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.
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
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.
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.
Wholeheartedly agree. Wverything else I can understand and maybe even excuse. But auctioning off a prototype that isn’t even yours is so far beyond the line. They have turned into another soulless corporation just like Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. And corporations should never be trusted.
He’s another tech bro. Wan show always seemed more like a soap box for him to try to make him seem like an aww shucks type of guy, but there was the whole discussing wages issue at LTT too that broke the illusion of the image he tries to depict of himself.
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 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.
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 $5000…OK, that’s certainly something to pause and think about. But a few hundred? A day or half a day for an employee to re-do the test? That’s too much?
Maybe to the average person, the average viewer, that sounds like a lot of money. But not to a business. Certainly not one as large as LMG.
Even more ridiculous when LMG could monetize that 500$ of time spent into another video and make the money back.
Dam that response sucked.
Ahaha. He managed to write all that and say nothing, he really needs professional advice before making public statements, he can’t help but jump in with his first thoughts. Classic linus though just deflecting “we got some really big things coming up guys! forget about this!”
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.
He wrote an entire article but still thinks his video cadence is good. Reminds me of my current CEO, as the sand empire he built for the past 4 years starts to crumble beneath him
This response at least answers the most important question. They are paying Billet for the prototype. Personally I think they should do more than cover the raw cost, but at least they have done something.
Linus commented on this later in the thread saying “Billet sent us a quote. I don’t know or care how they arrived at the value. If they’re good, I’m good.” So hopefully that was all taken into account.
Thanks for the update!
They should cover R&D costs too, not just the cost of manufacture and materials.
like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication
This is one of the main justification’s Linus uses for claiming the journalistic moral high ground in that reply. First of all, correct me if I’m wrong, but the video in question didn’t once claim that the cooler was “sold” - rather that it was “put up for auction”. Which doesn’t contradict or even misrepresent anything that actually happened. Secondly, a debate over whether it was sold for profit or auctioned off for charity is largely irrelevant anyway because the actual problem here is that LMG attempted to offload the product to a third party after receiving requests to return it to the manufacturer (and promising multiple times to do so). Linus is trying to use the charity angle to frame himself as the benevolent and misrepresented good guy just trying to do the right thing, but in the process is lying about what was actually said and is displaying a complete lack of awareness over what the actual problem here is. Signing off with this just makes him look even worse:
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.
He’s pretending he has the moral high ground, whilst continuing to take snipes and potshots, in a poorly worded apology where he admits he is in the wrong. The dude just sounds salty that someone dared to call him out. His ego can’t handle it and now he’s desperately floundering around attempting to find some way to damage the credibility of the other person.
Eh, I’d say the difference between selling it for themselves and for charity is meaningful. One seems like a play for dollars taking advantage of their connections while the other just sounds like a communication fuckup where the ones taking care of the block weren’t in contact with the ones making promises to return it. Neither is good, of course, but to someone outside the situation they do impact my view of the company differently.
Regardless, the main issue is their absurd pace and he doesn’t address that at all. I hope their new CEO is more willing to budge on that than Linus has been, but it’s too early to tell.
Neither is good, of course, but to someone outside the situation they do impact my view of the company differently.
Which is probably the intended tactic here. Pretend you’ve been misrepresented as having sold something that isn’t yours for profit, then clarify that it was actually just a mix-up and you were trying to do the right thing. People focus on the ethical difference between the strawman scenario you created and what actually happened and think “hey, that’s not so bad actually”, so you get some forgiveness without ever properly acknowledging the real problem - that you attempted to redistribute something that wasn’t yours, without permission from the real owner. Despite Linus’s claims, he really doesn’t address that at all in his “apology”. It’s mostly just fake moral grandstanding over “journalistic practices”, portraying the person who is reporting on this issue as the true villain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Many are hitting with the “it should have been handled in private” line, and it’s kind of annoying. Journalists report on things, and GN did just that. Reported on an issue that has been gaining in public discussion over time. This deserved transparency, and I hope that having it put out there will help LMG/LTT fix their shit. I’m sure I can speak for most of us in saying that we WANT LMG/LTT to SUCCEED. We want to see them produce quality content. But they can’t do that with accurate information right now, despite their public desire to provide that.
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.
This is the main issue I have with Linus. Doubling down on dumb takes.
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).
Clickbait used to be reserved for the title/thumbnail, but now it’s ingrained in the content itself and goes hand in hand with the drop in quality.
Before I stopped watching them I noticed the drop in quality. Can’t remember which video, but there was one with so many corrections it was absolutely ridiculous.
He’s Targeting a younger audience as they are more likely to spend money on stuff.
I mean the quality of the test data is slipping but
“He’s Targeting a younger audience as they are more likely to spend money on stuff.”
What younger audience has the income for an $80 screwdriver and a $200+ backpack? I think you may need to think out your point a bit more since nah I don’t think they are targeting a “younger” audience those in the sub 20 category. I think they are primarily focusing on just being a “entertainment” product rather than a informative review one. They do fine with technical stupid jank shit but probably shouldn’t be trusted for specs for the moment but at the end of the day I think labs will still probably be better than userbenchmark (even though that is a pretty low bar).
Rich kids
Not excusing the backpack, but the screwdriver was actually pretty good, almost worth the price.
I own both products and use both, I think either were good and worth the money, but either are inaccessible to most kids. No chance in hell I would’ve gotten a $200 backpack during high school or college.
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.
i watch ltt for alex messing around, and every now and then a video of linus wasting money on cool testing equipment for some reason. I’ve always assumed GN is superior for actual testing.
