The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility
The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility
87 comments
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Billet Lab's statement (Update 3)
You, the PC community, are amazing. We'd like to thank you for your support, it means more than you can imagine.
Steve at Gamers Nexus has publicly shown his integrity, at the huge risk of backlash, and we have nothing but respect for him for how he's handled himself, both publicly and when speaking directly to us.
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Regarding LTT, we are simply going to state the relevant facts:
On 10th August, we were told by LTT via email that the block had been sold at auction. There was no apology.
We replied on 10th August within 30 minutes, telling LTT that this wasn't okay, and that this was a £XXXX prototype, and we asked if they planned to reimburse us at all.
We received no reply and no offer of payment until 2 hours after the Gamers Nexus video went live on 14th August, at which point Linus himself emailed us directly.
The exact monetary value of the prototype was offered as reimbursement. We have not received, nor have we asked for any other form of compensation.
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About the future of Billet Labs: We don't plan to mourn our missing block, we're already hard at work making another one to use for PC case development, as well as other media and marketing opportunities. Yes it sucks that the prototype has gone, it's slowed us but has absolutely not stopped us. We have pre-orders for it, and plan to push ahead with our first production run as soon as we can.
We also have some exciting new products on our website that are available to buy now - we thank everyone who has bought them so far, and we can't wait to see what you do with them.
We're happy to answer any questions, but we won't be commenting on LTT or the specifics of the email exchanges – we're going to concentrate on making cool stuff, and innovative products (the Monoblock being just one of these).
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We hope LTT implements the necessary changes to stop a situation like this happening again.
Peace out ✌
Felix and Dean
Billet Labs
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Follow-up from Billet (Update 4)
UPDATE
For full transparency, Linus contacted us this evening saying it's likely he can get the block back from the buyer.
We have declined this offer, and asked for the previously agreed monetary value instead for the following reasons:
- we have already spent a significant percentage of the value of the block in the last few days on replacement parts to build a new block, assuming we'd never see the original one again.
- we do not know if the original block is still in good working condition, and how much money will be needed to fix it if it's not.
- we don't know if any of the bespoke fittings are missing, each of these costs money to replace if they are.
- LTT have had our 3090ti without using it for 9 weeks, so we have lost confidence that they will return items quickly.
- LTT isn't currently in possession of the block, they've only said that they can get it back. We therefore don't know when we'd get it back, and time is of the essence.
- LTT has confirmed that the block is with a private individual rather than a rival company, so lost IP is much less of an issue.
We wanted to state this publicly just in case anyone has any issues with the fact that the block has potentially been found, and we chose to take the money instead. We hope you understand our reasoning here. We can have our new block that we're currently making ready in the next couple of weeks, and we are sceptical that we would have the original block back in fully working condition in that amount of time – it would be a gamble at the very least.
Much love
Dean & Felix
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That's a class-act response.
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In the "Statement from Linus" are LMG critising GN's journalism for not reaching out before posting the video?
Seems 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 knowingly using the wrong GPU. Fair for who?
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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.
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Especially because Steve said "auctioned" and not "sold". Nice strawman, same as his "bad journalism" take. It only leads the discussion away from the allegations.
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Wait a sec, I'm gonna create a bunch of bot accounts just to up vote this higher.
*not gonna. I'm lazy, but it'd deserve it.
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That's a whole lot of excuses and no solutions.
Extremely disappointing.
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I want to believe, but there's still a bit of a lack of transparency, ironically when talking about transparency. He says things like "we're internally working on it" but working on what? I at least want to hear what some even potential interventions could be.
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You can really tell that Linus was the "dog ate my homework" from that post. Lots of blaming others.
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Their website is down
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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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Will be curious to hear Linus’ response, the Billet labs thing is super weird
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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).
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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.
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He apparently posted on the forums: https://lemm.ee/comment/2246534
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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
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I fell off of Linus yeeeeeeeeears ago when him and Luke got to talking about harassment in League of Legends. Luke gave sensible advice, mute everyone, take breaks. Linus then rudely interjected "Or just get better".
Sure getting better at league will reduce some harassment, but not all, and the way Linus interrupted Luke with that line left me with a subtext of, "People only flame you if you are bad, if you are bad it is your responsibility to git gud, if you are getting upset that people are flaming you, you're a stupid ass removed"
That made me feel like Linus wasn't this happy-go-lucky tech enthusiast, but just another overconfident ego-driven asshole. Recent events are giving me some nice confirmation bias. Linus is now a money enthusiast, not a tech enthusiast anymore.
My anecdote is totally silly, I know, but cracks in Linus' character can be seen outside of his reviews I suppose.
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Just look at his profile on their forum. Dude is ego maniac and should be avoided as much as possible. Especially when lying at people and ruining other people work.
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Same here. I liked their early content but it was obvious they crossed a line and everything new was driven by the dollar signs. If anything this GN video shows just how greedy Linus has become.
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Tbh even when there aren't such blatant errors in their reviews Linus has felt out of touch for years. Sometime in 2018 or 2019 (I don't remember exactly when) Linus did a review of some $150 Alcatel phone and he kept complaining about how it had a micro USB charging port instead of type C, arguing how physical type C ports only cost "pennies" more than micro ports and how there was "nO eXcUsE" to still use micro USB. Mind you, type C had only started appearing on flagships around late 2016-17, so it hadn't yet started to trickle down into the mid-range and budget segments of the market at that point. That made it all the more jarring to hear Linus ranting about a budget device still using micro USB only a couple of years after type C had even begun to see market adoption.
As someone who's stuck to the low-mid end of the market (~$150-250) basically since getting my first smartphone, it was immediately obvious watching that video that Linus doesn't know what the hell he was talking about when it came to tech outside of the high end, and expects every big new feature or standard to be crammed into budget devices regardless of the effects it might have on the final cost of said devices. Sure, type C ports only cost "pennies" more than micro-B ports at that time. But those extra pennies add up on devices that might only cost a handful of dollars to manufacture, plus the extra engineering and design work that has to be put in to implement it, and the added cost of type C cables over micro-B that would have to be included in the box.
After giving it some thought after watching that video, I started to gradually trust Linus less and less regarding anything budget of mid-range over the last 5-ish years before I unsubbed entirely last night. It sucks seeing a creator you respected so much at first go down this path, but I guess nothing can last forever.
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https://youtu.be/4sAeslM74U8 My perspective about LTT changed after this video.
TLDW: Alex reviews a Thinkpad and asks Lenovo to remove the trackpoint
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😯
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The channel's only good for their goofy shit now. Like jerry rigging a stupid, massively over-engineered cooling system to cool a server cabinet using a swimming pool.
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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.
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Should all corporations get time to respond before going public with a criticism video to be proper journalism?
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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.
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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.
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What am I missing here? I'm a super casual watcher and even I knew he was an investor in framework? Every time I've seen the company mention he goes about how he's involved. So yeah, not sure what the issue is there.
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Watch GNs video. Steve goes through several instances where their handling of sponsorships is clearly inappropriate, beyond just investing in Framework.
The biggest problem Steve points out is that LTT content is clearly biased from the beginning. They know exactly what angle they're pushing for before they start writing/testing the video. Whether they are Short Circuit videos where they wave away and even apologize for issues they find in their review-not-a-review, or whether it's Linus' own content decisons where he decides that he hates a product before even starting work on a video and so refuses to give that product a fair shake.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I find Linus to be an odd mix of earnest and smarmy.
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Its narcissism.
The Narcissist’s Prayer (by Dayna Craig)
That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, that’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
Read that, then re-read his response to GN.
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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....
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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
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As far as I know, he has never had AMD stock.
Personally I don't see the framework investment as an overwhelming conflict of interest. It's an amount of money that's not excessive for him(using the figures from the GN video), so if it were to vanish it wouldn't be life changing. It's also unlikely to be a life changer for him if it were to 10x. It sounds like even if it were to 100x, it would only increase his net worth by 20%.
It's disclosed frequently and the investment is very public, so the viewer knows to be aware of that potential bias.
The much larger issues are the countless errors in the video that can mislead millions of viewers with bad data and poor testing oversight... and of course how those errors are handled once they are pointed out. I'd wager 95% of viewers would never read a pinned comment. These errors and their treatment cast doubt on the multi million dollar investment into a lab dedicated to guiding purchasing decisions.
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Sorry, I'm totally out of the loop. I know Linus, but can anyone summarize what is the problem with billet labs?
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Linus tested it on the wrong GPU, then stole one of their prototypes and gave it out at LTX
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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".
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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
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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.
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Oh boy, drama!
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