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.
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.
Have only seen the clip of the LMG employee saying what they said from GN’s video, but seems quite an over-reaction from GN and the other company IMO. Definitely some form of baiting for views, even if parts of the video are valid.
LTT: says they want more accuracy, so they build a whole fucking lab for it.
Also LTT: puts bad data into the video anyway because time
That’s literally enough said. It’s not an attack on LMG, it’s pointing out legitimate concerns about LMGs internal processes because these easy to catch errors are getting through all the time.
They test a water block prototype on a card it wasn’t designed for, and then review it as a finished product with the bad data.
It’s a pattern over a long period of time that has been called out by the community. GN is fully right to be putting this out there. Even if you disagree with Steve’s assessment, he’s right to be pointing out things he has concerns with.
Yeah, once you stop playing up the entertainment angle, but try to be a go to resource for consumer buying decisions the kid gloves come off. Hashing things out privately in that area is how you lose legitimacy if trying to seem credible and not playing favorites is the image you are trying to project to viewers.
As soon as I saw who the video was by it’s a hard pass for me. This is drama for clicks, nothing more. Steve could do something worthwhile with his time instead of these silly reaction style videos for the YouTube algorithm. Like Linus stated, if he really had issues, and actually felt a concern about anything in the video he would have reached out. Not doing that makes this no better than the bot created trash for clicks IMHO.
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.
What frustrates me is that if you’re going in under the guise of journalistic integrity, why not ask for comment from LMG?
Steve made a lot of solid points, but if you never give them a chance to explain themselves, then it just looks like drama click bait. It’s turning me off to techtubers as a whole, both LMG and GN. The backbiting from GN is frustrating, and the maddening pace of faulty LMG videos is sad.
because those are the videos that pop off.
Yeah, drama gets clicks,
But Steve did say at the beginning, that this video is unmonetized.
So I give him credit for taking that step.
They can do both, and if their stance is at all ideologically motivated, then it is necessary to focus on more than just the low hanging fruit of doing reviews.
The free software movement is more than just the free software existing. It is also congruent to the laws that permit it and extending rights
Right to repair is about more than simply fixing things. It’s about going after companies and lobbying to get actual rights enshrined into law.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
(Referring to other replies, sarcastically) I friggin’ love having people explain how it’s totally cool to do to people all’ the things they (or people like them, in relevant contexts) say not to! Like when five freaking people people show up, none citing so much as a blog post or having met a trans person once, explaining that it’s totally cool to deadname someone as long as it doesn’t bother the person doing the deadnaming.
I’m just a little tired of this “it’s fine and you’re the real problem for whining about it” (not quoting anyone currently present… I think) kind of attitude. Maybe I’d be singing a different tune if my convenience got to override everyone else’s comfort and even wellbeing.
Edit: At least I don’t feel so compelled to join Beehaw any more. Certainly not the uniformly careful bunch I’d, unreasonably I suppose, imagined. Silver linings!
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.
Great video, a lot of the benchmark stuff I was unaware of because I don’t pay THAT much attention to the wider youtube review community, but I Did notice that waterblock review when it went up on LTT. Go and watch it, it’s honestly embarrassing how unprepared and silly it was. As a comedy sketch it’s fine, but as a review of a prototype it’s really really embarrassingly under prepared. It brings to mind something like an Asmondgold hardware review… “I don’t know, let’s just try this”.
To see they auctioned off a prototype device after that “review” is kinda disgusting (sorry for the hard word, but it’s how I feel).
