Their issues are:

1. Bad data - major errors in review videos
2. Ethical concerns - conflicts of interest, Billet review, Pwnage review

Anyone watching LTTs server videos hopes it is only for entertainment as following what they do other than for your home lab would be a disaster.

However they are building up the LAB and are selling it as serious detailed reviews… This would be a shift from their current content.

Flip side Gamers Nexus is hard core serious and I always have to skip through their videos as they put me to sleep.

I watched LTT for Top Gear of computer hardware videos. This commentary from GN made me wonder when was the last time they did one. I couldn’t remember and unsubscribed.

I’d be interested in videos by Alex, Nicholas and maybe few others. Hope they go their own way some day. Alex videos are probably quite expensive to do so he’s probably stuck there :/

Well he’s not exactly known for taking warranted criticism well…

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/FGW3TPytTjc

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

LTT claims to be hitting the brakes and asking itself how to proceed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY

How Linus publicly responds to these very fairly laid out criticisms will really affect their standing in the tech review space going forward.

Linus generally sucks at taking warranted feedback & criticism, so I can see him crashing and burning super hard in whatever post or podcast comment he makes publicly about this.

This looks like a huge issue as far as moving from a “haha wacky video” tech channel to a “hard data driven testing” tech channel, but also it’s not like they haven’t done “serious” reviews prior to the Labs stuff in the past so I’m not about to hand wave away their issues as “growing pains” or anything like that; it’s just indicative of sloppy workflow and low effort internal culture.

Could someone ELI5 the problem and what’s going on? (I don’t have good enough internet to watch videos ATM)

I watched a couple of Linus videos over the years and recently subscribed. I had no idea how many videos they push out a week - that is something they should really adress. Rather make three or four good videos a week than the absolute crap content they partially put out just to get their schedule full.

After this whole thing now I unsubscribed again. You can absolutely fuck up a situation and be good in my book if you own up to it, but Linus response is childish at best and a disaster at worse.

For some great irony check out this wan show segment where linus talks about how he doesn’t like that a prototype (backpack) of theirs ended up in the hands of the public https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwgZaSYuBLc&t=3209 Time 53:29, in case the timestamped link doesn’t work

It was really obvious to me Linus was full of shit when he pretended to give Linux a try but then defied a scary error message warning him not to continue which he did anyway and it wiped his desktop environment completely.

He then basically implied if you couldn’t just randomly copy paste cli commands without understanding them AND ignoring a scary warning message, then Linux just was too sketchy for average users to use. It would be trivial to make that exact argument about windows… Because it’s a bullshit meaningless argument

Anyone with even the tiniest experience with a cli, imo, should’ve known at that point he’s full of shit. Fuck their shitty videos.

Linus posted a response on the LTT forums:

There won’t be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I’ve already said, and I’ve done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn’t go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication… AND the fact that while we haven’t sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). 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.

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. We are going through some growing pains - we’ve been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it’s clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s no excuse for sloppiness.

Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we’re not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it’s sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we’ve communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah… What we’re doing hasn’t been in many years, if ever… and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn’t materially change the recommendation. That doesn’t mean these things don’t matter. We’ve set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven’t seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you’re really looking for it… The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I’m REALLY excited about what the future will hold.

With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I’ve already addressed above) is an ‘accuracy’ issue. It’s more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again… mystery) would have been impossible… and also didn’t affect the conclusion of the video… OR SO I THOUGHT…

I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn’t make sense to buy… so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn’t really make a difference.

Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn’t mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn’t because I didn’t care about the consumer… it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I’ve watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It’s an astonishingly unforgiving market.

Either way, I’m sorry I got the community’s priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn’t show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn’t to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it’s an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y’know, eat).

With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I’ve never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.

We can test that… with this post. Will the “It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they’re taking care of it” reality manage to have the same reach? Let’s see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it’s been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I’m a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.

Thanks for reading this.

I filtered out ltt on yt a long time ago bc they were clickbait tech trash, like the journalistic equivalent of people magazine

This is painstakingly well thought and put out. Stuff needed to be said, and let us hope the community voices it as well.

Not sure if this gets seen by anyone from LTT, but I’m a regular consumer of their products (ie., their YT content).

I find that more and more of their videos don’t seem to end with some satisfactory conclusion, and quite a number of it is way too janky when with a little more thought and planning, could have been done and concluded much better.

Take for example the fanless heatsink dipped in ice bath video, or the car radiator water cooling video. It’s always them trying to fix some jank or scramble on camera to fight some spontaneous issues or leaks or whatever. It’s fun, yes, entertaining, yes, but utterly unsatisfactory in the end. Reminds me of a post-nut sad depression wank.