Pretty damning 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.
To be fair, GN provides excellent Chapter selection to encourage you to skip to whatever you want to know. You don’t have to watch the whole thing if you don’t want to. I’m more annoyed by them using those idiotic clickbait thumbnails. Complete no-go for me.
Even with the chapters they yammer on in every section. They could say the same thing in half the time and their videos would STILL be long.
There’s an extension you can get that removes the clickbait thumbnails. I think this the right one. It really makes YT browsing so much better.
I’ve started consciously avoiding clickbait looking thumbnails for a while. While this addon looks great on paper, I do prefer to support creators who don’t treat me like a kid in a candy store. That being said, I had no idea this addon existed, that’s pretty cool
Yeah, but then I’d support the practice through my click. I’d rather block 90% of YT content.
As someone who’s been running unRAID out of a tower and like 5 drives; it’s weird watching like four people who are definitely more tech savvy than me just bumble fuck their way through all this server stuff with enterprise level gear. Like I do more research for myself and I’m not jumping on video. Ultimately I like the videos, I enjoy seeing the approaches, but they try to come off like authority figures. Then they don’t even know how to properly parity swap and make unRAID look harder than it is.
it’s weird watching like four people who are definitely more tech savvy than me just bumble fuck their way through all this server stuff with enterprise level gear.
As someone who is very technically savvy, let me assure you that these guys are clowns. They are tech entertainers, not experts. Give yourself some credit.
They have people knowing their stuff, it’s just Linus playing around and figuring out. Anthony with old hardware and Linux and Jake does know a thing or two about server stuff
This pretty similar to why I stopped watching their vids. I always thought they were a trusted authority, until they covered a product that I had some familiarity with. I wasn’t even an expert at it, I was just interested so I read some articles, visited some forums and subreddits about it for a week or two. Their video on it had a couple of mistakes and they omitted a couple of minor features, but were important to me. There was nothing egregious but it was pretty surprising to me that in this one thing, I knew more than them, despite not doing much research.
Yeah they’re good for keeping aware of what’s new in the tech world mostly. Their actually reviews of products are so poor and out of touch. If I hear them nitpick the bevels on a display without actually framing things into the cost and value sentiment one more time I’m buying a farm
They have zero consistency in platform or hardware and don’t seem to setup any monitoring as well.
Other than building gaming PCs I would not look to LTT for technical advice.
I just watch the videos where they do silly stuff… Cooling a server with a pool is something I would never be able to do, that’s the kind of shit I want to watch, them building their thousandth gaming PC is just meh.
it’s weird watching like four people who are definitely more tech savvy than me just bumble fuck their way through all this server stuff with enterprise level gear.
Exactly, bumble fuck is what every one of their server videos or home automation videos seems to be about.
I would never follow what they do in server videos exactly, but I learned a ton from their server video backlog. Also find their server shenanigans very fun. Think server and the occasional actually useful tech tip video are still their best stuff.
Most else feels half baked or falls into the GN video criticism.
Gamers Nexus makes extremely detailed videos, but after 10 Minutes of non-stop fact firework my brain just starts to fade away
Either i’m not that into tech or it is my brains fault
ya I jump to the chapter then scrub to the graphs.
Totally agree. Glad someone said this.
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But that’s the goal of those videos for the audience they’re trying to reach. For the people that will only ever use the hardware with windows, then that’s really is the most practical metric to look at.
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.
Did this motherfucker just respond by chiding someone else for not following “proper journalistic practices” after completely fucking burying a company without reaching out to them about their prototype product?
Oh he reached out to them, agreed to send it and their graphics card (that they didn’t use for the testing) back to them and then
soldauctioned it off.Rules for thee, not for me.
Linus is a massive narcissist. He literally thinks he’s special.
Yeah. That hit me hard was well. Dude is apparently way more unhinged than most people knew. In his rise to fame, he’s become a complete hypocrite (which also isn’t unique).
If Linus knew he wasn’t going to recommend anyone buy the waterblock no matter how it performed, but also didn’t want to show it off as a niche ‘supercar’ of waterblocks, then why agree to review it at all? Was he maybe not in the loop at all until shooting the video?
Seems like there was no good way for this to turn out for Billet which is a real shame since they seemed to just want to show off something cool and maybe get some publicity for their startup.
And auctioning off their handmade prototype, even accidentally and for charity, is a collosal fuck up that really can’t be solved with money alone.
Linus posted a response on the LTT forums:
Thanks for sharing his side/comment here.
Not that I agree with his defense (seems like allot of avoidance), but I am glad I could read it.
I get vibes of Top Gear reviewing the Tesla roadster.
I find him only responding in the forums sketchy, like I a lot of people have an will watch gamers Nexus video and will want a response from Linus. If Linus actually wanted to clear the air why wouldn’t you do it on the wan show, he did it with the trust me bro situation. Almost nobody who watched the GM’s video will read this post and I think that’s what Linus wants, less eyes on the situation.
A couple of other things am sorry but DW guys we had a bit of a miscommunication with billet labs and sold their best prototype but we are gonna pay them back soon*tm is an awful way of handling it.
Also with the inaccuracies he doesn’t actually address the problem, they are making too many videos too quickly, no matter how many checks and balances you put in if you rush people you will get a rushed shitty product. Not to mention he doesn’t actually respond to the glaring issues of benchmarks being wrong or them trying to get the benchmarks to fit amds given ones or hell the clear conflicts of interest with noctua or Asus
He’s only responding to his fans. It’s just sad.
They are the ones that make him money, so they are what he is focused on.
For now. Y’all acting like Linus should immediately make a video in response to Gamer Nexus’s 45 minute one. There’s a lot to break down and go over so these things take time. Honestly WAN show being live would be a much better time to discuss it than the quickest response video in the west when one of the complaints right now, too is sloppiness when rushing.
There’s a lot to break down and go over so these things take time.
Wait, so now they care about getting things right?
They are doing too many videos Indeed, but what’s the solution? Doing less videos is penalized by the algorithm, which means not enough money to keep everyone around. So one solution would be to scale down, fire a bunch of people, close a bunch of channels and really focus just on LTT. To me this seems unrealistic and I doubt anyone in Linus’ position would do this.
The other option instead is to double, triple and quadruple down, hire a bunch more people, create lots of tools and know how, ways to create more data, more easily and accurately, remove lots of work from the writers and try to grow until the issues are resolved. This to me seems the only solution and is one that LMG has been pursuing for years now.
The third option is to just handwave the problem away and say they should do better without actually offering a real solution l (and I’m talking from both points of view)
Am I wrong?
If that was what would be necessary, then yes, scaling down would be the correct choice, because in that case scaling up was a mistake.
Infinite growth is unsustainable, and it always falls apart in the end. Why can’t we just be happy with some slow and sustainable growth, until a sustainable plateau?
They could hire more people, so the production load would be more spread out.
A few months ago there was a post on Reddit pointing out the problem with the writers being rushed from someone claiming to work at LTT. The solution the Reddit post suggested was to hire more people. Linus mentioned it on the WAN show but dismissed the post as just a whiner. (I believe the person making the post may have already been fired prior to making the post.)
If LTT was unionized there would have been an institutional path for this person to go through to get their grievances addressed. But Linus views that as some kind of personal failure. Rather than an institutional change that needs to happen to ensure the company is well run.
Maybe if a video is made about this then that amplifies the Nexus video and the criticisms it had. By not meaningfully engaging with it, they are not exposing it to their audience which is substantially larger than Gamers Nexus.
I think it could be that he does do it eventually though, after he finds better arguments or finds support from his community.
I have a hunch LMG will come out with a company reply. LMG is not Linus, and Linus is not LMG, despite owning the company. You can also see in the comments how many people get this wrong, some even going on ad hominem attacks on Linus’ person.
It could be the case, that the forum post was Linus’ personal answer and the other execs stopped him from running his mouth on a live show (WAN) and dig them a deeper hole. I don’t work at LMG and I don’t know Linus personally, but if LMG would want to be “taken seriously as a company”, it should be a company statement, not a personal one.
Linus criticizing Steve on “proper journalistic practices” shows an incredible lack of self-awareness.
tl;dr with commentary:
On testing errors: Yep, we’re trying to be better. [i.e. Let’s move on and forget this ever happened.]
On the Billet auction: We’re trying to do the right thing after a miscommunication. [This one’s probably the best response, but that’s not a high bar.]
On the Billet hit piece: We were only assholes to them to get them to be better. [MAJOR abuser vibes. “I wouldn’t have beat you if you didn’t deserve it”.]
On releasing knowingly inaccurate videos: This is actually a good thing because we show our mistakes with footnotes. [WTF]
On conflicts of interest from corporate partnerships: Crickets [No surprise]
The worst part about the billet testing I feel is the arrogance when he said “it wouldn’t matter if it dropped temperatures by 20 degrees, it’s a bad product”
Like a bad product to who? If I were overclocking and something knocked off a full 20 degrees, that’s a great product regardless of price
There’s a reason people bought 4090s, some people want the highest tier performance and dropping an extra thousand to get something decent isn’t a concern for some
To be fair, he meant 20 degrees from where it was during testing, not from stock or competitors. Even in this hypothetical it would match other options at best despite a higher price. But the problem is that we can’t know this because they didn’t test it properly
(like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication…
Steve never uses the wold ‘sold’ in his video, and uses the word ‘auctioned’ twice.
As if “sold at a charity auction” isn’t an incredibly common and normal phrase. Linus is grasping.
I mean, since when has auctioning not been selling something? Auctioning is literally a method by which to sell something.
Right. And that’s what Linus lead with.
But he never even used the word sold, just auction/auctioning.
FYI your link does not format properly on Kbin at least.
Does anyone have any examples of Linus genuinely admitting he made a mistake or was wrong in a way where he dealt with a modicum of consequence? I can’t think of any, but I don’t watch him very much, at least recently.
There won’t be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything
The starting line really puts me off. I don’t really care much about the tech content but find their videos entertaining.
I have un-subscribed from all their channels and will see how much this video is addressed in the next WAN before I decide if to continue to watch their content at all going forward.
"I’m sorry…
…that you feel that way"
Kind of post.
The one real point that I thought Linus had here was that Steve didn’t talk to him first. That part is getting a lot of ridicule, because it sounds petulant, but it’s valid–it is accepted journalistic practice to give the subject of a story a chance to comment before publishing.
Since we can now see what that comment likely would have been, it doesn’t seem to change the conclusion much. From experience I can guess at Steve’s likely response–he would have tentatively given LMG credit for compensating Billet for the loss, pending verification and comment from Billet, and ripped all the rest of Linus’s excuses a new one. But that still doesn’t change the fact that Steve didn’t quite live up to the journalistic standards that he touts on his channel.
That failure gives things a bit more of a “drama” flavor (It’s hard not to suspect that this is primarily a response motivated by that clip of Linus’s lab tech attacking GN’s and HUB’s testing methods). But of course it doesn’t absolve LMG and its vaunted lab of milking the Youtube algorithm first and being a source of real information a distant second–which was argued pretty convincingly by GN and which a lot of us started to notice long before this video came out.
I think the way LTT handled the backpack warranty debacle shows that by contacting LTT, you won’t get anything substantial in response. Linus will just keep being stubborn and you’ll get nothing in response. Even the way that Linus responded in his “response”, it’s still a nothingburger response.
He’s still doubling down on the way that he reviewed Billet Labs cooler and doesn’t even acknowledge the biggest criticism that GN levied towards LTT, spending more time in making sure that the content that they’re producing is accurate. Having a pinned comment and edited fixes shows that LTT doesn’t really care about quality and instead pushing to keep more producing content.
I saw a post somewhere showing that at least 300 people unsubscribed from Floatplane, so that means at least 1500 USD/month (can be more if there’s people who subscribe for 4k content) of revenue are lost. Just from him not wanting to spend 500 USD of his employee time to make sure that he reviewed the products properly.
Linus has completely lost the plot here. Although it’s not unexpected since the way he handled the backpack warranty situation.
Please explain why it aught to be/is standard practice to try and get a reponse before publishing.
It’s a customary practice, and I think it’s a good one because it makes the story less one-sided and can diminish the appearance of it being a hit piece if it’s negative. Bottom line, it’s natural to want to know what the person the story is about thinks of it and what their perspective is. Obviously not all journalists seek a comment from every subject, but if they do, they often mention that they asked for a comment even if they weren’t able to get one, because people want to know that they at least tried.
What could LMG have said which would change the reporting of the inaccuracies of their content? Getting a response before hand may be able to get some more information but giving corporations time to react also gives them time to act in bad faith (e.g. cover up or attempt to blackmail, etc).
Wanting to know what the person in the story things doesn’t appear to me to support sharing your criticisms before posting. Something being a custom doesn’t justify it being a custom (if it really is one).
(if it really is one).
I mean, I’m not a journalist, I’ve just been reading them for decades. It’s a thing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/policies-and-standards/
No story is fair if it covers individuals or organizations that have not been given the opportunity to address assertions or claims about them made by others. Fairness includes diligently seeking comment and taking that comment genuinely into account.
Just as an example that came up in a quick web search–the Washington Post is a major US newspaper and this is its stated policy. Seeking comment from story subjects is an important practice in journalism, and if you consider yourself a journalist and don’t do it in a given case, you should probably have a good reason. This is why Steve felt the need to explain himself on that point.
I assumed some do it, perhaps most do and that makes it a standard.
Taking their comment into account has the potential to get more information which would prevent you reporting misinformation. I’d love to know how often their comment is useful vs how often corporations take advantage.
Their issues are:
- Bad data - major errors in review videos
- Ethical concerns - conflicts of interest, Billet review, Pwnage review
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At the very least it appears incredibly reckless.
what they did to billet is goddamn evil
Evil - least sheltered redditor, just an ass
ruining a prototype product, talking shit about it, and then selling it is a lot worse than being “just an ass”
K hes hitler the evil twins
Damn, I thought we had a while before the 14 yr olds showed up on Lemmy.
Ad hominems, buddy projecting find an argument next time
the dictionary definition of evil is “morally reprehensible”. you don’t need to overreact by going straight to a godwin
So what we call hitler then
I think that their point that it’s an $800 product for a last-gen card, there really isn’t anyone out there that should buy this, and therefore it’s a bad product is valid. They could have handled the whole thing better and honestly should’ve just scrapped the video before release.
Auctioning off the prototype when the company asked for it back is pretty inexcusable. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that it wasn’t malicious, but they clearly have problems with internal communication of things like this are happening.
At any rate, it’s going to be a spicy WAN show this week. Linus needs to actually watch the video and address this point-by-point. If he “reads the comments” or cherry picks some of GN’s weaker arguments he’s just going to end up throwing fuel on the fire.
It’s pretty normal for water blocks to come out well after a GPUs release. Also it looks like it was a new product/company so it makes sense the design took longer than the competition.
Then they shouldn’t have reviewed it if their decision was made before even holding the product in their hand.
They could have reviewed it from the point of view of an R&D curiosity with the potential future iterations and cost reductions as the new startup finds their feet. Because, you know, that’s what it was. But they decided to shit all over it for dishonest reasons instead.
I dont think it was malicious, but it is incredibly negligent. It puts a huge stain on the company that’s expected to honor embargos for unreleased products.
@wordle I also have the same thoughts as you.
I feel that if LMG looked at this product and thought “hey this is really dogshit”, the decent thing to do would have been to go back to billet and tell them we can’t cover it at all (and cop the loss of few hours as part of running an ethical business)
What the fuck, that’s deplorable
I don’t understand why he won’t just own up to the wrong gpu thing and move on. It’s like getting pissy that the f150 exhaust sounds like shit on your ford ranger.
If LMG gave out a prototype for their latest screwdriver to be reviewed and it was onsold, I highly doubt it being called a “mistake” would have sufficed, heads would be rolling
Feel terrible for Billet and how they were treated here
Ltt is certainly not innocent here but this one I’ll disagree with since it basically just happened to them with an early sample of the backpack.
Billet was treated very bad here and i’m not trying to defend anyone, but i didn’t saw the video and only heard from them because of this shitshow
This is hard to believe, it seems too comical.
I believe you of course, and without accumulating enough about Linus’ & LTT’s antics I would have doubted you. I wonder what it is that causes these kinds of things to happen. I want to say success but I think there may be something about their ethos. Not what they espouse but what they sorta believe internally.
Seemed like fair criticism to me, honestly. I enjoy watching LTT, but if they want to be a reliable source of data with “The Lab”, they can’t continue acting purely as an entertainment company.
Yeah, it was very measured and specific. You could tell he took no pleasure in doing it, the disappointment felt very genuine. It was also a classy move to avoid monetization
I mean for sure he just got a ton of viewers, but it didn’t feel like YouTuber beef or a takedown.
I think he hints at the real issue a few times when he calls them “the company”. It’s the issue why I haven’t been into Linus for a while - he talks like a capitalist now. He’s got plenty of technical opinions, but you can tell he’s not keeping up to speed on the tech (he’s always getting help from someone off screen) - instead, he’s always talking about business.
He talks about making products, the challenges, plans to expand, the sometimes hard to watch reccounts of changing relationships with his friends turned staff.
Which is still content, and I am led to believe he genuinely has a commitment to making good products and standing by them. But I’m not into that. I don’t find it interesting, and I find myself skeptical of his technical judgement and less able to identify with him
Bad data is not the issue when they’re the ones generating it. Rushed reviews are the issue.
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.
Another comparable thing is the retro emulator boxes where they play a couple games and go: “Well, it played games, it’s either fine or terrible. now check out out sponsor!!”
I still really like their server content and the home pool water cooling has been a recent cool series.
If I want an actual review, I’ll trust Jeff Geerling, GN, Explaining computers, Craft computing, or ETA Prime.
If I want to watch someone do dumb tech stuff, I’m going for Linus, Dawid, …and red shirt Jeff Geerling. The difference is that the latter two go into it fully transparent that what they’re doing is purely for the “will it blend?” vibe and should not be taken too seriously.
Linus’ videos blur the line a little too much between legitimately educational and purely for the entertainment value in a way that could give people false impressions of either the tech or processes.
Agreed. Everyone should learn to seek out multiple reviews while searching for products and not trust one source.
Love channels like Jeff geerling and craft computing for homelab stuff. They manage to keep things short from, fun, and informative. GN and Explaining Computers is too long form and dry for me. Nothing I’m doing is that deep. But they are super necessary for the space and I recognize that.
If you have seen three Stooges, that is what LTT videos are for me. No other value other than entertainment.
But after the thread by Madison it is getting difficult to support them for even that.
I really, really wish they had just done more Scrapyard Wars. Super entertaining and my girlfriend also wanted to watch it.
But it’s hard to ride a like between entertainment and actual lab-quality testing. When they tied themselves to LTT Labs, they made a choice that seems to have been beyond their capabilities, both in terms of scheduling and workforce (LTT folks saying timelines are constantly too tight) and ethics.
If it’s ts fun and entertaining, I think they hit their mark.
Ultimately this is probably a good thing. From what I’ve gathered of Linus he is a person that can recognize his mistakes, but only once you get past his stubbornness. His response saying they should’ve hit him up is kind of classic response. What could you have said really? Like GN is right that like almost every video has a pinned comment or on screen edit of a correction. And you know these companies are complaining. Yet it continues.
Having their audience put them to task will go a long way to making them recognize it is a bigger issue than individual videos. I’m really curious about the idea of Labs being able to actually test things publically in a way consumers haven’t been able to. (Give me more of transparency like digital foundry for games and Jerryrig everything for durability.) So they need to pull their shit together if they want to claim to be a data driven lab. Like accuracy is all that matters.
I think the ethical concerns section is overblown. LTT is almost harsh on their sponsors and I got a kick out of Linus starting the last video talking about Framework saying how he doesn’t actually use the Framework laptop as his daily driver at the time and complained about it.
It very much feels significantly more like incompetence than malice (not that I think any particular person at LMG is incompetent. The processes likely are however). Honestly LMG just probably grew way faster than any of their processes could scale.
Their production cycle seems to be more targeted at producing content, moreso than anything else, like integrity or correctness.
I’ve noted several errors myself, most of the ones I’ve seen are relatively minor, and mostly pedantic, but they’re inaccuracies nonetheless.
If LMG wants to move towards being more journalism and a reputable source of accurate information, which, from everything they’ve done recently (most notably the lab), they seem to want to be, then they need people to go and fact check everything, and scrutinize final products to ensure accurate information. Making sure that inaccuracies are caught and sent back to the beginning of the pipeline to be re-reviewed, and if necessary, re-shot.
They can’t keep doing things by the seat of their pants and hoping for the best.
My hats off to GN for bringing it to light, and hopefully some meaningful changes come from this.
The sponsor related aspects I feel they handle pretty well for the most part, they’re often critical of sponsors and I don’t get the feeling he’d straight up sell out. It feels like they’re putting out so much content across so many channels that they’re not able to keep up the accuracy / quality. That’s a fair point I think Steve raised and to see it fobbed off by Linus in his response is disappointing
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
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I forgot about this segment, thanks for bringing it up.
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.
My take on it:
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.
Yeah, well, that’s one of the main issues addressed in this video: You are not transparent about this, when you swap out videos without notice or bury corrections in a non-pinned comment.
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.
If the listing is wrong, who guarantees the lab tests on which the conclusion is based on are not wrong?
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.
Take the time it needs to produce correct reviews then. Who wants fast but false results?
Followup on Linus’ response from GN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso
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He already made a post in the LTT forum excusing himself and implying GM is bad journalism for not contacting him or LMG to ask for comment. Including the beautiful gem “We haven’t paid yet but we agreed to financially compensate [the heat sink company] for their prototype”. The backlash from his own community was so great they deleted the post.
GN released a followup this morning addressing his response. The bit about “already” having an agreement to compensate Billet Labs is nothing more than a bald-faced lie. He reached out after the GN video, and Billet hadn’t yet responded when GN asked them about it. Billet is not “good” as he claimed in another post.
The implication that GN did bad journalism by not contacting them is a fair point though. It is considered good practice to give a chance to the accused party to defend themselves about the allegations presented by the journalist.
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The one that gets me the most is the Billet Labs copper water cooler… Like holy shit how big of an asshole do you have to be to NOT return to them what you agreed to return, and then to just auction it off
It’s so idiotic that it can’t be malice.
It’s just Linus overworking his employees.
I think anyone working in a bad company can tell you that people just stopped to care
LTT’s response was that they did not sell it, they auctioned it. As if that somehow makes it better?
They also made it seem like they had already come to an agreement on compensation but they clearly did not until after GN’s video and even after they had made their own claim.
We didn’t sell it, we just sold it. Dude knows what an auction is.
I keep trying to be charitable and think of it in an “incompetence rather than malice” way, but Linus lying, twisting and tripling down isn’t making it easy.
What I thought was interesting about this is that apparently not only me, but tons of other people have all kinda felt like LTT has seemed off the past year or so, and this video kinda explained it all
It’s not really new. LTT initially was breaking the advertising standards laws by using undeclared sponsors for videos without telling anyone. It started as an advert for companies products with paid placement. Many people didn’t care, the Canadian ASA told them to stop by which point they were already succeeding. The fact they deleted evidence of that shows what type of person Linus is.
At no point has LTT throughout its existence shown any regard for the law let alone ethics, morality, integrity or accuracy. Now it’s bigger and throwing out a lot more content it’s showing this at a frightening pace.
As the old adage goes, behind every great fortune is a great crime. I consider Linus at the very least unethical throughout his entire YouTube career. There is probably more going on than we can see, he seems more than willing to just lie openly so at this point any statements about anything he has said regarding framework and other investments and impartiality should at least be seen as highly questionable.
I’ll have to watch this review to have a knowledgeable opinion, but from the LTT I’ve been watching over the past few months, my initial feeling it is must suck to constantly have to come up with new content and to have the it’s core business at the whim of the YouTube algorithm (where quality of content doesn’t seem to be weighted much anymore). I’ve read a while ago that a thumbnail with a person’s face weighed more than a thumbnail without in the algorithm, that’s why all the LTT videos have the stupid face. It’s small dumb shit like that (to play by the algorithm’s ever changing rules) that can really chip away at a YouTube series
It’s been a consistent decline over many years, which makes it more noticeable the longer it’s been happening.
I just can’t get myself to care about the majority of the content anymore. They make so many videos that the topics just end up being about some goofy and dumb stuff that I don’t really care about. The ratio between serious reviews about serious products and some goofy random stuff is just worsening all the time on the main channel and it just pushes me away.
I mean I will never get why people actually watch graphics cards reviews. Just set a budget clock through 20 reviews and take the one that was mentioned most of the time. Watching a video with graphs and benchmarks is so boring
My own conclusions was that their lab building took so many resources.
I filtered out ltt on yt a long time ago bc they were clickbait tech trash, like the journalistic equivalent of people magazine
I unsubscribed from LTT years ago when the silly content ramped up.
YouTube kept suggesting LTT and I had to block the channel so I’m not really familiar with their content anymore, looks like they only got worse.
This is shameful.
This is why I feel only mildly outraged, compared to other comments here. LTT/LMG was only ever entertainment to me so gross factual errors neither surprise nor frustrate me personally. Any graphs or data presented couldn’t be trusted because they were the product of what you saw on screen, which was a buncha dorks bashing around equipment with a running gag of dropping expensive tech on the floor.
Linus justifies his frantic video production pace in terms of budget and finance. He should at least be able to reflect on the monetary harm to the small businesses that his botched reviews caused. To me, that’s what needs to be remedied ASAP because the two case studies presented (Billet and Pwnage) are not huge Nvidia corporations. Getting knocked around in the market can spell doom for everyone who works there.
And Linus/LTT will have excuses over excuses instead of sincerely apologizing and actually trying to get better.
Doesn’t matter for me, I’ve stopped watching them years ago. Their extremely clickbait titles make it hard to search for anything anyways.
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 :/
I largely stopped watching the LTT main channel after it became the All Linus Hour. I used to watch because you’d get to see more of the crew sharing things they enjoy and are passionate about. (See: Alex’s car reviews) Now it seems like all they put out on the main channel are Buzzfeed listicles with Linus squeaking about the newest color of screwdriver.
I watched LTT for Top Gear of computer hardware videos.
I think that perfectly describes LTT…if they weren’t trying to be taken as a serious facts and figures review channel.
Dan is absolute legend, and would deserve his own channel if he wanted to do videos.
Thanks, Steve.
LTT needs to make sure quality catches up to quantity wrt their yt videos. Essentially, they need:
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More technical experts/researchers to find and filter news/info before it goes into the script.
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Quality control after shooting a vid, i.e. they must be willing to reshoot segments with wrong info, not just put a note on the screen or in the yt comments
Both requires a huge investment in manpower and studio space. As it is, they are short staffed and juggling sets for shoots. If Linus wants to go on this path of business growth, he has no choice in this matter. They can’t go on like a small garage operation anymore.
He did invest in getting a new huge workspace and hired a bunch of experts. Remains to be seen if it’s enough and if they are used effectively.
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Well he’s not exactly known for taking warranted criticism well…
