What started as criticism over errors in recent YouTube videos has escalated into allegations of sexual harassment, prompting the company to hire an outside investigator.
The verge will be handling all PC building videos now. Grab your tweezers!!!
I never found LTT that informational. Jayz2Cents was way better.
As a car dork as well as a tech dork, please don’t tell me Donut did something bad as well.
I want to like Jayz but every. Fuckin. Video. was clickbait with bait titles
DeArrow has been quite nice for clickbait titles and thumbnails. Made by the same guy who created SponsorBlock. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dearrow/
I should rephrase my comment. Because I watched like 10 videos of his in 2018 when I was building my rig. They were all more informative than LTT, but its not like I was avidly tuning into Jay’s channel. Quality everywhere is sinking at an alarming rate. Its as if the entire world is exhausted.
I’m not surprised by this whole thing at all, the only thing I’m kinda surprised about is that people are surprised by this in the first place.
Even in the first video I saw of him it already showed he did semi basic hardware mistakes and was kind of an ass, and that was years ago.
I’ve never taken him seriously, sort of taken him for a … I dunno, for lack of better comparison, tucker Carlson like. Not a right wing crazy, but more of an asshat only to be viewed for entertainment and his “facts” never to be taken seriously.
Linus Media Group CEO Terren Tong also responded via email, saying he was “shocked at the allegations and the company described” in Reeve’s posts. He went on to note that “as part of this process, beyond an internal review we will also be hiring an outside investigator to look into the allegations and will commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”
Finally, someone in this shit fest of a management structure realized that having the owners of the company investigate themselves isn’t the smartest idea here.
I will be interested to see how much power the new CEO really has over operations, or if Linus predictably has got such a founder’s syndrome that he tries to “fix” the problems himself (which he can’t, of course, since he clearly doesn’t believe he has a workplace culture issue in the first place).
The quality and partner/sponsor issues are mostly expected from getting investor money and expanding quickly. The harassment issues are probably a preexisting problem from existing management. So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.
Expect Linus to be reigned in and no longer be responding directly to these issues. Despite that he didnt sell the company, the people/banks that gave him the money to expand will not be happy to lose their money.
So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.
I don’t think it’s that unusual, really. LTT and Linus specifically have had people accuse him before of being unprofessional or creating a toxic work environment or bolstering a toxic fanbase or putting out bad content or all those things. Things I didn’t know about because I just started getting into his stuff a couple of months ago. But all those things are being reexamined now because he lost favor for a second. The Gamer’s Nexus video opened him up to be criticized where normally he’d have a loyal fanbase that would rush to his defense. But even then, it wasn’t until he made that first bad response and Gamer’s Nexus responded to the response and called out his gaslighting on the topic that a lot of the controversy blew open.
People who had long been ignored or felt like they weren’t safe to speak out against the harm they felt LMG or Sebastion had done to them saw an opportunity to let their voice be heard. And people who had been ignored in the past are being looked at again in new context and by more people. This is a common thing. People often feel frightened to speak out about something because they feel they’ll be dismissed or punished for it. Everything from people simply telling them to suck it up because that’s just life to people threatening violence to people getting you blacklisted. This is why after just a couple of sexual abuse allegations started coming out, an entire flood of them suddenly were made public and #MeToo happened. That was a case where speaking out against producers, writers, directors, actors, or anyone else big in the motion picture industry would usually be an end to your career, so most people weren’t willing to do it. And most of the ones who had spoken out in the past were made fun of, actually laughed at, before being blacklisted and relatively forgotten by the wider audience. An individual victim had no power to do anything, but once a few did, some of the others joined, and then it became a movement.
The LTT scandal won’t be anywhere near the same size as that, of course. It’s one relatively small company. But my point is that it’s the same phenomenon at a different scale. The group and specifically Linus have a fan base that has been absolutely brutal to dissenters before. Sebastion on the WAN show and in previous replies to criticism always dismisses it as invalid and that emboldens his fanbase to hit back at people who are, “Just hating,” or, “Don’t understand what they’re talking about!” The Gamer’s Nexus videos started to form a little wedge between Sebastion and his fans as they showed how he wasn’t being fair to them either. That created an opening.
I had no idea this operation was so big
The way they act makes it hard to tell. You would think any company with over 100 employees would have HR policies on responding to things on social media and sexual harassment.
So much for the flippant “I won’t be responding to this outside of this text post”.
You would think that after so many YouTubers sucked at apologizing and got called out they would figure out how to do it the right way. But no!
That big ass team and you couldn’t get a PR person to help you?
None of this was irredeemable. Sure, it will take a significant amount of time to rebuild trust but you can choose to be transparent in response and right your wrongs.
The hubris
I mean the Madison stuff is pretty bad. The rest of it, was probably recoverable from.
I think the thing is in these kind of situations they are typically no win situations. When the fuel is burning really the only answer is let it burn itself out, then deal with the aftermath. I don’t think any response would be good enough because right now people are out for blood, some of it very justifiably but people would need to be blind to not see there are people who have an axe to grind and the usual drama chasers. I’m not here to say they didn’t do anything wrong but people are going to try to connect some unrelated controversies to keep the fire burning (Note: This isn’t about the Madison leak) like the mindchop tragedy.
To some extent, I agree. But while you’ll never craft a perfect response and some people will always call your response, “Not enough,” or, “Disengenous,” there are better and worse ways to do it. Dan Harmon sexually harassed a coworker, created a toxic work environment, and harmed one of his writer’s careers. When that started to come out, he talked to her first, then he laid all the cards on the table, took full responsibility, and talked about how he’s trying, not always succeeding, but trying to improve and not do the same things again. It’s impossible to ever say that a simple apology is enough, but even the person he hurt said that his was the kind of apology that people should strive for. It was brutal, honest, and it didn’t shy away from anything. He admitted fault and talked about the very real and non-idealized path forward.
LMG’s response… Was horrible. Even if the apology was only for the bad data stuff, it felt like one of his joke videos like the April Fool’s Day slave farm video, in tone. Sponsor segues, jokes, merch promotions, things like that. I admit that maybe a little humor could be justified because some people make jokes when they’re stressed out, I do that! My mom was damn near on her deathbed a few years back, barely made it out of that alive, and between the sobs, I cracked jokes because that’s how I handle things, so I fucking get that! But that was a scripted video that was supposed to be their apology to the fans, and it felt like an insult. They didn’t feel like they were taking the accusations seriously, it didn’t feel like they were taking responsibility for the problems, and it didn’t feel like they were serious about making changes going forward. It felt like a hollow, “This will help us ride out the storm,” response.
So, I agree with you that even if they’d done the best apology video they possibly could have, people would have still criticized them for it. You’re right. There’s no way around that. But it doesn’t change that that’s not what they did. They put out that apology video instead. And that was just an insult.
This is how assholes behave. They don’t even see themselves as having done wrong.
They just know they got caught and they’re pissed off and annoyed about it. Why should they need a pr person, they think.
The whole reason for sexual assault, employee abuse, and egregious errors in test results isn’t simple “oops”, it’s indicative of priorities and biases and behaviors from the top down.
