- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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I must say, the Billet Labs part nailed me to the floor.
For someone who has to do with prototypes and early development products, such a blunder would have cost me my current job and would have barred me from any other in my field
The Billet Labs cooler block stuff actually made me go “what the fuck” and got me to unsubscribe. That’s not just some error you can cut out or some funny joke, everything about that was something that Billet Labs could likely prove monetary damages for in the worst case scenario.
That part really bothered me, especially Linus’ words in the WAN show showing a complete disregard for the company and then auctioning off something they didn’t even own. I know if they were in America they’d likely be sued for defamation or something, I swear. If I were a company in that position I wouldn’t trust Linus with anything at all.
Yeah, everything else was bad, but I think ultimately forgivable if they can tighten up their testing and QA process going forward. The Billet Labs thing is on a whole other level though. Like, how do you even fuck up that bad as a professional organization?
Do you think LTT can invest in one laptop company and still review theirs and others’ laptops? I don’t know the right answer - I’m interested in your perspective.
Left ltt a while ago. Been noticing he’s not paying his staff respectfully while showing off his custom home. Then you get into the errors that have been show just shows I got out in time.
He makes his video editors do manual labor for his home, like painting his walls and moving home furnitures. He is not known to be a respectful guy.
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As in unsubscribed from the channel or left a job?
Will be curious to hear Linus’ response, the Billet labs thing is super weird
Linus responded on their forum, he said it was a ‘mistake’ and that they’re gonna pay Billet Labs back for the prototype (trust me bro).
I would donate to a gofundme for Billet Labs to sue LTT tbh. Have been watching Linus since his ncix days but this behaviour is disguisting and his response just solidifies that LTT has gone down the shitter. Unsubscribed from all their channels.
He apparently posted on the forums: https://lemm.ee/comment/2246534
Haven’t been watching LTT (or GN) for a couple of years, but this made me go to LTT’s channel and unsub. Can’t believe what Linus has become. Love the thorough look into all this from Steve.
Why? This is a solid criticism, but I don’t think it warrants any kind of “revenge” or whatever. Just let LTT address it and hopefully be better going forward.
I would agree until it came to the blatant and grossly negligent mishandling of Billet Labs’ unique and one of a kind prototype. What they’ve done can’t be “addressed”. That can sink a smaller company that was depending on that hardware. And then LTT dared to drag them after completely fucking up their own process during the entire video.
Maybe it was more “I haven’t watched it in forever anyways, they seem to have crashed in quality anyways, might as well finally pull the plug from my sub”? Sounds like that to me, anyways.
Personally the last time I really watched LTT was when he started doing the idiot-face algorith-optimization, as in a lot of ways it heralded the shift towards a “proper” business over the more smallscale tech videos I enjoyed. It just felt too clean, too business, for me. I have the same problem with GN, obviously.
You summed it up pretty nicely why I unsubbed. The part “can’t believe what Linus has become” is mostly about how they handled Billet Labs.
Carighan’s answer to you sums it up why I unsubbed, not due to revenge (me unsubbing isn’t going to hurt them anyway). The comment about how Linus is now is due to how they handled Billet Labs and his answer to all that.
Ltt has felt untrustworthy to me for a long time. I watched a smartphone review of theirs years ago, and they had made errors with specs and features. Watching their other (and older) smartphone reviews it felt like they would just copy last year’s review, make small changes and call it a new one. Calling old features new year after year, not mentioning key features, getting simple facts wrong. Decided to not trust any information in their videos after that
I find Linus to be an odd mix of earnest and smarmy.
That’s a whole lot of excuses and no solutions.
Extremely disappointing.
Succinctly put. Linus doesn’t seem to acknowledge that there’s any problem you’re absolutely right. Seems to be in his own bubble I guess.
We MIGHT get an apology video, or one that serves a similar purpose without an actual apology, he will 100% roll his eyes on the WAN show if this is even brought up at all, and he won’t take any responsibility for any of it.
I hate this, I’ve enjoyed the entertainment aspect of LMG for a long time and seeing blatant mistakes get glossed over with one excuse after another is getting really old. this isn’t even the first time or second time this has happened.
In the “Statement from Linus” are LMG critising GN’s journalism for not reaching out before posting the video?
Seem like a good thing to do but would LMG have gotten enough context regarding the prototype water block? Seems even now they think that review was fair while knowing using the wrong GPU. Fair for who?
Also he DIDNT “SELL” the prototype, he AUCTIONED it.
Said my 7 year old this weekend, and linus.
Seriously. Its excuses my kids use. “It was an accident”. “I misunderstood”. I didnt hit my brother, it was a love tap.
Many years ago when Linus started to aggressively use clickbait titles and thumbnails, people were pissed at the beginning but he said something like, Youtube is forcing them to do it…yeah right. That’s kinda when I stopped watching them, I wasn’t a big fan before anyway.
Besides the cooler block part, the most annoying one is that if you invest in companies, good for you but maybe at that point you should stop reviewing their products. You are not in a place where you can be objective anymore. They did that with Framework and I think he also has shares in AMD? He kept pumping them some time ago.
I see the vast majority of comments on the video are “ehhh, I watch them for entertainment”. I don’t find them at all entertaining and I actively avoid their channels because 99% of the time, the information presented is very generic or has nothing to do with the product. Plus the atrocious thumbnails/titles…
When. You set aside integrity for fortune, you don’t get to complain about it. You’ve made a choice, just like I choose to turn it off
There’s a lot of people here focussing on the biillit labs thing. While that is pretty bad on it’s own, and probably indicative of company or at least communication culture; Linus has not adressed the allegations regarding the sponsorships and the underlying conflict of interest. There’s some response to the error handling and sloppiness. But what is lacking is a clear identification and owning of errors as well as the accompanying, hard steps LMG will take to rectify them.
I would’ve liked to see a post saying" whow, this is a bit much at once, we will publish a full response with x/y plans in [a week]". This (Linus’ Forum response) just feels drama-inciting and not like a level-headed response.
I honestly fully stand by GN in this and while I think LTT should have had the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the video went live, since this is the proper Journalistic thing to do, it should be considered that ltt has a huge audience and influence in the tech sphere so I can only assume GN didn’t want them to get ahead of the curve? It’s sad if it has come to this.
I also don’t know how exactly ltt could respond to the observations GN made since it’s a piece about what happened in videos they posted. They can’t really deny what happened. All they could do is lower their head and promise to do better.
Yeah what was the justification for airing this out in public anyway? Seems like a private conversation should have happened first if his goal was trying to fix the sloppy LTT process. Then if no changes were made you can go public.
I just get the sense he wants the attention now… Which fair enough I guess? But rubs me the wrong way.
Been an LTT viewer since back in the Langley house days. As people, Linus and I are very similar (obviously based on his on camera personality, I of course have no idea what he’s like behind closed doors) and I can absolutely see how these mistakes were made. It’s incredibly disappointing to see that he’s not learning from them.
I’ve seen the asterisk corrections and the pinned comment corrections increase lately, but after watching GN’s video I realized that for every one I noticed there was a video where I hadn’t noticed. These corrections absolutely need to be resolved in production. I don’t care if it’s a crappy voice over where it’s incredibly obvious that it was dubbed in after, it just needs to be audibly corrected.
I get that they’re not always going to be caught before they go out the door, I’ve made egregious errors on stuff that I’ve looked over and other people have looked over many times to have it immediately called out on someone’s first glance. The videos with corrections need to be and should have been IMMEDIATELY privated, corrected, and have had a post stating the previous error and the new correction, at least for the big stuff. Small errors (like Linus mistakenly saying Ti on the 4070) I think is fine to be left in (with the asterisk or comment correction), as there wasn’t really any substantial change in the content. I do realize that this has man hour costs, but it’s absolutely imperative that their content is reliable if they’re trying to enter the testing market. For issues like the Billet labs monoblock, they should be taken down and have the entire thing reshot. With that situation however, it should’ve never made it to subscribers.
The issue of selling the billet labs monoblock is absolutely massive and inexcusable. There were so many places( where this could’ve and SHOULD HAVE been caught. The block should’ve NEVER been inventoried as their own, as it well, wasn’t. I’m guessing their inventory doesn’t have a distinction between their own stuff and stuff they’ve been lent (it all should be inventoried so it’s accounted for). Linus almost would’ve had to know about it being auctioned off, especially after making the (frankly kinda arrogant) distinction of saying it wasn’t “sold” but rather “auctioned”. It should’ve been caught there, it should’ve been caught by whoever sent the email to Billet confirming that they were going to return it, and it should’ve been caught by the inventory. I don’t blame whoever sent the email to be very clear, I’m saying that communication within the company needs to improve. This is very clearly an issue in viewer trust. It’s very hard to “trust me bro” when issues brought to his attention are not being taken seriously because it’d affect their bottom line rather than somebody else’s.
Honestly, Linus should follow GN’s lead and not do sponsors, merch messages, ads, anything for the WAN show this week. He needs to address it and address the plan for producing better content. I know his intentions are good. I know how easy it is to make horrible mistakes with good intentions by being completely ignorant in the situation.
POST “what do we do now” VIDEO: Realistically it looks like every concern that I raised here was addressed in the video that went out ~1 hour ago. I’m glad they made this video as well as the decision not to include sponsors (or the lack of ability for this video, but dbrand would’ve we all know that). Linus confirms that it was a knee jerk reaction to make the comment on the forums, as well as confirming my suspicions that nobody had seen the comment before he made it.
I hope we see improvements that continue and are upheld. I’m hopeful that they’ve properly used this as a learning opportunity, and will take time in the future to step back and see what’s new to learn.
Edit after reading Madison’s post:
Yikes. I’m now unsubscribed from all of their content.
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Is there a TL;DR; on this? Because I find the GN videos extremely cringe to watch, but I’m willing to accept that their allegations are accurate. I like LTT, but they’ve had a habitual problem with unprofessionalism even though they know they’re massively influencing PC gamers’ buying decisions.
LTT fscked up again and is trying to make it right, but I’m having trouble seeing the shockwaves of this as anything but the normal “youtuber drama for clout”.
Mate, the video is packed full with content and tons of issues regarding LTT. Just take the time and watch it, there is barely any fluff in there.
Quick summary of issues:
- Tons of data mistakes that are either unaddressed, only brought up in a footnote or in a tiny text popup. Often on videos with a million views already, so hardware buyers make the wrong decisions. Not even small mistakes, like one slide showed a 4090 to be 300% faster than a 3090 Ti, which is simply untrue. Even their own internal numbers are inconsistent between benchmarks
- Rush of getting videos out, employees of LMG say they don’t have time to do quality control, it’s too much. Like 25 videos per week or something over all channels combined
- LTT received a custom waterblock prototype to test on a 3090 Ti (they received the GPU too), they tried to test it on a 4090, turns out that didn’t work well (while also ignoring all instructions), then said the product is shit and nobody should buy it. Instead of sending the prototype back like agreed upon they auctioned it off and gave the money to charity (allegedly). If really unlucky a competitor might have bought it on that auction to duplicate the design. After the GN video Linus said they already agreed to pay the prototype company… while the prototype company said they just got the email from Linus and haven’t even replied to it. So straight up thieving and lying and destroying the reputation of a small indie company
- Problems with conflict of interest. LTT has Noctua branded tools on sale in their shop, but also reviews their fans. Or have a big investment in Framework laptops, while also reviewing laptops of other brands. It’s a dangerous line
- …
I probably forgot several points here, the video really is full to the brim with objective issues. I unsubbed from LTT and I’ll never watch any of their videos again at this point.
Oh boy, drama!
