Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls | What started as criticism over errors in recent YouTube videos has escalated into allegations of sexual harassment, prompting the company t…::The YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has halted production after controversies over ethics and accuracy in reporting, spurred further this morning by accusations of sexual harassment experienced at the company.
So despite the recent “reactions” from LTT, and just to bring this all back to the beginning… Thank you to Gamers Nexus for doing some damn necessary journalism, which couldn’t have been done without a high level of ethical, and technical competency.
Steve and crew do amazing work. They seem so genuine compared to 99% of the content on YouTube. Its like the Red Letter Media guys compared to all the other movie review channels.
What they did should be the standard. Serious reviewers should check on each others work and point out errors on regular basis. It’s the only way to stop corrupt/incompetent reviewers from misleading people.
They really should, especially since LTT was trying to be GN by adding the Labs. Claiming to be better than GN while making basic mistakes was just super unprofessional, which is why Steve’s response was so awesome. Anyone who has watched his channel knows he has a standard, and it’s massively important to him. I don’t think he would mind more competition in the space necessarily, even coming from LTT Labs, but the bedrock of GN is data, even if it’s a little bit dry as content sometimes. If you’re going to try to compete with or dunk on Steve, best meet the bar he’s set.
As much as this is Linus fault as the leaders, if LTT goes down for this. More than 100 of the employees will be out of job at the end of this.
Either way the outcome won’t be pretty for LTT staffs.
Most of those staff are going to have no trouble finding new jobs. It’s a highly technical and specialised crew, many would already be in demand elsewhere, and a void left by LTT would be quickly filled by other groups producing similar content, who suddenly find themselves in need of more staff. Hell, a lot of former LTT staff would be gobbled up by LTT’s own sponsors.
This is a terrible argument whenever there’s any public controversies within the private sector. It’s not worth thinking about ‘the jobs’ because that’s not how the economy works. If there’s fire behind this smoke, and LTT did fold, those left long-term unemployed are probably fewer in number than those who are currently being exploited and mistreated. It’s almost always a zero-sum game.
I get the concern. And I’ve been part of enough layoffs to know how much it sucks. But a company being held to its responsibility and a standard and held to the light like this to show it’s failings, would be an acceptable condition. That said though, I really don’t see anyone losing their jobs over this. This is a failing on the higher end of LMG, not the rank and file.
Linus is not the only one to blame. The people who work there could have done something to stop the unethical behavior or quit. But some of them stayed there for years and enabled Linus. I can’t look at those people and not think that they aren’t incompetent or corrupt.
Given they couldn’t even reign Linus in on the appology video and he is still playing the real victim they simply don’t have the power to. The new CEO can’t possibly be happy with what Linus said there but Linus is the boss and he certainly doesn’t listen to anyone else trying to make him see sense. If Luke can’t reach him, and he hasn’t managed to at any point over the years, then the rest don’t have a chance.
This is and has always been a culture that Linus has created and is continuing to reinforce.
Good point, they can’t change who Linus is. But then I don’t understand why Luke and others would stay there for years and continue working with that guy, continue to take part in unethical behavior. It makes me think that it just didn’t bother them enough.
It’s cult of personality shit.
It’s something Madison talked about in her Twitter rant.
For most of these people it’s their dream job, and they don’t believe they’ll be able to do it on their own. For many of them they tried to do it on their own for years before joining LMG.
So they’ll do anything to try and hold onto the fantasy. Including destroy themselves and the quality of their work. Which is really why the mental health of the company is in the shitter.
I mean this honestly: I like many of the team members and I hope that LMG is able to fix itself… But I don’t know if it’s possible.
That’s sad. I hope that the company fails and they get hired somewhere else.
They’re not going anywhere. He’ll take a hit from it. Now that the heat is actually on and he can’t just say whatever he’ll apologize he’ll outline what they’re going to do to make it better and then it’ll all be back to where it was in another couple months, maybe with a little extra effort on the data.
Hopefully things will get better, and also let’s hope the “shocked face” thumbnails for the videos go away. I don’t care if the algorithm says they convert better. I skip right over.
Really hits weird when a video talking about something so serious has a thumbnail that looks like it could be on a video about Fortnite.
And the title is an ambiguous clickbait question. Bad look for sure
here for you: https://lemmy.world/post/1569801 An addon to make thumbnails good again.
This has been coming for a long time. I have had issues with Linus and his channel for a long time including making a complaint about breach of advertising standards in Canada (which resulted in a change forced by the ASA). They have become the model of how to make money on Youtube but they do so in such an unethical way where they make or invest in competing products that they also review. They have never had any appearance of journalistic standards or integrity, they don’t publish errata or corrections and they make a lot of mistakes and the abusive reviews have been going on for a long time.
I am not surprised to find sexual harassment as well as undue pressure being applied in the workplace. It all centres and comes from the Narcissist at the centre of it who has built a media group off the back of civil law breaches repeatedly and continues to push the limits.
Labs was a terrible idea mostly because Linus and his media group will corrupt the results for his personal profit and he and Yvonne are the only ones making big bucks in all this. This has been building for a very long time, the lack of basic morality has been on display since the beginning.
They have been misleading millions of people for years and getting away with it. I hope this company is done. There have to be consequences for this kind of behavior.
What Gamers Nexus did should be the standard. Serious reviewers should check on each others work and point out errors on regular basis. It’s the only way to get rid of corrupt channels like Linus Tech Tips and I suspect they were just one of many.
Ah, colour me surprised that the spammiest channel on YouTube, which is practically unwatchable without Sponsorblock and has always been my go-to example use case for the addon (which Linus deems “Piracy”), turns out to have incredibly shady advertising practices. And incredibly shady practices in general.
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I believe some of his early videos were basically undisclosed advertisements. They were so over the top positive, it just didn’t feel right. I’ve had his channels blocked on YouTube for a while now. I simply don’t trust anything coming from him.
That was their early model. They took money for a product and produced a positive video on it. That was the channel its how it got started and grew. They always used weasel words (still do) like a company “hooked them up” which meant they received a free product and payment to produce this video. They were actually caught properly on this on a series of AMD sponsored videos which were so incredibly positive and glossing over the issues and AMD explained the videos had been paid for. It turned out that was how the channel worked, they got paid for positive reviews.
Nowadays sponsorship is better declared (because the ASA required that of them) but conflicts of interests aren’t. There is also the appearance of a lot of fraud too where free products are being placed into their homes. The Intel extreme series is a prime example of something that looks super dodgy and maybe a tax dodge. Right now its hard to prove something criminal is happening, based on their history however its not unreasonable to suspect it is.
I think they are using workarounds, for instance they get paid for worthless advertisement, and then incidentally review your products nicely, which is the real advertisement.
They fooled me once, which is how I found out the review must have been fake. After that it became pretty easy to see other examples.
It’s seems obvious to me that Linus reviews are according to what he is paid above all else.
Even if its not so direct there is a still a problem. Intel is giving each of the employees one after the other $5000 worth of whatever upgrade they want to their gaming gear. Almost everyone there is reaching the benefits of this Intel sponsorship personally. Sure looks like a bribe. If you start doing such a sponsorship deal the only way to remove the conflict of the interest and ethical problems is to never review anything involving Intel, because the entire staff is receiving significant bribes from that company.
It doesn’t have to be as direct as getting paid for a sponsored video to bias a review more positively, they are so unethical in the deals they make they will happily maintain the appearance of taking bribes and review products from that company. Its by no means the only example of this given the amount of free tech that has gone into Linus’ personal house that received a nice thumbs up only to be replaced 6 months later often on the quiet. Its everywhere in everything they are doing, companies are throwing goods and money at them and they are all taking it home and then the next week doing a review on products from that company.
Misleading? Have they been lying about their reviews?
Yes. When a review is in fact an advertisement and not a review, it’s lie to call it a review without disclosing they are paid to make it, which makes it an advertisement.
They fooled me once about 8-9 years ago. After that it has been pretty obvious to me, that it was not just a 1 off.
The thing I don’t get is all these random LMG apologists saying “actually here is exactly why it happened and is actually completely okay” despite absolutely no one having a true inside view of the company.
Like I saw someone just randomly guessing really stupid reasons why Madison is in the wrong, and acting like they have secret knowledge.
But Steve didn’t contact Linus to give him time to prepare an explanation in which he would blame everyone else and say how sad he is! It’s just a poor $100M company, they are just humans and they make mistakes. :D
Someone replied to their apology video saying “I’m not entirely convinced that Madison isn’t half making this up for attention.” Followed by “as someone who works long hours in manual labor” then uses that as a reason the workers shouldn’t be complaining about their work schedules.
I’m convinced half of LTT’s fans are incels.
If it’s half as bad as the allegations some heads should be rolling when this is all said and done. Otherwise this is just a PR patch job. But for now, we wait.
It’s great to see that this has bumped up one level in the media and is actually getting wider attention than just us YT and forum nerds.
Linus thought he could just swipe back at this and make it go away but not. this. time.
