been enjoying solely the WAN Show, but hearing about constant mistakes in benchmarks while praising “We want to show factual information on benchmarks for once.”, is rubbing me in the wrong way. You can’t rush benchmarking without QA and publish those results as fact. You get to choose for accuracy, or fast to churn content.
And Linus not mentioning something concrete on the first issue is worrying to me, not showing a clear intent to ease on rushing those benchmarks.
Not to mention, it’s worth taking down a video if benchmarka are wrong even if the conclusion is “most likely to remain the same”, which one cannot conclude with certainty without redoing it. It would be better transparency wise to either not knowingly publish wrong information, or put a more clear notice on said videos besides the description and a pinned comment.
