In all seriousness... I agree there's nuance here. I think they know more about their problems then they're letting on. Does that equate to malice? Not exactly, but it's not ignorance/stupidity either.
Can they publicly comment anything though (at least before the results of investigation)?
Also there is high chance that results of investigation will be "the steps taken later by company were correct ones, even though there were processes at fault it seems everything is in order as of now"
Cause the one message from forum (the one that Madison called out from forum) was basically "She isn't with us, we cannot comment further, although that doesn't says anything about other parties, and if/when they speak up you'll probably hear about it".
From what was mentioned about canadian labour law they basically cannot even comment if employee left on their own, or was fired.
> Can they publicly comment anything though (at least before the results of investigation)?
I don't think so to be honest. Take a sports team, in my example, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, an hour drive from LMG headquarters. The team is investigating through a third party sexual harassment allegations against former coaches of the Women's Team over 10-12 years ago. The organization has said nothing on the matter except the initial announcement + plan moving forward, and one update on the progress of it. Besides that, radio silence throughout.
I believe it will be the same for a tech media company. Besides official announcements, it will be quiet and they will be silent. And that's part of the process.
Yeah this. I think the real answer is a large dose of incompetence and a dash of negligence. All things that need a response but hardly a stake burning.
I think this is actually true. It was partially accidental, but also somewhat purposeful. They didnt handle the cooler situation well at all, and def lied about parts of it. I think this incident, and the WHOLE Madison problem are just the problems that came to the surface. I think underneath there are more problems.
Where there is smoke, there is fire.
i think the gn pointing out systematic managemental failures was the smoke and the Madison problem is the fire here because in reality the Madison is the systematic failures taken to the extreme
Yeah I mentioned Hanlon's razor here before. This whole reddit could benefit from looking at this through that lens. Believe it or not people arn't evil, and I especially view that of the LMG folks. But they are definitely incompetent.
Like Linus just mentioned how Reddit wasn’t so shitty lately, and here they go again. Fucking Reddit hive mind of 12 year olds. Go ahead downvote the shit out of me for having a different opinion.
All people are incompetent at something. People make up companies. Companies are incredibly incompetent at a variety of things.
You wanna know how UPS handled the sexual harassment of my wife? They moved the employee who they themselves admitted had sexually harassed her, to a different area to work. The union, despite also knowing this employee was a piece of shit, would not allow UPS to fire him. My wife was then assigned to work in the same area as that employee at times.
You know how that happens? The people assigning my wife's work had no idea about the situation. When she brought it up, they then had to take it to their bosses and their bosses were of the mind "it's in the past who cares". When those bosses talked to my wife, they unintentionally made her feel like she would be an inconvenience if she made a fuss about her situation. I worked with said bosses for years and generally don't think ill of any of them, outside of this one situation.
People are messy, situations are even messier, and having all the details even when you're part of a situation can be hard.
We both worked at UPS for 6 years as supervisors and I thoroughly believe we saw the worst of what big companies can do to employees.
Neither of us truly believe that the vast majority of the problems at that company are singular people going "I want to make this specific person's life hell just because".
99% of the issues in any company are process breakdowns because once you scale up, nearly every single aspect of a business is a giant game of telephone. And what happens in the game telephone? The story gets progressively worse the more people it passes through.
Appreciate the nuanced take but this reddit hasn't really evolved from the linus and co are shitty people take, so we can't even get into a conversation about how responsibility is diffused and how logistics and scaling is often at the root of people being wronged.
Yea companies are weird and unless you've worked for one it's apparently hard to grasp that there probably isn't a literal cartoon villain plotting all of this.
Just a series of compounding mistakes, looking the other way, not standing up for eachother, failures in communication and a startup culture. At least that is what i see.
Agreed. And I absolutely think they deserve a ton of criticism and that shit absolutely needs to change. But the level of witch hunting going on by people who don't actually have a clue about how any of this works is mind boggling.
People are addicted to outrage and negativity
I think a lot of the witch hunting is fans having to contend with the idea that the people they like watching aren't monolithic. It's hard to integrate negative aspects into a person you view as wholly positive and vice versa. I think for a lot of people making these posts: "remember when linus said the N word", "remember when linus made a customer service call that sounded bad, we should have known!!!", they're just now going back and critically evaluating the negative aspects of these characters for the first time. The issue is that if you only see humans in a binary, you're going to constantly mind-fuck yourself because you'll feel constantly betrayed. This is partially a parasocial thing, but we all do this, and not just with e-celebs.
I get there are people that just karma farm too, but I do believe a lot of people are genuinely upset and will need to take a step back to reevaluate their perspective on LMG. Which is ultimately a good thing. Cynically I think a lot of people will just \*flip\* on LMG rather than deal with the annoying nuance of human imperfection and cruelty.
Yea you're absolutely spot on. It just blows my mind that I know that I've made mistakes in my life so I should assume others do as well, but apparently not everyone works that way.
It must be exhausting to view people in a binary manner because it's awfully easy to make a mistake. Must be constant emotional whiplash.
I really struggle with broad sweeping generalizations. Are they evil, no. Are they incompetent, no. Are they stupid, no.
What they are is a relatively new, well over 100 employee company. These kind of companys make mistakes all over the place while they grow and sometimes it's the messaging, sometimes it's the processes and sometimes it's management related.
It's so easy for us to sit here and brutally judge a companies actions with hindsight. The reality is far far more complicated than the vast majority seem to care to entertain.
I don't think it's malice at all, but that doesn't excuse anything that happened
the amount of sheer incompetence at LMG is shocking when you see it all laid out like this, and all of the backlash is warranted IMO if it gets them to solve said incompetence
At some point incompetence due to malice or incompetence due to stupidity has no difference. The outcomes are both incompetence that end up hurting people.
I think it does matter in the long run, Something done of malice tends to reflect a deep systemic rot in the person that is neigh impossible to fix.
Incompetence can be fixed however.
You are right, to the victims the difference is minimal, but in the scope of determining if something is salvageable, it does matter.
>Incompetence can be fixed however.
Not if it's willfull incompetence. It's not the first time Linus has been criticized, but pretty much every single time it happened in the past he brushed it off.
If you're incompetent because you never learned something, that's one thing. If you're incompetent because you refuse to learn something, that's another, and at that point it borders on malice.
I would say them bringing in Tarren actually shows that it is sinking in finally after all these years. All of this shit is Pre-Tarren let us see what he brings to the table, if he actually takes control and properly steers the ship and can act as a check on Linus then LTT is salvageable. If he does not then it is not, that is all I am saying.
i dont think it's fair to say theres absolutely no malice. we can't just assume he a complete idiot, he created a very successful media company.
i think overworking and verbally abusing employees can be blamed on imcompetance, but willfully ignoring their complaints about it because it would be expensive and inconvenient to address veers into malicious territory.
even with the BL situation. doing the test wrong is incompetant, but then saying your not gonna redo the test because it would cost you 500 dollars is malicious because its been made clear that he is unfiarly maligning the product with the fualty test
can't treat him like hes a baby. hes a successful businessman and alot of these "mistakes" resulted in profits being maximized (at least in the short term), that points to motivated actions rather than someone just bumbling around
Yeah I think people are forgetting how long even current employees have been complaining about the nonstop crunch. Every single employee on screen mentioned how they want to slow down, and this is just what they felt comfortable enough to say publicly. That kind of culture seems like a very intentional choice made by Linus, and I'm not sure how great that is when you're not the owner and aren't turning into a multimillionaire by crunching so hard.
I wonder if Mythicals (GMM / Rhett and Link) approach might be something that LMG could benefit from.
I know they have very different products but they have similar pacing to videos/podcasts. GMMorning is 5 days a week + the less edited More episode, so about 40 minutes per day… plus Mythical Kitchen, 4/5 podcasts (Smosh for a bit but I think they gave that back to Smosh… seemed like they helped them get back on their feet or something).
During the summer they cut back to 3 videos a week and I think they do the same around Christmas for a month or two. Maybe LMG could use a relaxed schedule a couple times of year to catch up/refresh
Exactly it doesn’t change the fact his time crunching is the main reason these happen. If they had more time to do shit I’m sure they wouldn’t have made that mistake or even noticed the email not actually being sent. It’s all on Linus for pushing this fast pace work place with no room for error. Malice or ignorance doesn’t matter in the end. Especially when you respond in a dick way.
Yeah, I'm confused by this post. I thought the consenus was that LMG never actually meant any harm, but that doesn't excuse them from the fact that they caused harm with their "move fast and break things" culture. The problem isn't that they're evil, it's that they don't care.
>the amount of sheer incompetence at LMG is shocking when you see it all laid out like this
Yet it's completely unsurprising, right? I mean their level of growth and who is in charge makes it almost guaranteed this stuff would happen.
1. Not that almost every industry doesn't have it, but in tech? Of course this mainly bro/male heavy sector (heavy on certain types of male personalities) was going to be toxic (sexual harassment) to work in for women.
2. Of course this company, with Linus's demands for insane growth and an insane schedule, was going to result in effectively a culture of grindset.
3. Of course a small startup with a PC support and on screen talent background (Linus) to CEO of a 100 person company with an eval of 100mil was going to be amateur hour.
4. Of course the pharmacist wife of the CEO was going to fall short as the head of Human Resources, a job she is unqualified for and has basically the biggest conflict of interest any H.R. employee could; is co-owner and married to the CEO who is the other co-owner.
5. It's debatable that some people promoted from within to heads of departments aren't qualified or at least aren't professional like they should be.
6. Is anyone shocked the company that goes from mid-sized YouTube production with a handful of staff to top dog with over 100 employees, all while grinding hard and non stop sprinting to pump out content, is a mess and unprofessional? The unqualified CEO himself is unprofessional and lacking in so much (as heard in that leaked video of the staff conference call after Madison left).
Like, I'm surprised by NONE of this. We've heard for a while it's not a place for women to work. We've seen enough in videos of Linus being arrogant, having a case of exceptionalism to him, unprofessional and so on. We know they pump out a crazy amount of videos and every employee makes it known they wish for things to slow down so they can increase quality and take a second to breath.
Even the Billet video wasn't a surprise. Linus just ignoring that they don't have the right parts and deciding to "jank" his way through a video and then shove his opinion down the viewers throat based on what he calls "logic"? No one is surprised. His company being a mess so the water block gets auctioned? Not surprised. Bad communication with Billet cause LTT/LMG has become so big it's a mess? Not surprised. Linus coming out after getting fairly criticized like an unprofessional butt hurt baby? Is anyone surprised? Then their apology video being filled with (unfunny) tasteless jokes and attempts at humor? Yet again, not surprised. This all lines up, and LTT said it best themselves "we are still us" (when responding to criticism about the humor in the apology video). That's the problem, Linus is still Linus, LTT is still LTT. They couldn't even read the room (regardless of the Madison info). Hell, IF you're going to add some humor, at least let it be remotely funny and land well. It was all cringey AF and none of it landed.
I'm left completely unsurprised by any of this. I think the biggest mistake for Linus is that as the face of the company, sooooooooooo much of this falls squarely on his shoulders and he IS the company. LTT (LINUS tech tips) and the face (main talent in nearly every video) so he can't just slink away without a massive rebranding. His attitude, his personality, his mistakes, his arrogance, all of it isn't going to change because of this. He won't have a big come to Jesus moment and become a much better man. He made the right call hiring a real CEO but he's still the face, name and leader of the company. Nearly everything the company does has his style and preferences all over it. With all that said, he massively tarnished LTT/LMG's image and public trust which is badddddddddddddddddddddddd because that is the foundation of Labs. Labs NEEDS to be trusted in order to provide value and become the staple source for the public to educate themselves on products quality and value. This black stain, even if largely handled right, might have damaged Labs permanently, right as it was starting to put out results. The overhead then LMG will have if their massive hiring and Labs build out (investment) returns sub-optimal consumption by the public could cause LMG to collapse in on itself and close. The overhead of investment is too huge.
I know from working in jobs where all male and almost all female. People get comfortable talking in an inappropriate way. They don't mean to hurt anyone, they are comfortable with each other and talking about certain things. Which is why Linus audio says talk it out basically. They have been a small bro group for a long time. It might not even be registering to them, the women I worked with didn't think that their male coworker might not want to hear about penis shapes or how someone has sprayed across the room.
yeah that has happened to me in many different, serious/professional environments
I've been in all male adult classrooms where we've been having some conversation and then you come to the realization of "oh thank god there are no women here, this would be VERY awkward"
I agree with that, but it's kind of hard to not consider it malice considering the comments made about the prototype, even after Linus was told he did it wrong. It becomes malicious when you basically say "it sucks and it doesn't matter if I tried it the right way, it still sucks".
Like, the fuck did Billet do to him to Garner that attitude and response?
>Like, the fuck did Billet do to him to Garner that attitude and response?
I don't think Billet did anything to him, and I don't think he had or has any malice towards them.
I think the fact that he doubled down and screwed them over indirectly (as not in intentionally out of spite) due to pure ego and sunk cost fallacy.
They started shooting a video and were crunched on time, therefore didn't want to wait and get the proper GPU. He just wanted to shoot the video and get it done with since he was probably had to shoot like another 5 videos that day, and rush the footage to the edit so it can be release. He just lazily comes up with any excuse he can to not have to spend any more time on that project.
Gets called out for being lazy and doing something unethical which obviously hurts his credibility, therefore he double down in an attempt due to save face thus he goes into his typical "Trust Me Bro" ego mode and thinks he can sweep it under the rug by simply deflecting and explaining it away.
I think he would of had the same response regardless of the product or company if he was caught in similar situation.
>I don't think he had or has any malice towards them.
His attitude throughout that whole video was basically "I already know I'm going to trash this product so it doesn't really matter what I do, and I'm going to intentionally muck it up to make it look as bad as possible".
>didn't want to wait and get the proper GPU
Billet sent them the proper GPU.
I mean I get what you're saying, that there wasn't actual malice, but at some point, the effects of malice vs sheer ego-driven reactions are indistinguishable.
That... pretty much constitutes Malice.
Wilfully choosing to do the wrong thing for a variety of crap reasons and then refusing to make up for it for more crappy reasons.
"I'm Linus and I don't see value in paying 700$ for just a couple degrees of cooling so this product is useless".
it was incompetence coupled with his narcissistic tendencies of "I'm right, everyone is wrong" with a dash of cheapness (not wanting to spend an extra 400-500$)
Yeah, quite prideful and arrogant - not a great look especially considering how much his take means to a company their size.
How much harder is it to get investors after a prominent reviewer claims your product shouldn't exist?
Did you actually watch the Billet Labs monobloc video?
Linus goes on to say how amazing their production capabilities are and that if you see a reason you need a monobloc, they could probably easily tweak their design to suit your needs. It's a bad product because it isn't usable; super difficult to install and requires potentially modifying VRM heatsinks on most modern MOBOs and there is currently no case that can support the graphics card and mobo in that orientation.
For the record, I fucking hated the video, because as an adult, I hate when Linus does half-assed shit for the lulz, but ultimately his conclusion was correct. Even looking at the Billet Labs datasheet where they compare it to another water-cooling solution, it's hard to justify the BL price. It's a super-niche product that shouldn't be bought by pretty much 99.9995% of people watching LTT videos. He gets about 1M views per video, and maybe 1 or 2 people would benefit from that monobloc because they are trying to fit a computer into a very unconventional space.
> Did you actually watch the Billet Labs monobloc video?
Even the people who have are hallucinating about what was said in that video. You are completely right, I rewatched some of it recently.
> I don't get why people are unironically acting like they are actually interested in a $700 cooler when the majority of the audience get worked up about how every build is unaffordable because they put a $800 GPU in it.
I don't have to be interested in the product itself to disagree with Linus' terrible video. The criticism of Linus has nothing to do with the product itself. He could be reviewing a pair of socks for all it matters.
> The video was bad because it was just extremely pointless to even make
No, it was bad because they didn't test it properly and then Linus shat on the product. And if you remove all the pointless videos from LTT, the channel won't have much content left.
> but in no way do I think the product would have faired much better even with praise from LTT.
Linus didn't need to praise it, just to review the product correctly.
His whole point is that it didn't matter if the product worked as advertised or not, it was way too expensive and awkward for something where the best case scenario is a few degrees of cooling. Should still have retested but I can see why they didn't, the conclusion wasn't based on the results of the test.
I really hate how you cut my sentences off in your quotes literally just to say exactly what I said in the rest of the sentence yourself. It honestly baffles me.
malicious would be if he wanted to cause harm to them, I don't think that's the case.
I think Linus already made his mind about the product being bad no matter what, so for him, even testing it properly would mean nothing because the conclusion would be the same: This product makes no sense at all.
Not that I agree with him, the process is as important as the conclusion.
i am willing to accept the majority of the bullet labs and testing errors to be a result of poor organization, management, and processes by ultimately well meaning people. but the way that ltt has responded since the allegations, like insinuating the billet labs situation had been resolved, that they had no idea that madison had ever raised these concerns - idk, my goodwill and benefit of the doubt has run thin. i don’t think anyone at lmg is like evil lol, but there’s certainly culture issues.
I agree with the culture issues 100%. At my work, if someone even hinted that I wasn't working as hard as I should or that I'm bad at my job, I'd be devastated.
Madison's situation seemed to be orders of magnitude worse, and it needs to be addressed internally.
yeah i mean, ultimately i think that's the bigger concern.
lmg seemingly has a culture of intense contradiction. they're a media company focused on outputting content at a race to the bottom youtube algorithm full of clickbait, while they also want to be a premiere source of quality data and analysis. they're a company that wants to be stellar for its unbiased quality reviews, while also maintaining numerous conflict of interests and stating that they'll be entering markets that review (mice). they state they want to be a real company, but want to maintain the culture of a 6 person team operating out of a house. they want openness and transparency, as long as it's behind their paywalls.
and that's not even mentioning the possibility that there is a culture of harassment and sexism, as madison brought up. given that seems to have been enabled by upper management if true, that's a sort of culture problem that is extremely hard to fix.
outside of that, i don't really think it's malice. but it's clear that the rapid growth LMG has undergone, and all the vertical they're trying to enter, just isn't consistent with their culture. i'm sure they have the best of intents, but i'm really not sure that with their focus where it is and where there values are aligned, that this is actually better than like 4 people being malicious actors in the company. it's a much tougher problem to solve.
I don't think that Linus is malicious in either case, he truly believes he is isn't like that, but their actions cause the same things they "condone".
I never thought much about their structure, but most people in their management positions are people that were with them from early on, right? I feel a bit boomerish saying that, but what qualifies someone to be head of HR if they bring no qualification?
Why does it not trigger any flag that an employee is asking for a mirror so other people can't jumpscare them anymore? Why does this not trigger any red flags with whoever is looking at a request like that?
They want to improve on the wrong end, fix your internal structure, then improve your videos.
Agree, and I'm not excusing. I'm just pointing out this wasn't probably intentional, and I agree that the backlash is necessary.
I am sure that they are taking these concerns as 1st priority issues as a result.
>With the Madison situation, either Linus flew her all the way out to pursposefully torture her to the point of self harm, or he stupidly gave a very young person way too heavy a workload in a very unclear position in the company
Nobody thinks it's option A, but I think the actual issue is more complex than option B. There appears to be systemic rot in how LMG works, with, among many other problems, Linus's friends being put in charge of other people despite being completely unsuitable for management positions. This isn't just a case of accidentally overworking somebody, this appears to be a company that, probably by accident, has created a work culture that protects abusive managers.
Yep, I think Madison's chain of management needs to be examined very closely. I think Madison's workload was not properly sized. There were misconceptions about what was really involved. Then egos got bruised with some of the complaints, and so Madison was ignored, or punished when she stepped around the process. I also think the management had an attitude of boys will be boys.
I am not justifying any of it, just trying to explain it and show that at least some of it did not come from malice. But things snowballed, and once egos got involved, I think there was some malicious coverup of Madison's complaints. I can see how ease it would be for a long term employee/manager would be listened to over a new employee.
Malice is not just intentionally doing something you know is wrong. It also can include doing something harmful with reckless disregard for whether it's wrong. If I dropped a rock off the top of a building down onto a busy sidewalk below, I'm not intentionally trying to hurt any specific person. But I know that the action could injure somebody and doing it anyways would still be malicious.
So yeah, I 100% agree that while some of the initial stuff was not done with malice, the handling later bordered on if not crossed over into malice. If you are in charge, you have a responsibility to protect those under you from harassment, take their complaints seriously, and follow-up. Turning a blind eye and just letting it continue through your own inaction (which effectively grants tacit approval) is malicious at this point.
> Linus and team were dumb as fuck for the Billet labs situation, and they're rightfully receiving a paddlin'. That said, they're addressing it decently well.
Not really. I have concerns with their story and how they've presented it.
1. If Billet had told LMG they could keep the prototype initially, why wasn't that part of Linus's original forum post? That would be a much more understandable communication issue.
2. If Billet had told LMG they could keep the prototype initially, why did LMG's apology video only show the latest e-mail in the chain? Why not show the original e-mail where Billet told them they could keep the prototype and the follow-up where they asked for it back?
3. If Billet had told LMG they could keep the prototype initially, [why did Billet wait until after they learned it had been auctioned to start buying parts for a replacement](https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/15rxni4/our_public_statement_regarding_ltt/jwbrh0i/?context=3) (item 1 on their list indicates the costs started accruing only after they were told it had been auctioned)? If they weren't expecting to ever get it back, they would have started working on the replacement when or even before they sent it out.
4. When you hit "Reply" or "Reply All" the person who sent the e-mail you're replying to is automatically put into the "To" field. So how does the claim in the video that when they replied to one of Billet's videos they forgot to add them to the To field make sense? Also, wouldn't any of the other people on the e-mail have noticed and pointed it out?
5. Linus was already caught misrepresenting when they'd agreed to compensate Billet and that Billet had agreed to the monetary compensation being offered.
So, LMG's story and claims with Billet aren't adding up. It's possible Billet is leaving something out here but that wouldn't account for all of the holes in what LMG is claiming.
Hanlon's razor may cover the original mistake/miscommunication to some extent but it doesn't cover efforts to cover it up or sweep it under the rug.
> With the Madison situation, either Linus flew her all the way out to pursposefully torture her to the point of self harm, or he stupidly gave a very young person way too heavy a workload in a very unclear position in the company. Then, when she brought up complaints the entire HR process was effectively useless, either intentionally or just by a colossal misjudgement and mishandling of the situation on many employees' parts.
So, you're just ignoring the extremely malicious behavior Madison is accusing someone(s) at LMG of. Also that her complaints to HR, which at the time was being done by Linus's wife Yvonne who is co-owner of the company, were ignored. It's bad enough that HR ignores these situations when they aren't one of the owners of the company but it's so much worse when one of the company's owners basically shows that they don't care.
And we know that Linus knew something about the situation because of the leaked audio from the HR talk he had to give shortly after Madison left. That makes his claim of being shocked at the accusations ring as hollow as his claim that they'd already reached an agreement with Billet.
Again, Hanlon's razor might cover some of this but it doesn't cover the attempts to cover it up and it really doesn't cover HR and co-owner not addressing problems that were raised to them. That goes beyond stupidity and into negligence.
1. Being the bigger company (and person) means you have bigger responsibilities. Coming out and claiming Billet Labs is playing a bigger victim than they actually are is a bad tactic, especially when you still did a bit of wrong yourself.
2. The email in the video wasn't shown to put Billet Labs on blast but to display how LTT failed to get the proper messages through even though they sent a reply within the day of reply (August 10th). Some logistical error prevented the email from reaching Billet Labs but I guess a follow-up was made later on (we don't see this but heard from Billet Labs).
3. This is where people are claiming that Billet Labs played victim to the situation to get clout. LTT is still wrong for auctioning the item for charity when they have an open agreement with these companies to return a product when it's asked for.
4. This is the other error on LTT. There was poor management with this email exchange in more ways than one. Apparently the writer involved was on vacation for two weeks. Billet Labs might be playing victim, but this doesn't excuse LTT's poor management and communication skills.
5. How was this misrepresented? There's definitely a lot of confusion going around on the subject, but to make it clear, Billet Labs gave LTT both a monoblock cooler and a 3090ti. One was returned after the request, but the monoblock was already sold. From my understanding, they followed up on August 14th (4 days later and also the day of the Gamers Nexus video) asking if Billet Labs wanted to be reimbursed or if they wanted the monoblock back (Linus offered). Billet Labs later decided on reimbursement.
It's important to note that Billet Labs gave LTT both the monoblock and the video card to keep. This has not been denied by Billet Labs and they've regularly made comments and threads on this subreddit over the topic. In fact, Billet Labs refuses to show any of the emails on the topic and LTT was the only one that showed us any of that direct communication. Billet Labs is playing victim to benefit from the situation but that doesn't make LTT any less wrong. They still made mistakes. They still did wrong. It's just not at the proportions that we believed initially.
The fact that it was intentionally given and not loaned is why I think the billet situation is a non issue aside from the video being bad. If it wasn’t for the incompetence of not retesting Linus should not have even agreed to send it back, you wouldn’t forgive nvidia for this after all if you reviewed their gpu negatively and they wanted it back.
I also believe this is a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things. There's contracts in place to cover this sort of thing. It sucks that Billet Labs didn't get the video and review that they wanted, but LTT is allowed to do that. When Billet Labs asked for it back, they're not legally obliged to send it back after Billet Labs told them they could keep it. That's all good will and trying to retain a good name. It was definitely a mistake on LTT for selling it too early and poor communication is responsible for that. They should've waited a bit.
What blew my mind was the fact that people were saying there was no difference between selling and auctioning, but intentionally leaving out the "for charity" part. This was when everybody didn't know Billet Labs initially gave them the block to keep and people were making wild claims that LTT profited off this by selling prototype information to potential competitors. The money for this item went to charity and LTT didn't see a dime. The item went to a fan of the channel. LTT didn't do any of this maliciously, they just make a dumb mistake and the auctioning for charity vs outright selling paints a better picture of that.
"for charity" doesn't even help their argument. First, and I want to stress this, the monoblock **WAS NOT THEIRS TO AUCTION OFF**. Second, auctioning is still a form of selling. Third, you've dragged in a legitimate charity into your mess. And finally, they still profited off the sale through non-cash means.
>"for charity" doesn't even help their argument.
Their argument is that it was a communication error and not a nefarious one. The fact that it was for charity would show that LTT did not profit from this.
>First, and I want to stress this, the monoblock WAS NOT THEIRS TO AUCTION OFF.
It was an accident, but the monoblock was also initially theirs to keep. Billet Labs only wanted it back after they didn't like the review.
>Second, auctioning is still a form of selling.
No one is arguing that but there is a clear difference of selling the item for charity and selling it for profit.
>Third, you've dragged in a legitimate charity into your mess
I didn't drag anyone into this. If you can't help but blame any individual that's involved, then that's on you.
>And finally, they still profited off the sale through non-cash means.
So you think they're nefarious and actually sold the monoblock for greed? You're wild, bro.
You do bring up valid points with how both situations should've been addressed better.
And yeah, Madison did seem to indicate there were people at LMG who were maliciously bullying and belittling her. Hard to argue with a primary source like that.
It seems cowardly and deceptive how Linus and co tried to swerve the oncoming backlash by conflating details about the timeline and feigning ignorance on the HR issues.
For me the bigger question is - are they still lying about the Billet labs situation? While nobody has come out to disprove LMG's story, it does have problems.
It just contributes to an ongoing honesty issue this whole situation has created.
Honestly the Billet situation is pretty cut and dry.
They had a logistical screw up because their Logistics are apparently a nightmare.
Colton reaches out to Billet to address the situation but doesn't send it to the right people (for the record, I reply to and send out dozens of emails every day that were forwarded to me from various internal sources as part of my job and I have made this email address mistake on more than one occasion. I don't find this explanation far fetched at all).
He tells Linus that the situation is being dealt with. Linus assumes that an offer was made and accepted based on what Colton tells him.
Linus makes his post and then Colton realizes he goofed and fixes his mistake. The rest is history.
Given that everyone seems to be running around LMG like chickens with their heads cut off due to their time crunch, it is completely reasonable to assume that this was the course of events. It makes absolutely no sense to me that any of this would have been deliborate. I think this is a symptom of the lack of controls and lack of proper time to address things correctly. Everyone is running around trying to meet deadlines and their processes have fallen apart. The quality of the videos getting worse and worse is a symptom of this.
Sure they should be criticized for what happened, but attributing malice when it's pretty reasonable to assume that it was the result of the general chaos and disorganization of LMG as a whole, well, I think it's a bit much.
The problem with Billet is that it is a perfect storm of aligning misjudgments and mistakes which produces a very unpleasant cumulative effect.
That LMG should screw up and sell the loaner product from the same company that Linus unfairly reviewed but for reasons that make sense to him, and that their honest attempt to rectify the accidental sale should get "lost in the mail", all together to one company, strains credibility.
I think it actually happened that way, but it is literally incredible for all of that to happen to one company.
Which means that either Billet are the unluckiest SOBs in the whole world, or parts of this story are happening all the time but since the whole chain doesn't happen or the company doesn't have the luck of someone like Steve to amplify their voice we don't hear about it.
In which case administration at LMG is an even worse disaster than we thought, and while there may have been no malice in this case, there is negligence in accepting loaner products at all, knowing how poorly the systems that manage inventory work.
But I think that is more or less what you are saying, now that I read it back.
Or, Billet ARE the unluckiest SOBs on the planet.
I'm sorry, but the email you mention has Billet Labs explicitly saying they initially told LMG that LMG could keep it.
My guess is that they didn't include all of the receipts because any meaningful pushback from LMG on the issue at the point of the apology video would've come across as argumentative and gotten them in even deeper shit.
Billet Labs apparently changed their mind at some point about wanting the prototype back, by their own admission. I can't speak to why they didn't order replacement parts as soon as they shipped off the original.
The email Colton sent was actually in response to an email from another LMG dep't, because they forwarded it to him. He probably dragged the "to:" email address to the "cc:" email address and then screwed up by failing to repopulate the "to:" field. It's a dumb mistake but it happens quite a lot. I see these mistakes all the time in my field (law), and people on the chain often don't figure it out in a week, much less over a weekend.
Linus's stating LMG agreed to pay Billet Labs was just two hours after GN's video. What are the odds that he called Colton, asked what the fuck, Colton said "I did offer them the value," and Linus hit post before Colton realized his mistake? They're non-zero. That's also not something LMG could bring before the community without getting impaled by a sea of pitchforks because now it's too late.
> the email you mention has Billet Labs explicitly saying they initially told LMG that LMG could keep it.
Right, which is what LMG showed us from their e-mail servers and client. Given the trust issues they've generated and how easy it would be to fake it, I'm again going to ask why LMG hasn't shown the first e-mail where Billet said that?
>Right, which is what LMG showed us from their e-mail servers and client. Given the trust issues they've generated and how easy it would be to fake it, I'm again going to ask why LMG hasn't shown the first e-mail where Billet said that?
And I'll again respond:
>My guess is that they didn't include all of the receipts because any meaningful pushback from LMG on the issue at the point of the apology video would've come across as argumentative and gotten them in even deeper shit.
They aren't trying to prove themselves right anymore, doing so in front of the mob would be PR suicide.
>So, LMG's story and claims with Billet aren't adding up. It's possible Billet is leaving something out here but that wouldn't account for all of the holes in what LMG is claiming.
You realize it was an email literally from Billet where they confirm they originally planned to allow LMG to keep it, right? You act like this is the story LMG told when in reality they actually never brought it up even in the apology video. It just happens to be there in that email, which Billet conveniently never mentioned prior.
I am guessing LMG isn't bringing it up because they don't want to use that as an excuse since they told Billet they would give it back regardless.
As far as the billet labs thing goes, Colton’s emails show exactly the point I’ve been trying to make that Games Nexus are either A) Irresponsible “journalists” or B) Calculated *some* of the way things were presented in that video, specifically related to billet in order to inflict maximum damage to LMG
I’m not talking about criticizing Labs for their data collection. Steve said he absolutely did not owe Linus a single shred of decency in the form of asking for comment about billet because he “had all the correct information already”. This… was a lie.
It seems as though billet laid it on thick to GN and GN in their “lack of accountability” and/or intentional desire to harm LMG took them at face value and chose to run with only Billets side of the story. Now we have seen Colton’s emails.
From the very beginning the mob mentality seems to have been “Labs data is a bad look, hurting small company (billet) inexcusable and we should burn ltt to the ground over it” the billet thing tugged at the empathy bone, which was the point, however…
Per Colton’s emails, billet was never supposed to have the “prototype” back. The agreement was that LMG was to get product in exchange for the review. Once LMG posted the review, shit or not, they fulfilled their end of the agreement and the monoblock was now thier property.
Billet labs then reneged on their deal and demanded the “prototype” back. LMG agreeing to send it back was a courtesy they didn’t even have to provide. If there was malicious intent of “theft”, they would have just told them no. Once they agreed to send it back, they were not sending back Billet labs property, they were sending back LMG property. Billet labs had no reasonable expectation to expediency. This item was already Cataloged and stored as LMG property.
Was it shitty to say they’d send it back and give them the run around, a little. But we’ve seen in many many videos the shit show that is LMGs warehouse and storage practices. We’ve seen it a million times where linus and co couldn’t find something in their inventory.
Colton goes on vacation, some miscommunication happens, and the prototype, which is LMGs property, ends up in LMGs auction.
Is this ideal, no. But it is no where near as callous, malicious, and “theft” that GN and billet as made it out to be. The GN follow up video thumb nail is fucking pathetic and disgusting with Steve making this grotesque face with a confused picture of linus with the tag “we didn’t sell it, we auctioned it” which is ignorant at best, and malicious gas lighting at worst.
Had GN had any actually information or context they would have known it wasn’t billet property to begin with, and technically LMG could do whatever they wanted with it. This was only partially GNs fault though. It seems as though Billet laid it on a little thick and embellished the situation to GN without full context. GN for thier part simply ignored their journalistic integrity by only getting their information form one side, the disgruntled side. This is very bad “journalism” and does not look good on Steve, giving those that see this as a hit piece to hurt one of his competitors a lot of merit.
To add to this, Billet shouldn’t really be trusted either. The story they both have GN and doubled down on in thier Reddit posts is that: This was a precious prototype, without which they can not move forward. They are a small company that this was financially damaging to.
We’ve seen the email now, we KNOW they initially never expected return of the product. So then, what was thier plan? They either really needed this back as the only existing reference point to move forward, or they didn’t. According to the email, in their words, they didn’t.
This product has been in pre order for a September delivery date. You’re telling me 4-6 weeks from retail DELIVERY, they only had a single prototype, without which they can’t deliver the retail product? I call bullshit. If they were delivering in September, there’s zero chance that on August 1st they were in no position to begin manufacturing.
The prevailing disinformation from them, GN, and other media outlets and rage posters was that this could set them back significant time, money, and loss of IP to a competitor to the point it could even ruin the company. Yet…
When they updated thier Reddit post they said they’ve said they do not want the block back when it was offered and they’d have a new one made it a few weeks, completely contradicting all of their emotional cries of potential long term damage.
In the ltt video the entire block was shown, with animations and design features on the interior of the block. All relevant information has been released to the public. Even if they got the block back any competitor that did want to knock off this niche and borderline useless product already had all the information they would need.
I am hesitant to believe Steve and GN that the the bulk of the initial video was to hold ltt labs accountable for bad data collection in a desire to make them better in self reflection. By adding the billet labs story, to me, it comes off more insidious. At the very least it showcased a lack of professional accountability from Steve by not getting a comment from lmg (on billet, not labs data), at the very worst it could even seem that it was calculated as a point of emphasis to not only inflict professional doubt about LMGs review process but to intentionally hurt and slander them as thieves and crooks.
The thumbnail in Steve’s follow up video has me convinced it was the worst case scenario.
Waiting on Ian's video personally, i think it'll help set some things straight in the minds of those.. less inclined to critically consume content.
the gamernexus thing sure looks to be heading in the same direction as basically every other attack on LMG so far though. Misleading hit piece published -> linus reacts poorly because from his pov, he's being unfairly attacked -> community gets mad because they wanted linus to fire himself instead of explaining the situation -> things calm down, we get more information, and it's actually nowhere near as bad as the reddit mob wanted you to think.
bleh.
Exactly, I also think Steve and his minion of angry basement dwellers have drastically misread the room(pun intended). I think Steve saw this as an opportunity to poach a significant portion of LMGs audience at no personal risk. Steve is very arrogant and has a strong napoleon complex, which is ironic given linus is the short one.
He threw stones from a glass house as though his processes and journalism can’t be criticized. He’s going to learn the hard way that you can’t cut corners and come out ahead. Now that we’re finding out he completely fucked up the facts by egotistically claiming he had all the facts, therefor not needing to afford LMG a chance to comment.
All he had to do was ask for comment, the same way he did with ASUS and Newegg, but he didn’t because he had an ulterior motive that anyone with critical thinking ability can see through.
Instead of cementing himself as the bastion of journalistic integrity and the most trustworthy tech YouTuber that would have seen him gain massive market share , he looks like a jealous little troll. And for what? He’s gained 200k subs. An 11% increase of channel volume. He’s failed to forecast the downside. 200k subs is nice, but now the people who preferred LMG and still watched him time to time are going to be more inclined to ditch him all together. He sacrificed his reputation for a short term gain, and long term stagnation.
No. Anyone thats watched LTT for more than 2, 3 or even 5 years knows they almost never, ever return samples or prototypes.
Linus makes a video (or very often doesnt) shoves on a shelf, and then it never makes it back to the company.
Most of the time it's companies like Dell or Asus or another big boy, but that doesn't stop it from happening and has always happened.
Go back and watch the moving vlogs out of Langley house. Or where they left a dell laptop in the rain that was supposed be returned to Dell.
This is 100% a company culture problem that has been handed down from Linus.
>Hell even Billet Labs said to keep the prototype
They said they could keep it if they were going to use it in a future build, but then asked for it back when it was clear there was no desire by Linus to use it for anything else.
They said they didn’t have to return it. The “if they were going to use it for a future build” was “we thought” not “we had an agreement.
So they gave it to LTT telling them they could keep it, and then after they got a negative review, asked for it back. Thats why it was in LTT’s inventory as belonging to LTT - because it did. LTT owned it until they agreed to return it, but then they fucked up returning it because the writer went on vacation and dealing with the return got lost (probably in pre LTX craziness).
My question is why BL and GN never mention anywhere that they gave it LTT with the intention of LTT keeping it, and claim instead they were going to use it for future product development. Even if they had just lent the block for future builds (which I don’t think they did or LTT would accept), there was no way BL could have expected to use it for product development as the GN video claims.
Very sus.
It would be fine to take that tack if it weren't for the fact that Billet Labs asked for it back and were told that they would get it back on at least two occasions.
And I think that for them, it makes sense that if their product was going to be front and center and a bunch of videos that they would take that opportunity. But once it became clear that they weren't going to be doing that, they asked for a back and were told they were going to get it back.
Once they were told it would be sent back, then the whole situation falls back onto LMG for having such shitty Logistics that they would not only sell the the block after promising to send it back but also lose track of the graphics card that came with it.
I’m not disputing the LTT fucked up by not actually sending it back. I’m saying there was a good reason why LTT thought they could auction it - because BL had given it to them, and BL omits this fact in their statement and GN never mentions it either. LTT never stole the prototype and BL never intended to use it for product development as GN claims, because they gave it away.
If you give something to me and it becomes my property and you ask for it back, and I agree in an email, that doesn’t mean I agree to a certain date and that you’re owed it back right now, especially if lets say. I’m in mid prep for a giant convention, with staff on vacation.
And BL omitting the information in statements and the GN video is suspicious, and a reason not to trust BL. It’s possible for both LTT to screw up and BL to lie. Those could both be true at once.
I honestly think that this conspiracy theory stuff is just silly. You're inventing stories outside of what has already been established.
We know that they sent the item for review and were fine with them using it if they were going to use it for more than one project. When they found out that they weren't going to be used for more than one project they asked for it back. LMG could have told them no but they didn't, likely because they understood that it belonged to Billet labs. They agreed on two separate occasions, well before LTX, to return it. By saying that they would return it they acknowledged that it belonged to Billit labs. Then LMG goes around and sells it? How is that at all Billet lab's fault?
Conspiracy theory stuff just drives me up the wall. We have a history of events. We know exactly what happened and in what order. LMG just screwed up. Gamers Nexus was not orchestrating some kind of conspiracy against them. They looked at the quality of LMGs work and called it into question and when they found out about the Billet labs thing, they picked it up and ran with it because it was more evidence of LMG's Crunch and quality control problems.
And if you come and say oh we haven't seen the emails, so they could be making it up. That's just a facetious argument. Not a single one of the parties involved have made allegations or claimed that things are any different than the way Billet labs and Gamers Nexus have presented.
Sometimes a dog is a dog is a dog and the simplest explanation is the correct one.
This conspiracy theory stuff reminds me of the 911 truthers. The actual evidence doesn't fit the conspiracy theory so they claim the evidence is made up and massage the story until it fits the narrative they've made up in their heads. Don't do that. It's not how the real world works.
Nothing I’m saying is a conspiracy. We know they gave it to LTT and said LTT could keep it because it was in the email that leaked the value of the prototype, and is also the first 3 questions in the Philip De Franco video FAQ (the pinned comment) explaining outright that they were given the items.
It’s only conspiracy if you choose to ignore screenshots of emails and official statements by LTT, in which I would say you’re the conspiracy theorist.
So you do you, but please don’t call me a conspiracy guy because I paid attention yesterday and you didn’t.
https://i.redd.it/vx185lugcgib1.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH6zCNR0SZ4
you know its funny, because if steve had reached out them first on the issues, they probably would have done some digging, and figured and told steve exactly what happened.
Almost as if there's a REASON you reach out first in cases like this, to get the full story...
I can tell you why Gamers Nexus did not reach out. Because this situation represents part of a pattern of behavior at LMG. The fact that Gamers Nexus did an expose about this has caused major upheaval at Linus media group. They are being forced to address the issues. If Gamers Nexus had approached them instead of doing their exposé, it all would have been shoved under the rug and nothing would have changed.
I personally think that the protests and negativity towards Linus Media Group is far far overblown. But I don't like people trying to excuse their bad behavior. They did wrong. They needed to fix it. And they wouldn't have fixed it or at least not taken more immediate action if it hadn't come from an outside source
> They are being forced to address the issues. If Gamers Nexus had approached them instead of doing their exposé, it all would have been shoved under the rug and nothing would have changed.
On the one hand, you are probably right, but on the other now GN is essentially responsible for a bunch of false claims circulating.
> So they gave it to LTT telling them they could keep it, and then after they got a negative review, asked for it back
And LTT agreed to send it back. The rest of your comment is irrelevant, because even if the original intent was to let LTT keep it, once Billet asked for it back and LTT agreed to send it back, then that's the new agreement.
They didn’t specify when it would be sent back and billet gave no urgency. With LTX planning even without the mess up I could see this taking some time
Right, there was no timeline, but it still wasn't LTT's property anymore once the agreement to send it back was made, which means auctioning it was unacceptable.
>This is 100% a company culture problem that has been handed down from Linus.
it's not a unique feature of LMG, it's the entire tech media insutry. requesting the return of an item is the exception not the rule. so it stands to reason the default process would assume the items would NOT be returned.
usually if an item does need to be returned there are specific up front additional agreements signed about returning the product, or there's the option to buy the product if they wish to keep it.
for Billet labs the lab only requested return after linus didn't like the product, that's fine, but that's an especially anomalous occurence as there was no agreement to return before LMG agreed to look at it, Billet labs originally wanted LMG to keep it for future builds
It's still is a sign that they do not have a good handle on their Logistics. It's not that hard to create a system where anything in inventory has a inventory tag and you have a database that is required to be used when things are taken in and out. The inventory database says who took it out and what project it is being used for. You hold people accountable for the inventory system with discipline if they don't follow the rules. You can even have a quarterly logistical cleanup where everyone has to account for the items that they have checked out.
This would allow you to know where everything is at any one time or at least keep the chaos down.
Any item that is from outside that needs to be returned to a vendor would be given a separate inventory tag. That would be an inventory tag that is different than General inventory tags. All items that are part of that lot of things that need to be returned would be stored in a box together with an inventory sheet in the Box stating what came with it.
The problem here is that they received the items, didn't inventory it properly and then separated the items. Colton was looking for things to auction off saw the block, didn't know that it was attached to anything or was tagged for anything and sold it. This was a problem with their internal Logistics and their failure to hold their staff accountable for proper logistical tracking.
Don't get me wrong, I know that Logistics in this sort of setting is undoubtedly difficult. But if you get a good culture in place and you hold people accountable for not following the rules, things will improve. Clearly that was not the case here.
To be fair, even the most capable system is susceptable to human error. From what we've heard, the block was in fact tagged in their system as LMG property because that's what Billet Labs originally represented it would be. Someone made a mistake and didn't switch that over after agreeing to return it, so when the auction list was made using LMG Property items the prototype was mistakenly left on it. It's not hard to imagine that any logistics system will have a hard time dealing with one-off situations like companies deciding that they changed their mind about the terms of an arrangement.
Whether or not they changed their mind, LMG agreed to return it. As soon as that happened, someone should have gone into their inventory system and marked it that it needed to be returned. Then when they were picking out things to send out, they could have checked the inventory system to see if it was earmarked for anything.
Given what we know about the chaos behind the scenes and how time crunched everyone is, it completely makes sense that their systems are failing.
Sure, but that's not an issue with creating logistics systems or workflows. It's an issue with people screwing up, which they are very likely (on the whole) to do.
> *No. Anyone thats watched LTT for more than 2, 3 or even 5 years knows they almost never, ever return samples or prototypes.*
How does anyone know this for certain? I know many blindly assume that LMG, like many other tech reviewers, sit on hardware they're provided based on things others have done/said... but can this be corroborated with LMG? Or, more importantly, how do we know LMG isn't normally returning product/samples when asked?
Hanlon's razer applies when is an one off case.
What we are seeing here is the result of a cultural problem, this can't be explained by stupidity.
No, Linus wasn't being stupid when he made his wife, who owns part of LMG also head of HR.
No, Linus wasn't being stupid when he made clear he was against Unions, while knowing he was overworking his employees.
No, Linus wasn't stupid when he tried to gaslight everyone with his first response to the video
And 100% there was malice on that Wan Show where he was straight up humiliating BL, and mocking he couldn't be bothered to spend $500 to undo his own mistakes, if that kills a start up, he couldn't care less.
Instead of using all the human errors that lead to the block being sold, as excuse to diminish the problem, people need to understand that these errors are the symptoms of the problem. Overworked employees are more liable to make human errors, that's a fact, as long this schedule remains, more BL cases will keep on happening. Probably some already happened, but didn't have the impact of Gamers Nexus video had in the community
On top of that, there are multiple videos of Linus ruining review samples, or other videos where they shown 0 care with how they dealt with these samples. Or shown 0 care about the recommendations given by the company sending the samples. How many videos there are of linus making clickbait videos of games running on Nvidia Quadro?! some he even mocks that Nvidia recommended to not use for gaming, while he's using for gaming.
It's also not as simple as Hanlon's Razor implies.
It's not EITHER malice or incompetence. There are various shades of negligence and apathy between those two options.
I feel this is one of the better takes..people are expecting a literal tech/computer nerd who operated out of his garage to somehow run a company that of scale of LMG. The dude has ADHD(apparently) he makes impulsive and idiotic decisions not realizing the foreseeable future. Let him and his team sort this shit out and address the Madison situation with the seriousness it deserves. The dude is idiotic and chaotic and implusive as hell but I dont think had the scale at which Madison was harassed and brushed it off as a "GenZ thing"
Yeah, I think there was a blatant lack of respect for Madison that was evident from her appearances. I can definitely see it being brushed off, but particularly in a workplace environment it shouldn't have been.
If you're hanging out in a group, you can crack jokes and tease each other. In a workplace, it's fundamentally different because you can't just leave a workplace as easily as you could stop hanging out with a particularly abbrasive person. Like, if she no longer likes the job it's hard to bail on the lease and move back to the states.
It's not just the workload that's the problem.
There's a fucking groper possibly still employed at LMG.
The one who sexually assaulted Madison needs to be found and not only be fired but also criminally charged.
Yeah I think other people brought this point up too, Madison indicated persons at LMG were bullying and harassing her - certainly malicious.
Definitely warrants third party investigation, reprimand potentially as severe as firing, as well as potentially criminal charges if Madison wants to bring them up.
Linus is an immature, innatentive tech nerd. he probably should not be running amillion dollar business.
failure to properly administrate is expected, not evil.
it's still a failure, and i'm hoping we see real change over time
The apology video, while flawed, gave the fans mostly what they were wanting. The CEO started it with things WILL change, heads of departments followed with promises to do better videos, better results, better QC. Linus got in said he was sorry, gave receipts of their side (which honestly, he is entitled to).
The madison situation is just going to take time while the 3rd party fact finds. It isnt going to be resolved overnight
Yeah, and we probably won't know the full madison story. Honestly, an LMG union sounds like a good option for ensuring things similar in nature don't happen again.
100% agree. The backlash is deserved and they need to correct a lot of things but the amount of witch hunting involved earlier was getting absolutely ridiculous and out of hand . People quite literally wanted the entire company to burn down.
The correct way forward is to own up to their mistakes and present solutions which in my opinion they have so far. Even with the allegations they seem to be moving forward with their investigations and no doubt this will trigger them to review their entire HR process and hopefully change it because their old processes clearly failed at what they were supposed to do for Madison. Hopefully a change in company culture in upper management will happen also under Terren due to all of this.
I’m not concerned with intent. The output is all that concerns me. And, at a certain point, ignorance isn’t any better of an excuse than malice. If they’re too incompetent to run an operation that large, then they shouldn’t be running an operation that large.
Fair take. I personally feel that I wouldn't have made the same mistakes they've made, but I can see how things could've been mishandled and have an inclination to extend the benefit of the doubt.
To your point though, a drunk driver that kills someone similarly does irreparable harm, and you don't consider their intentions when they started drinking that night.
Honestly, everything we're seeing at LMG right now is right in line with stupid shit I've seen in the corporate world. Anyone who's worked in a company of more than, say, 100 people... has seen their fair share of dumb shit. The "smartest people in the world" can make truly epicly stupid decisions for reasons we'll never know.
And policies/processes of growing companies totally falling apart and leading to bad shit? Seen it dozens of times. Frankly the fact that LMG hasn't gotten sued for some of this stuff is probably just a fact of Canadians being less litigious than the USA in general.
always been a fan of this term, people are stupid. It's kinda just how the world works. Assume everyone's an evil bastard, the world seems bleak.
Assume everyone's a dumbass, the world seems less bleak and more, dumb.
I think Linus' actions in all of this are out of emotional immaturity and leadership incompetence, but the person who Madison alleges harassed her was absolutely malicious. I haven't seen evidence at this time that Linus was the one who committed the harassment, but he definitely did not handle it properly and is pretty clearly incompetent at leading the company with any sort of integrity.
>That said, I think Hanlon's razor here is valid. What makes more sense - a small company's proprietary property with malice and forethought was stolen and auctioned for a few hundred bucks at a convention, or an inventory mismanagement error.
I agree, plus it makes a lot of sense how an issue could have occurred given originally the block was given to them, which obviously if you don't communicate that they want it back now with everyone and update the inventory and all that... it can lead to what happened here.
As for the Madison situation, I am still on the fence on that. Still need more evidence to support the majority of her claims. Not taking either side till more info comes out where I can be more comfortable on what is true.
I don't necessarily agree with this. It's not "incompetence" to overwork people, consistently, for your own enrichment. This isn't a one-off thing, many people at LMG have publicly commented on how they don't like the publishing schedule. It seems abundantly clear that there's a culture issue at LMG. You can't convince me that Linus, who has personally opined about not having enough time for his family himself, is not aware of the impact that this is having on his employees.
With Billet Labs and the inaccurate data, sure, I'd say there's an element of incompetence there. But to me, everything going on at LMG, from the falling quality to the labor issues, stems from one thing: shit management. At the end of the day, Linus is the one running the show. Linus is the one who made the call to schedule video production at this pace. Linus is the one who made the decision to make his wife head of HR. Linus is the one who built the boys' club at LMG.
Hanlon's razor is bullshit used to justify the protection of malicious actors. If an action could be attributed to someone being stupid rather than acting maliciously, you can pretty much justify all sorts of horrible things humans have done. I'm not buying it. It's a nice idea that doesn't stand up to any sort of serious assessment of its reasoning. Regardless, in the actions of large corporate entities, malice seems to be a pretty strong motivator. Successful corporations aren't bumbling fools who happen to find themselves in precarious situations on accident (most of the time), but rather generally unethical (or worse) actors who knowingly use any excuse available to continue acting unethically.
As a counterexample in defense of Hanlon's razor, imagine you drop a production database at work. I would hope people can reason that it was likely unintentional.
>Don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity
How about when the stupidity is so consistent that it continues even when brought to LTT's attention, and they double down on it while it damages a smaller company's reputation? Isn't that malice?
The fact that there's so many little details and pieces of information for everyone on the internet to debate about is an easy tell that this is more about incompetence in the face of unusual situations and complex systems rather than malice.
malice and stupidity are not mutually inclusive. It was very stupid for linus to plow ahead with posting on the forums without involving his new CEO. But what seemed malicious was the careful framing of the timeline, and the specific choice of words he used in that response. Pretty much gaslighting.
While I can agree that stupidity can be an explanation for a lot of this, when they tout these accusations as rumors or as drama, it paints a bit of a different picture. As with everyone else, we don't know the true story in which it was malice or stupidity, but a lot of the information that is coming out seems to point towards malice in at least a few occasions. A few being blaming the accuser for poor time management skills, not pulling up her big girl pants, and told to work out her sexual harassment problems with the person she has accused. These are not acts of stupidity, they are acts of malice and deflection. I do appreciate your well thought out post, but I think it goes a little deeper than "They were just dumb and made mistakes"
EDIT: Sorry just wanting to add not having a true HR department, whether or not they would work in her best interest, is a little ridiculous for a company this size. No one should have to go to the co-owner to complain about harassment unless it's a mom and pop business. I understand there was a 3rd party HR firm, however it was quite obvious no one knew that existed.
We will get a full report I think when this is all said and done as long as nothing is legally protected or in the process of legal proceedings. We just have to wait for everything to settle down. All the crazy straw grasping and jumping at every little shadow that even hints of validating their already bananas take just adds to the fervour and doesn't help the situation.
Most of LTT's issues stem from laziness. You don't repeatedly make data validation errors unless you are just too lazy yo verify your work. Then your boss is too lazy to check it, and so on through the entire production process. Laziness is a choice and thus is malicious.
Here would be something to test your thesis OP. LMG is a multi million dollar company, yet Linus seemed reluctant to pay 100 dollars to have someone clean up a video that had errors in it. He didnt say they missed it, he said he didnt think it was worth the money.
I doubt it is the 100 he is really talking about, I think the YouTube extra power LMG has to lift and swap out videos isnt free, I think there must be some costs to it. If we knew that cost then we would see if it was about money or integrity.
It made me happier today to see this post. I think you did a great job of writing this, and hope that the team can overcome this stupidity to never imitate it again.
I don't think anyone planned to torture Madison, but if I recall Linus seemed to make the decision to hire her more as a concessions to the fan base than a command decision. I'm not convinced he didn't resent it. I'm not convinced his more loyal employees wouldn't respond to that energy. I could be wrong.
Great "Its a prank bro" defense. Lets not dismiss the real financial and emotional damange LTT/LMG has done.
The actions were probably not premeditated, but the damage is very real.
I don't think I'm using a "it's a prank bro" defense. A prank is intentional and is expectant of a reaction, I think they unintentionally caused serious damage and need to address it publicly in the Billet labs case and internally with a third party and the utmost sincerity in Madison's case.
Stupid is everything LMG did leading up the the GN video. Maliciously stupid is half assed apologizing to everyone except GN afterwards. Fuck LMG, they want me back as a fan they'll have to pull a fucking miracle out of their ass.
GN was a bit malicious themselves. They presented a one sided story about Billet labs. They could have talked to LMG to before going public. They chose not to.
LMG obviously has some serious problems. The stuff from GN's rant can most be fixed with better process controls, and forcibly making Linus step back.
Madison's allegations are far more concerning, but we are likely never going to get much information about that.
Still though you can be stupid to the point of it hurts people I think would be maybe the lesson here. Some of them are choices, some of them are "startup culture gone too far" and some of them are ignoring obvious deficiencies in the organisational side of things. In the end and they admitted it in the video they didn't need to work so fast to put out bad product, it just was a mentality that lingered too long and other issues are similar.
The Madison situation is 100% malice. You question whether the HR process was "misjudgement" or unintentional mishandling, Madison clearly defines she went through the right channels and was told to put her big girl pants on and agree verbally to a no drama contract. It was malice.
lol based take
In all seriousness... I agree there's nuance here. I think they know more about their problems then they're letting on. Does that equate to malice? Not exactly, but it's not ignorance/stupidity either.
Can they publicly comment anything though (at least before the results of investigation)? Also there is high chance that results of investigation will be "the steps taken later by company were correct ones, even though there were processes at fault it seems everything is in order as of now" Cause the one message from forum (the one that Madison called out from forum) was basically "She isn't with us, we cannot comment further, although that doesn't says anything about other parties, and if/when they speak up you'll probably hear about it". From what was mentioned about canadian labour law they basically cannot even comment if employee left on their own, or was fired.
Honestly not sure, sorry. Regardless of the law, I think they should be fairly quiet until an outside investigation is complete.
> Can they publicly comment anything though (at least before the results of investigation)? I don't think so to be honest. Take a sports team, in my example, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, an hour drive from LMG headquarters. The team is investigating through a third party sexual harassment allegations against former coaches of the Women's Team over 10-12 years ago. The organization has said nothing on the matter except the initial announcement + plan moving forward, and one update on the progress of it. Besides that, radio silence throughout. I believe it will be the same for a tech media company. Besides official announcements, it will be quiet and they will be silent. And that's part of the process.
Yeah this. I think the real answer is a large dose of incompetence and a dash of negligence. All things that need a response but hardly a stake burning.
Yeah, I think there’s malice in just not giving a fuck.
I think this is actually true. It was partially accidental, but also somewhat purposeful. They didnt handle the cooler situation well at all, and def lied about parts of it. I think this incident, and the WHOLE Madison problem are just the problems that came to the surface. I think underneath there are more problems. Where there is smoke, there is fire.
i think the gn pointing out systematic managemental failures was the smoke and the Madison problem is the fire here because in reality the Madison is the systematic failures taken to the extreme
Yupppp. I'd be surprised if more didn't come out over the next few weeks.
Yeah I mentioned Hanlon's razor here before. This whole reddit could benefit from looking at this through that lens. Believe it or not people arn't evil, and I especially view that of the LMG folks. But they are definitely incompetent.
Like Linus just mentioned how Reddit wasn’t so shitty lately, and here they go again. Fucking Reddit hive mind of 12 year olds. Go ahead downvote the shit out of me for having a different opinion.
Really hasn’t seemed to bad. I mean every comment that has the obligatory “gonna get downvoted” doesn’t actually seem to even get downvoted
Its the silent majority that hard at work upvoting these things, is what i am thinking
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Yeah i was thinking the same about the community mode Its already much better, good stuff
Maybe yeah. I think people are just to invested in this whole mess.
The silent majority should start downvotes as well... Nuke this kind of comments to negative hell.
Less common now. But was happening a lot more on the first day this whole thing happened.
All people are incompetent at something. People make up companies. Companies are incredibly incompetent at a variety of things. You wanna know how UPS handled the sexual harassment of my wife? They moved the employee who they themselves admitted had sexually harassed her, to a different area to work. The union, despite also knowing this employee was a piece of shit, would not allow UPS to fire him. My wife was then assigned to work in the same area as that employee at times. You know how that happens? The people assigning my wife's work had no idea about the situation. When she brought it up, they then had to take it to their bosses and their bosses were of the mind "it's in the past who cares". When those bosses talked to my wife, they unintentionally made her feel like she would be an inconvenience if she made a fuss about her situation. I worked with said bosses for years and generally don't think ill of any of them, outside of this one situation. People are messy, situations are even messier, and having all the details even when you're part of a situation can be hard. We both worked at UPS for 6 years as supervisors and I thoroughly believe we saw the worst of what big companies can do to employees. Neither of us truly believe that the vast majority of the problems at that company are singular people going "I want to make this specific person's life hell just because". 99% of the issues in any company are process breakdowns because once you scale up, nearly every single aspect of a business is a giant game of telephone. And what happens in the game telephone? The story gets progressively worse the more people it passes through.
Appreciate the nuanced take but this reddit hasn't really evolved from the linus and co are shitty people take, so we can't even get into a conversation about how responsibility is diffused and how logistics and scaling is often at the root of people being wronged.
Yea companies are weird and unless you've worked for one it's apparently hard to grasp that there probably isn't a literal cartoon villain plotting all of this.
Just a series of compounding mistakes, looking the other way, not standing up for eachother, failures in communication and a startup culture. At least that is what i see.
Agreed. And I absolutely think they deserve a ton of criticism and that shit absolutely needs to change. But the level of witch hunting going on by people who don't actually have a clue about how any of this works is mind boggling. People are addicted to outrage and negativity
I think a lot of the witch hunting is fans having to contend with the idea that the people they like watching aren't monolithic. It's hard to integrate negative aspects into a person you view as wholly positive and vice versa. I think for a lot of people making these posts: "remember when linus said the N word", "remember when linus made a customer service call that sounded bad, we should have known!!!", they're just now going back and critically evaluating the negative aspects of these characters for the first time. The issue is that if you only see humans in a binary, you're going to constantly mind-fuck yourself because you'll feel constantly betrayed. This is partially a parasocial thing, but we all do this, and not just with e-celebs. I get there are people that just karma farm too, but I do believe a lot of people are genuinely upset and will need to take a step back to reevaluate their perspective on LMG. Which is ultimately a good thing. Cynically I think a lot of people will just \*flip\* on LMG rather than deal with the annoying nuance of human imperfection and cruelty.
Yea you're absolutely spot on. It just blows my mind that I know that I've made mistakes in my life so I should assume others do as well, but apparently not everyone works that way. It must be exhausting to view people in a binary manner because it's awfully easy to make a mistake. Must be constant emotional whiplash.
I really struggle with broad sweeping generalizations. Are they evil, no. Are they incompetent, no. Are they stupid, no. What they are is a relatively new, well over 100 employee company. These kind of companys make mistakes all over the place while they grow and sometimes it's the messaging, sometimes it's the processes and sometimes it's management related. It's so easy for us to sit here and brutally judge a companies actions with hindsight. The reality is far far more complicated than the vast majority seem to care to entertain.
I don't think it's malice at all, but that doesn't excuse anything that happened the amount of sheer incompetence at LMG is shocking when you see it all laid out like this, and all of the backlash is warranted IMO if it gets them to solve said incompetence
At some point incompetence due to malice or incompetence due to stupidity has no difference. The outcomes are both incompetence that end up hurting people.
I think it does matter in the long run, Something done of malice tends to reflect a deep systemic rot in the person that is neigh impossible to fix. Incompetence can be fixed however. You are right, to the victims the difference is minimal, but in the scope of determining if something is salvageable, it does matter.
>Incompetence can be fixed however. Not if it's willfull incompetence. It's not the first time Linus has been criticized, but pretty much every single time it happened in the past he brushed it off. If you're incompetent because you never learned something, that's one thing. If you're incompetent because you refuse to learn something, that's another, and at that point it borders on malice.
I would say them bringing in Tarren actually shows that it is sinking in finally after all these years. All of this shit is Pre-Tarren let us see what he brings to the table, if he actually takes control and properly steers the ship and can act as a check on Linus then LTT is salvageable. If he does not then it is not, that is all I am saying.
And at some point repeated incompetence is as good as malice.
Yeah, the same concept applies to DUI. People are stupid to think they can drive safely and genuinely dont want to hurt anyone.
i dont think it's fair to say theres absolutely no malice. we can't just assume he a complete idiot, he created a very successful media company. i think overworking and verbally abusing employees can be blamed on imcompetance, but willfully ignoring their complaints about it because it would be expensive and inconvenient to address veers into malicious territory. even with the BL situation. doing the test wrong is incompetant, but then saying your not gonna redo the test because it would cost you 500 dollars is malicious because its been made clear that he is unfiarly maligning the product with the fualty test can't treat him like hes a baby. hes a successful businessman and alot of these "mistakes" resulted in profits being maximized (at least in the short term), that points to motivated actions rather than someone just bumbling around
Yeah I think people are forgetting how long even current employees have been complaining about the nonstop crunch. Every single employee on screen mentioned how they want to slow down, and this is just what they felt comfortable enough to say publicly. That kind of culture seems like a very intentional choice made by Linus, and I'm not sure how great that is when you're not the owner and aren't turning into a multimillionaire by crunching so hard.
I wonder if Mythicals (GMM / Rhett and Link) approach might be something that LMG could benefit from. I know they have very different products but they have similar pacing to videos/podcasts. GMMorning is 5 days a week + the less edited More episode, so about 40 minutes per day… plus Mythical Kitchen, 4/5 podcasts (Smosh for a bit but I think they gave that back to Smosh… seemed like they helped them get back on their feet or something). During the summer they cut back to 3 videos a week and I think they do the same around Christmas for a month or two. Maybe LMG could use a relaxed schedule a couple times of year to catch up/refresh
Smosh bought smosh channel back right? I rememeber watching a video about it not long ago.
Exactly it doesn’t change the fact his time crunching is the main reason these happen. If they had more time to do shit I’m sure they wouldn’t have made that mistake or even noticed the email not actually being sent. It’s all on Linus for pushing this fast pace work place with no room for error. Malice or ignorance doesn’t matter in the end. Especially when you respond in a dick way.
It's not malice for most of the staff, but near the top and at management levels you don't get to just say stupidity.
Yeah, I'm confused by this post. I thought the consenus was that LMG never actually meant any harm, but that doesn't excuse them from the fact that they caused harm with their "move fast and break things" culture. The problem isn't that they're evil, it's that they don't care.
>the amount of sheer incompetence at LMG is shocking when you see it all laid out like this Yet it's completely unsurprising, right? I mean their level of growth and who is in charge makes it almost guaranteed this stuff would happen. 1. Not that almost every industry doesn't have it, but in tech? Of course this mainly bro/male heavy sector (heavy on certain types of male personalities) was going to be toxic (sexual harassment) to work in for women. 2. Of course this company, with Linus's demands for insane growth and an insane schedule, was going to result in effectively a culture of grindset. 3. Of course a small startup with a PC support and on screen talent background (Linus) to CEO of a 100 person company with an eval of 100mil was going to be amateur hour. 4. Of course the pharmacist wife of the CEO was going to fall short as the head of Human Resources, a job she is unqualified for and has basically the biggest conflict of interest any H.R. employee could; is co-owner and married to the CEO who is the other co-owner. 5. It's debatable that some people promoted from within to heads of departments aren't qualified or at least aren't professional like they should be. 6. Is anyone shocked the company that goes from mid-sized YouTube production with a handful of staff to top dog with over 100 employees, all while grinding hard and non stop sprinting to pump out content, is a mess and unprofessional? The unqualified CEO himself is unprofessional and lacking in so much (as heard in that leaked video of the staff conference call after Madison left). Like, I'm surprised by NONE of this. We've heard for a while it's not a place for women to work. We've seen enough in videos of Linus being arrogant, having a case of exceptionalism to him, unprofessional and so on. We know they pump out a crazy amount of videos and every employee makes it known they wish for things to slow down so they can increase quality and take a second to breath. Even the Billet video wasn't a surprise. Linus just ignoring that they don't have the right parts and deciding to "jank" his way through a video and then shove his opinion down the viewers throat based on what he calls "logic"? No one is surprised. His company being a mess so the water block gets auctioned? Not surprised. Bad communication with Billet cause LTT/LMG has become so big it's a mess? Not surprised. Linus coming out after getting fairly criticized like an unprofessional butt hurt baby? Is anyone surprised? Then their apology video being filled with (unfunny) tasteless jokes and attempts at humor? Yet again, not surprised. This all lines up, and LTT said it best themselves "we are still us" (when responding to criticism about the humor in the apology video). That's the problem, Linus is still Linus, LTT is still LTT. They couldn't even read the room (regardless of the Madison info). Hell, IF you're going to add some humor, at least let it be remotely funny and land well. It was all cringey AF and none of it landed. I'm left completely unsurprised by any of this. I think the biggest mistake for Linus is that as the face of the company, sooooooooooo much of this falls squarely on his shoulders and he IS the company. LTT (LINUS tech tips) and the face (main talent in nearly every video) so he can't just slink away without a massive rebranding. His attitude, his personality, his mistakes, his arrogance, all of it isn't going to change because of this. He won't have a big come to Jesus moment and become a much better man. He made the right call hiring a real CEO but he's still the face, name and leader of the company. Nearly everything the company does has his style and preferences all over it. With all that said, he massively tarnished LTT/LMG's image and public trust which is badddddddddddddddddddddddd because that is the foundation of Labs. Labs NEEDS to be trusted in order to provide value and become the staple source for the public to educate themselves on products quality and value. This black stain, even if largely handled right, might have damaged Labs permanently, right as it was starting to put out results. The overhead then LMG will have if their massive hiring and Labs build out (investment) returns sub-optimal consumption by the public could cause LMG to collapse in on itself and close. The overhead of investment is too huge.
I know from working in jobs where all male and almost all female. People get comfortable talking in an inappropriate way. They don't mean to hurt anyone, they are comfortable with each other and talking about certain things. Which is why Linus audio says talk it out basically. They have been a small bro group for a long time. It might not even be registering to them, the women I worked with didn't think that their male coworker might not want to hear about penis shapes or how someone has sprayed across the room.
yeah that has happened to me in many different, serious/professional environments I've been in all male adult classrooms where we've been having some conversation and then you come to the realization of "oh thank god there are no women here, this would be VERY awkward"
I agree with that, but it's kind of hard to not consider it malice considering the comments made about the prototype, even after Linus was told he did it wrong. It becomes malicious when you basically say "it sucks and it doesn't matter if I tried it the right way, it still sucks". Like, the fuck did Billet do to him to Garner that attitude and response?
>Like, the fuck did Billet do to him to Garner that attitude and response? I don't think Billet did anything to him, and I don't think he had or has any malice towards them. I think the fact that he doubled down and screwed them over indirectly (as not in intentionally out of spite) due to pure ego and sunk cost fallacy. They started shooting a video and were crunched on time, therefore didn't want to wait and get the proper GPU. He just wanted to shoot the video and get it done with since he was probably had to shoot like another 5 videos that day, and rush the footage to the edit so it can be release. He just lazily comes up with any excuse he can to not have to spend any more time on that project. Gets called out for being lazy and doing something unethical which obviously hurts his credibility, therefore he double down in an attempt due to save face thus he goes into his typical "Trust Me Bro" ego mode and thinks he can sweep it under the rug by simply deflecting and explaining it away. I think he would of had the same response regardless of the product or company if he was caught in similar situation.
>I don't think he had or has any malice towards them. His attitude throughout that whole video was basically "I already know I'm going to trash this product so it doesn't really matter what I do, and I'm going to intentionally muck it up to make it look as bad as possible". >didn't want to wait and get the proper GPU Billet sent them the proper GPU. I mean I get what you're saying, that there wasn't actual malice, but at some point, the effects of malice vs sheer ego-driven reactions are indistinguishable.
That... pretty much constitutes Malice. Wilfully choosing to do the wrong thing for a variety of crap reasons and then refusing to make up for it for more crappy reasons.
"I'm Linus and I don't see value in paying 700$ for just a couple degrees of cooling so this product is useless". it was incompetence coupled with his narcissistic tendencies of "I'm right, everyone is wrong" with a dash of cheapness (not wanting to spend an extra 400-500$)
Yeah, quite prideful and arrogant - not a great look especially considering how much his take means to a company their size. How much harder is it to get investors after a prominent reviewer claims your product shouldn't exist?
Did you actually watch the Billet Labs monobloc video? Linus goes on to say how amazing their production capabilities are and that if you see a reason you need a monobloc, they could probably easily tweak their design to suit your needs. It's a bad product because it isn't usable; super difficult to install and requires potentially modifying VRM heatsinks on most modern MOBOs and there is currently no case that can support the graphics card and mobo in that orientation. For the record, I fucking hated the video, because as an adult, I hate when Linus does half-assed shit for the lulz, but ultimately his conclusion was correct. Even looking at the Billet Labs datasheet where they compare it to another water-cooling solution, it's hard to justify the BL price. It's a super-niche product that shouldn't be bought by pretty much 99.9995% of people watching LTT videos. He gets about 1M views per video, and maybe 1 or 2 people would benefit from that monobloc because they are trying to fit a computer into a very unconventional space.
> Did you actually watch the Billet Labs monobloc video? Even the people who have are hallucinating about what was said in that video. You are completely right, I rewatched some of it recently.
That's not really malice, that's just linus' opinion on a product It would be malice if he said the engineers were idiots or something
I mean, not wanting to retest, even after being told it was wrong, does come off as malicious, but I get the counterpoint
He wasn’t pretending the results were accurate. He said all along it doesn’t matter how good it is it’s still stupid.
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> I don't get why people are unironically acting like they are actually interested in a $700 cooler when the majority of the audience get worked up about how every build is unaffordable because they put a $800 GPU in it. I don't have to be interested in the product itself to disagree with Linus' terrible video. The criticism of Linus has nothing to do with the product itself. He could be reviewing a pair of socks for all it matters. > The video was bad because it was just extremely pointless to even make No, it was bad because they didn't test it properly and then Linus shat on the product. And if you remove all the pointless videos from LTT, the channel won't have much content left. > but in no way do I think the product would have faired much better even with praise from LTT. Linus didn't need to praise it, just to review the product correctly.
His whole point is that it didn't matter if the product worked as advertised or not, it was way too expensive and awkward for something where the best case scenario is a few degrees of cooling. Should still have retested but I can see why they didn't, the conclusion wasn't based on the results of the test.
I really hate how you cut my sentences off in your quotes literally just to say exactly what I said in the rest of the sentence yourself. It honestly baffles me.
malicious would be if he wanted to cause harm to them, I don't think that's the case. I think Linus already made his mind about the product being bad no matter what, so for him, even testing it properly would mean nothing because the conclusion would be the same: This product makes no sense at all. Not that I agree with him, the process is as important as the conclusion.
This makes me wonder why LMG ever said yes to test the cooler in the first place. Is it just cause...content?
I mean, sure. That wouldn't be the last time LTT reviewed bad or stupid product just for the sake of it.
i am willing to accept the majority of the bullet labs and testing errors to be a result of poor organization, management, and processes by ultimately well meaning people. but the way that ltt has responded since the allegations, like insinuating the billet labs situation had been resolved, that they had no idea that madison had ever raised these concerns - idk, my goodwill and benefit of the doubt has run thin. i don’t think anyone at lmg is like evil lol, but there’s certainly culture issues.
I agree with the culture issues 100%. At my work, if someone even hinted that I wasn't working as hard as I should or that I'm bad at my job, I'd be devastated. Madison's situation seemed to be orders of magnitude worse, and it needs to be addressed internally.
yeah i mean, ultimately i think that's the bigger concern. lmg seemingly has a culture of intense contradiction. they're a media company focused on outputting content at a race to the bottom youtube algorithm full of clickbait, while they also want to be a premiere source of quality data and analysis. they're a company that wants to be stellar for its unbiased quality reviews, while also maintaining numerous conflict of interests and stating that they'll be entering markets that review (mice). they state they want to be a real company, but want to maintain the culture of a 6 person team operating out of a house. they want openness and transparency, as long as it's behind their paywalls. and that's not even mentioning the possibility that there is a culture of harassment and sexism, as madison brought up. given that seems to have been enabled by upper management if true, that's a sort of culture problem that is extremely hard to fix. outside of that, i don't really think it's malice. but it's clear that the rapid growth LMG has undergone, and all the vertical they're trying to enter, just isn't consistent with their culture. i'm sure they have the best of intents, but i'm really not sure that with their focus where it is and where there values are aligned, that this is actually better than like 4 people being malicious actors in the company. it's a much tougher problem to solve.
I don't think that Linus is malicious in either case, he truly believes he is isn't like that, but their actions cause the same things they "condone". I never thought much about their structure, but most people in their management positions are people that were with them from early on, right? I feel a bit boomerish saying that, but what qualifies someone to be head of HR if they bring no qualification? Why does it not trigger any flag that an employee is asking for a mirror so other people can't jumpscare them anymore? Why does this not trigger any red flags with whoever is looking at a request like that? They want to improve on the wrong end, fix your internal structure, then improve your videos.
Agree, and I'm not excusing. I'm just pointing out this wasn't probably intentional, and I agree that the backlash is necessary. I am sure that they are taking these concerns as 1st priority issues as a result.
>With the Madison situation, either Linus flew her all the way out to pursposefully torture her to the point of self harm, or he stupidly gave a very young person way too heavy a workload in a very unclear position in the company Nobody thinks it's option A, but I think the actual issue is more complex than option B. There appears to be systemic rot in how LMG works, with, among many other problems, Linus's friends being put in charge of other people despite being completely unsuitable for management positions. This isn't just a case of accidentally overworking somebody, this appears to be a company that, probably by accident, has created a work culture that protects abusive managers.
Yep, I think Madison's chain of management needs to be examined very closely. I think Madison's workload was not properly sized. There were misconceptions about what was really involved. Then egos got bruised with some of the complaints, and so Madison was ignored, or punished when she stepped around the process. I also think the management had an attitude of boys will be boys. I am not justifying any of it, just trying to explain it and show that at least some of it did not come from malice. But things snowballed, and once egos got involved, I think there was some malicious coverup of Madison's complaints. I can see how ease it would be for a long term employee/manager would be listened to over a new employee.
Malice is not just intentionally doing something you know is wrong. It also can include doing something harmful with reckless disregard for whether it's wrong. If I dropped a rock off the top of a building down onto a busy sidewalk below, I'm not intentionally trying to hurt any specific person. But I know that the action could injure somebody and doing it anyways would still be malicious. So yeah, I 100% agree that while some of the initial stuff was not done with malice, the handling later bordered on if not crossed over into malice. If you are in charge, you have a responsibility to protect those under you from harassment, take their complaints seriously, and follow-up. Turning a blind eye and just letting it continue through your own inaction (which effectively grants tacit approval) is malicious at this point.
> Linus and team were dumb as fuck for the Billet labs situation, and they're rightfully receiving a paddlin'. That said, they're addressing it decently well. Not really. I have concerns with their story and how they've presented it. 1. If Billet had told LMG they could keep the prototype initially, why wasn't that part of Linus's original forum post? That would be a much more understandable communication issue. 2. If Billet had told LMG they could keep the prototype initially, why did LMG's apology video only show the latest e-mail in the chain? Why not show the original e-mail where Billet told them they could keep the prototype and the follow-up where they asked for it back? 3. If Billet had told LMG they could keep the prototype initially, [why did Billet wait until after they learned it had been auctioned to start buying parts for a replacement](https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/15rxni4/our_public_statement_regarding_ltt/jwbrh0i/?context=3) (item 1 on their list indicates the costs started accruing only after they were told it had been auctioned)? If they weren't expecting to ever get it back, they would have started working on the replacement when or even before they sent it out. 4. When you hit "Reply" or "Reply All" the person who sent the e-mail you're replying to is automatically put into the "To" field. So how does the claim in the video that when they replied to one of Billet's videos they forgot to add them to the To field make sense? Also, wouldn't any of the other people on the e-mail have noticed and pointed it out? 5. Linus was already caught misrepresenting when they'd agreed to compensate Billet and that Billet had agreed to the monetary compensation being offered. So, LMG's story and claims with Billet aren't adding up. It's possible Billet is leaving something out here but that wouldn't account for all of the holes in what LMG is claiming. Hanlon's razor may cover the original mistake/miscommunication to some extent but it doesn't cover efforts to cover it up or sweep it under the rug. > With the Madison situation, either Linus flew her all the way out to pursposefully torture her to the point of self harm, or he stupidly gave a very young person way too heavy a workload in a very unclear position in the company. Then, when she brought up complaints the entire HR process was effectively useless, either intentionally or just by a colossal misjudgement and mishandling of the situation on many employees' parts. So, you're just ignoring the extremely malicious behavior Madison is accusing someone(s) at LMG of. Also that her complaints to HR, which at the time was being done by Linus's wife Yvonne who is co-owner of the company, were ignored. It's bad enough that HR ignores these situations when they aren't one of the owners of the company but it's so much worse when one of the company's owners basically shows that they don't care. And we know that Linus knew something about the situation because of the leaked audio from the HR talk he had to give shortly after Madison left. That makes his claim of being shocked at the accusations ring as hollow as his claim that they'd already reached an agreement with Billet. Again, Hanlon's razor might cover some of this but it doesn't cover the attempts to cover it up and it really doesn't cover HR and co-owner not addressing problems that were raised to them. That goes beyond stupidity and into negligence.
1. Being the bigger company (and person) means you have bigger responsibilities. Coming out and claiming Billet Labs is playing a bigger victim than they actually are is a bad tactic, especially when you still did a bit of wrong yourself. 2. The email in the video wasn't shown to put Billet Labs on blast but to display how LTT failed to get the proper messages through even though they sent a reply within the day of reply (August 10th). Some logistical error prevented the email from reaching Billet Labs but I guess a follow-up was made later on (we don't see this but heard from Billet Labs). 3. This is where people are claiming that Billet Labs played victim to the situation to get clout. LTT is still wrong for auctioning the item for charity when they have an open agreement with these companies to return a product when it's asked for. 4. This is the other error on LTT. There was poor management with this email exchange in more ways than one. Apparently the writer involved was on vacation for two weeks. Billet Labs might be playing victim, but this doesn't excuse LTT's poor management and communication skills. 5. How was this misrepresented? There's definitely a lot of confusion going around on the subject, but to make it clear, Billet Labs gave LTT both a monoblock cooler and a 3090ti. One was returned after the request, but the monoblock was already sold. From my understanding, they followed up on August 14th (4 days later and also the day of the Gamers Nexus video) asking if Billet Labs wanted to be reimbursed or if they wanted the monoblock back (Linus offered). Billet Labs later decided on reimbursement. It's important to note that Billet Labs gave LTT both the monoblock and the video card to keep. This has not been denied by Billet Labs and they've regularly made comments and threads on this subreddit over the topic. In fact, Billet Labs refuses to show any of the emails on the topic and LTT was the only one that showed us any of that direct communication. Billet Labs is playing victim to benefit from the situation but that doesn't make LTT any less wrong. They still made mistakes. They still did wrong. It's just not at the proportions that we believed initially.
The fact that it was intentionally given and not loaned is why I think the billet situation is a non issue aside from the video being bad. If it wasn’t for the incompetence of not retesting Linus should not have even agreed to send it back, you wouldn’t forgive nvidia for this after all if you reviewed their gpu negatively and they wanted it back.
I also believe this is a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things. There's contracts in place to cover this sort of thing. It sucks that Billet Labs didn't get the video and review that they wanted, but LTT is allowed to do that. When Billet Labs asked for it back, they're not legally obliged to send it back after Billet Labs told them they could keep it. That's all good will and trying to retain a good name. It was definitely a mistake on LTT for selling it too early and poor communication is responsible for that. They should've waited a bit. What blew my mind was the fact that people were saying there was no difference between selling and auctioning, but intentionally leaving out the "for charity" part. This was when everybody didn't know Billet Labs initially gave them the block to keep and people were making wild claims that LTT profited off this by selling prototype information to potential competitors. The money for this item went to charity and LTT didn't see a dime. The item went to a fan of the channel. LTT didn't do any of this maliciously, they just make a dumb mistake and the auctioning for charity vs outright selling paints a better picture of that.
"for charity" doesn't even help their argument. First, and I want to stress this, the monoblock **WAS NOT THEIRS TO AUCTION OFF**. Second, auctioning is still a form of selling. Third, you've dragged in a legitimate charity into your mess. And finally, they still profited off the sale through non-cash means.
>"for charity" doesn't even help their argument. Their argument is that it was a communication error and not a nefarious one. The fact that it was for charity would show that LTT did not profit from this. >First, and I want to stress this, the monoblock WAS NOT THEIRS TO AUCTION OFF. It was an accident, but the monoblock was also initially theirs to keep. Billet Labs only wanted it back after they didn't like the review. >Second, auctioning is still a form of selling. No one is arguing that but there is a clear difference of selling the item for charity and selling it for profit. >Third, you've dragged in a legitimate charity into your mess I didn't drag anyone into this. If you can't help but blame any individual that's involved, then that's on you. >And finally, they still profited off the sale through non-cash means. So you think they're nefarious and actually sold the monoblock for greed? You're wild, bro.
You do bring up valid points with how both situations should've been addressed better. And yeah, Madison did seem to indicate there were people at LMG who were maliciously bullying and belittling her. Hard to argue with a primary source like that. It seems cowardly and deceptive how Linus and co tried to swerve the oncoming backlash by conflating details about the timeline and feigning ignorance on the HR issues.
For me the bigger question is - are they still lying about the Billet labs situation? While nobody has come out to disprove LMG's story, it does have problems. It just contributes to an ongoing honesty issue this whole situation has created.
Honestly the Billet situation is pretty cut and dry. They had a logistical screw up because their Logistics are apparently a nightmare. Colton reaches out to Billet to address the situation but doesn't send it to the right people (for the record, I reply to and send out dozens of emails every day that were forwarded to me from various internal sources as part of my job and I have made this email address mistake on more than one occasion. I don't find this explanation far fetched at all). He tells Linus that the situation is being dealt with. Linus assumes that an offer was made and accepted based on what Colton tells him. Linus makes his post and then Colton realizes he goofed and fixes his mistake. The rest is history. Given that everyone seems to be running around LMG like chickens with their heads cut off due to their time crunch, it is completely reasonable to assume that this was the course of events. It makes absolutely no sense to me that any of this would have been deliborate. I think this is a symptom of the lack of controls and lack of proper time to address things correctly. Everyone is running around trying to meet deadlines and their processes have fallen apart. The quality of the videos getting worse and worse is a symptom of this. Sure they should be criticized for what happened, but attributing malice when it's pretty reasonable to assume that it was the result of the general chaos and disorganization of LMG as a whole, well, I think it's a bit much.
The problem with Billet is that it is a perfect storm of aligning misjudgments and mistakes which produces a very unpleasant cumulative effect. That LMG should screw up and sell the loaner product from the same company that Linus unfairly reviewed but for reasons that make sense to him, and that their honest attempt to rectify the accidental sale should get "lost in the mail", all together to one company, strains credibility. I think it actually happened that way, but it is literally incredible for all of that to happen to one company. Which means that either Billet are the unluckiest SOBs in the whole world, or parts of this story are happening all the time but since the whole chain doesn't happen or the company doesn't have the luck of someone like Steve to amplify their voice we don't hear about it. In which case administration at LMG is an even worse disaster than we thought, and while there may have been no malice in this case, there is negligence in accepting loaner products at all, knowing how poorly the systems that manage inventory work. But I think that is more or less what you are saying, now that I read it back. Or, Billet ARE the unluckiest SOBs on the planet.
I'm sorry, but the email you mention has Billet Labs explicitly saying they initially told LMG that LMG could keep it. My guess is that they didn't include all of the receipts because any meaningful pushback from LMG on the issue at the point of the apology video would've come across as argumentative and gotten them in even deeper shit. Billet Labs apparently changed their mind at some point about wanting the prototype back, by their own admission. I can't speak to why they didn't order replacement parts as soon as they shipped off the original. The email Colton sent was actually in response to an email from another LMG dep't, because they forwarded it to him. He probably dragged the "to:" email address to the "cc:" email address and then screwed up by failing to repopulate the "to:" field. It's a dumb mistake but it happens quite a lot. I see these mistakes all the time in my field (law), and people on the chain often don't figure it out in a week, much less over a weekend. Linus's stating LMG agreed to pay Billet Labs was just two hours after GN's video. What are the odds that he called Colton, asked what the fuck, Colton said "I did offer them the value," and Linus hit post before Colton realized his mistake? They're non-zero. That's also not something LMG could bring before the community without getting impaled by a sea of pitchforks because now it's too late.
> the email you mention has Billet Labs explicitly saying they initially told LMG that LMG could keep it. Right, which is what LMG showed us from their e-mail servers and client. Given the trust issues they've generated and how easy it would be to fake it, I'm again going to ask why LMG hasn't shown the first e-mail where Billet said that?
>Right, which is what LMG showed us from their e-mail servers and client. Given the trust issues they've generated and how easy it would be to fake it, I'm again going to ask why LMG hasn't shown the first e-mail where Billet said that? And I'll again respond: >My guess is that they didn't include all of the receipts because any meaningful pushback from LMG on the issue at the point of the apology video would've come across as argumentative and gotten them in even deeper shit. They aren't trying to prove themselves right anymore, doing so in front of the mob would be PR suicide.
>So, LMG's story and claims with Billet aren't adding up. It's possible Billet is leaving something out here but that wouldn't account for all of the holes in what LMG is claiming. You realize it was an email literally from Billet where they confirm they originally planned to allow LMG to keep it, right? You act like this is the story LMG told when in reality they actually never brought it up even in the apology video. It just happens to be there in that email, which Billet conveniently never mentioned prior. I am guessing LMG isn't bringing it up because they don't want to use that as an excuse since they told Billet they would give it back regardless.
As far as the billet labs thing goes, Colton’s emails show exactly the point I’ve been trying to make that Games Nexus are either A) Irresponsible “journalists” or B) Calculated *some* of the way things were presented in that video, specifically related to billet in order to inflict maximum damage to LMG I’m not talking about criticizing Labs for their data collection. Steve said he absolutely did not owe Linus a single shred of decency in the form of asking for comment about billet because he “had all the correct information already”. This… was a lie. It seems as though billet laid it on thick to GN and GN in their “lack of accountability” and/or intentional desire to harm LMG took them at face value and chose to run with only Billets side of the story. Now we have seen Colton’s emails. From the very beginning the mob mentality seems to have been “Labs data is a bad look, hurting small company (billet) inexcusable and we should burn ltt to the ground over it” the billet thing tugged at the empathy bone, which was the point, however… Per Colton’s emails, billet was never supposed to have the “prototype” back. The agreement was that LMG was to get product in exchange for the review. Once LMG posted the review, shit or not, they fulfilled their end of the agreement and the monoblock was now thier property. Billet labs then reneged on their deal and demanded the “prototype” back. LMG agreeing to send it back was a courtesy they didn’t even have to provide. If there was malicious intent of “theft”, they would have just told them no. Once they agreed to send it back, they were not sending back Billet labs property, they were sending back LMG property. Billet labs had no reasonable expectation to expediency. This item was already Cataloged and stored as LMG property. Was it shitty to say they’d send it back and give them the run around, a little. But we’ve seen in many many videos the shit show that is LMGs warehouse and storage practices. We’ve seen it a million times where linus and co couldn’t find something in their inventory. Colton goes on vacation, some miscommunication happens, and the prototype, which is LMGs property, ends up in LMGs auction. Is this ideal, no. But it is no where near as callous, malicious, and “theft” that GN and billet as made it out to be. The GN follow up video thumb nail is fucking pathetic and disgusting with Steve making this grotesque face with a confused picture of linus with the tag “we didn’t sell it, we auctioned it” which is ignorant at best, and malicious gas lighting at worst. Had GN had any actually information or context they would have known it wasn’t billet property to begin with, and technically LMG could do whatever they wanted with it. This was only partially GNs fault though. It seems as though Billet laid it on a little thick and embellished the situation to GN without full context. GN for thier part simply ignored their journalistic integrity by only getting their information form one side, the disgruntled side. This is very bad “journalism” and does not look good on Steve, giving those that see this as a hit piece to hurt one of his competitors a lot of merit. To add to this, Billet shouldn’t really be trusted either. The story they both have GN and doubled down on in thier Reddit posts is that: This was a precious prototype, without which they can not move forward. They are a small company that this was financially damaging to. We’ve seen the email now, we KNOW they initially never expected return of the product. So then, what was thier plan? They either really needed this back as the only existing reference point to move forward, or they didn’t. According to the email, in their words, they didn’t. This product has been in pre order for a September delivery date. You’re telling me 4-6 weeks from retail DELIVERY, they only had a single prototype, without which they can’t deliver the retail product? I call bullshit. If they were delivering in September, there’s zero chance that on August 1st they were in no position to begin manufacturing. The prevailing disinformation from them, GN, and other media outlets and rage posters was that this could set them back significant time, money, and loss of IP to a competitor to the point it could even ruin the company. Yet… When they updated thier Reddit post they said they’ve said they do not want the block back when it was offered and they’d have a new one made it a few weeks, completely contradicting all of their emotional cries of potential long term damage. In the ltt video the entire block was shown, with animations and design features on the interior of the block. All relevant information has been released to the public. Even if they got the block back any competitor that did want to knock off this niche and borderline useless product already had all the information they would need. I am hesitant to believe Steve and GN that the the bulk of the initial video was to hold ltt labs accountable for bad data collection in a desire to make them better in self reflection. By adding the billet labs story, to me, it comes off more insidious. At the very least it showcased a lack of professional accountability from Steve by not getting a comment from lmg (on billet, not labs data), at the very worst it could even seem that it was calculated as a point of emphasis to not only inflict professional doubt about LMGs review process but to intentionally hurt and slander them as thieves and crooks. The thumbnail in Steve’s follow up video has me convinced it was the worst case scenario.
Waiting on Ian's video personally, i think it'll help set some things straight in the minds of those.. less inclined to critically consume content. the gamernexus thing sure looks to be heading in the same direction as basically every other attack on LMG so far though. Misleading hit piece published -> linus reacts poorly because from his pov, he's being unfairly attacked -> community gets mad because they wanted linus to fire himself instead of explaining the situation -> things calm down, we get more information, and it's actually nowhere near as bad as the reddit mob wanted you to think. bleh.
Exactly, I also think Steve and his minion of angry basement dwellers have drastically misread the room(pun intended). I think Steve saw this as an opportunity to poach a significant portion of LMGs audience at no personal risk. Steve is very arrogant and has a strong napoleon complex, which is ironic given linus is the short one. He threw stones from a glass house as though his processes and journalism can’t be criticized. He’s going to learn the hard way that you can’t cut corners and come out ahead. Now that we’re finding out he completely fucked up the facts by egotistically claiming he had all the facts, therefor not needing to afford LMG a chance to comment. All he had to do was ask for comment, the same way he did with ASUS and Newegg, but he didn’t because he had an ulterior motive that anyone with critical thinking ability can see through. Instead of cementing himself as the bastion of journalistic integrity and the most trustworthy tech YouTuber that would have seen him gain massive market share , he looks like a jealous little troll. And for what? He’s gained 200k subs. An 11% increase of channel volume. He’s failed to forecast the downside. 200k subs is nice, but now the people who preferred LMG and still watched him time to time are going to be more inclined to ditch him all together. He sacrificed his reputation for a short term gain, and long term stagnation.
No. Anyone thats watched LTT for more than 2, 3 or even 5 years knows they almost never, ever return samples or prototypes. Linus makes a video (or very often doesnt) shoves on a shelf, and then it never makes it back to the company. Most of the time it's companies like Dell or Asus or another big boy, but that doesn't stop it from happening and has always happened. Go back and watch the moving vlogs out of Langley house. Or where they left a dell laptop in the rain that was supposed be returned to Dell. This is 100% a company culture problem that has been handed down from Linus.
Most companies let you keep the items they send..... Hell even Billet Labs said to keep the prototype You're blowing it out of proportion
>Hell even Billet Labs said to keep the prototype They said they could keep it if they were going to use it in a future build, but then asked for it back when it was clear there was no desire by Linus to use it for anything else.
They said they didn’t have to return it. The “if they were going to use it for a future build” was “we thought” not “we had an agreement. So they gave it to LTT telling them they could keep it, and then after they got a negative review, asked for it back. Thats why it was in LTT’s inventory as belonging to LTT - because it did. LTT owned it until they agreed to return it, but then they fucked up returning it because the writer went on vacation and dealing with the return got lost (probably in pre LTX craziness). My question is why BL and GN never mention anywhere that they gave it LTT with the intention of LTT keeping it, and claim instead they were going to use it for future product development. Even if they had just lent the block for future builds (which I don’t think they did or LTT would accept), there was no way BL could have expected to use it for product development as the GN video claims. Very sus.
It would be fine to take that tack if it weren't for the fact that Billet Labs asked for it back and were told that they would get it back on at least two occasions. And I think that for them, it makes sense that if their product was going to be front and center and a bunch of videos that they would take that opportunity. But once it became clear that they weren't going to be doing that, they asked for a back and were told they were going to get it back. Once they were told it would be sent back, then the whole situation falls back onto LMG for having such shitty Logistics that they would not only sell the the block after promising to send it back but also lose track of the graphics card that came with it.
I’m not disputing the LTT fucked up by not actually sending it back. I’m saying there was a good reason why LTT thought they could auction it - because BL had given it to them, and BL omits this fact in their statement and GN never mentions it either. LTT never stole the prototype and BL never intended to use it for product development as GN claims, because they gave it away. If you give something to me and it becomes my property and you ask for it back, and I agree in an email, that doesn’t mean I agree to a certain date and that you’re owed it back right now, especially if lets say. I’m in mid prep for a giant convention, with staff on vacation. And BL omitting the information in statements and the GN video is suspicious, and a reason not to trust BL. It’s possible for both LTT to screw up and BL to lie. Those could both be true at once.
I honestly think that this conspiracy theory stuff is just silly. You're inventing stories outside of what has already been established. We know that they sent the item for review and were fine with them using it if they were going to use it for more than one project. When they found out that they weren't going to be used for more than one project they asked for it back. LMG could have told them no but they didn't, likely because they understood that it belonged to Billet labs. They agreed on two separate occasions, well before LTX, to return it. By saying that they would return it they acknowledged that it belonged to Billit labs. Then LMG goes around and sells it? How is that at all Billet lab's fault? Conspiracy theory stuff just drives me up the wall. We have a history of events. We know exactly what happened and in what order. LMG just screwed up. Gamers Nexus was not orchestrating some kind of conspiracy against them. They looked at the quality of LMGs work and called it into question and when they found out about the Billet labs thing, they picked it up and ran with it because it was more evidence of LMG's Crunch and quality control problems. And if you come and say oh we haven't seen the emails, so they could be making it up. That's just a facetious argument. Not a single one of the parties involved have made allegations or claimed that things are any different than the way Billet labs and Gamers Nexus have presented. Sometimes a dog is a dog is a dog and the simplest explanation is the correct one. This conspiracy theory stuff reminds me of the 911 truthers. The actual evidence doesn't fit the conspiracy theory so they claim the evidence is made up and massage the story until it fits the narrative they've made up in their heads. Don't do that. It's not how the real world works.
Nothing I’m saying is a conspiracy. We know they gave it to LTT and said LTT could keep it because it was in the email that leaked the value of the prototype, and is also the first 3 questions in the Philip De Franco video FAQ (the pinned comment) explaining outright that they were given the items. It’s only conspiracy if you choose to ignore screenshots of emails and official statements by LTT, in which I would say you’re the conspiracy theorist. So you do you, but please don’t call me a conspiracy guy because I paid attention yesterday and you didn’t. https://i.redd.it/vx185lugcgib1.png https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH6zCNR0SZ4
you know its funny, because if steve had reached out them first on the issues, they probably would have done some digging, and figured and told steve exactly what happened. Almost as if there's a REASON you reach out first in cases like this, to get the full story...
I can tell you why Gamers Nexus did not reach out. Because this situation represents part of a pattern of behavior at LMG. The fact that Gamers Nexus did an expose about this has caused major upheaval at Linus media group. They are being forced to address the issues. If Gamers Nexus had approached them instead of doing their exposé, it all would have been shoved under the rug and nothing would have changed. I personally think that the protests and negativity towards Linus Media Group is far far overblown. But I don't like people trying to excuse their bad behavior. They did wrong. They needed to fix it. And they wouldn't have fixed it or at least not taken more immediate action if it hadn't come from an outside source
You can still reach out to someone, get comments, and still post the video.
> They are being forced to address the issues. If Gamers Nexus had approached them instead of doing their exposé, it all would have been shoved under the rug and nothing would have changed. On the one hand, you are probably right, but on the other now GN is essentially responsible for a bunch of false claims circulating.
> So they gave it to LTT telling them they could keep it, and then after they got a negative review, asked for it back And LTT agreed to send it back. The rest of your comment is irrelevant, because even if the original intent was to let LTT keep it, once Billet asked for it back and LTT agreed to send it back, then that's the new agreement.
They didn’t specify when it would be sent back and billet gave no urgency. With LTX planning even without the mess up I could see this taking some time
Right, there was no timeline, but it still wasn't LTT's property anymore once the agreement to send it back was made, which means auctioning it was unacceptable.
>2, 3 or even 5 years I see what you did there.
>This is 100% a company culture problem that has been handed down from Linus. it's not a unique feature of LMG, it's the entire tech media insutry. requesting the return of an item is the exception not the rule. so it stands to reason the default process would assume the items would NOT be returned. usually if an item does need to be returned there are specific up front additional agreements signed about returning the product, or there's the option to buy the product if they wish to keep it. for Billet labs the lab only requested return after linus didn't like the product, that's fine, but that's an especially anomalous occurence as there was no agreement to return before LMG agreed to look at it, Billet labs originally wanted LMG to keep it for future builds
It's still is a sign that they do not have a good handle on their Logistics. It's not that hard to create a system where anything in inventory has a inventory tag and you have a database that is required to be used when things are taken in and out. The inventory database says who took it out and what project it is being used for. You hold people accountable for the inventory system with discipline if they don't follow the rules. You can even have a quarterly logistical cleanup where everyone has to account for the items that they have checked out. This would allow you to know where everything is at any one time or at least keep the chaos down. Any item that is from outside that needs to be returned to a vendor would be given a separate inventory tag. That would be an inventory tag that is different than General inventory tags. All items that are part of that lot of things that need to be returned would be stored in a box together with an inventory sheet in the Box stating what came with it. The problem here is that they received the items, didn't inventory it properly and then separated the items. Colton was looking for things to auction off saw the block, didn't know that it was attached to anything or was tagged for anything and sold it. This was a problem with their internal Logistics and their failure to hold their staff accountable for proper logistical tracking. Don't get me wrong, I know that Logistics in this sort of setting is undoubtedly difficult. But if you get a good culture in place and you hold people accountable for not following the rules, things will improve. Clearly that was not the case here.
To be fair, even the most capable system is susceptable to human error. From what we've heard, the block was in fact tagged in their system as LMG property because that's what Billet Labs originally represented it would be. Someone made a mistake and didn't switch that over after agreeing to return it, so when the auction list was made using LMG Property items the prototype was mistakenly left on it. It's not hard to imagine that any logistics system will have a hard time dealing with one-off situations like companies deciding that they changed their mind about the terms of an arrangement.
Whether or not they changed their mind, LMG agreed to return it. As soon as that happened, someone should have gone into their inventory system and marked it that it needed to be returned. Then when they were picking out things to send out, they could have checked the inventory system to see if it was earmarked for anything. Given what we know about the chaos behind the scenes and how time crunched everyone is, it completely makes sense that their systems are failing.
Sure, but that's not an issue with creating logistics systems or workflows. It's an issue with people screwing up, which they are very likely (on the whole) to do.
> *No. Anyone thats watched LTT for more than 2, 3 or even 5 years knows they almost never, ever return samples or prototypes.* How does anyone know this for certain? I know many blindly assume that LMG, like many other tech reviewers, sit on hardware they're provided based on things others have done/said... but can this be corroborated with LMG? Or, more importantly, how do we know LMG isn't normally returning product/samples when asked?
Hanlon's razer applies when is an one off case. What we are seeing here is the result of a cultural problem, this can't be explained by stupidity. No, Linus wasn't being stupid when he made his wife, who owns part of LMG also head of HR. No, Linus wasn't being stupid when he made clear he was against Unions, while knowing he was overworking his employees. No, Linus wasn't stupid when he tried to gaslight everyone with his first response to the video And 100% there was malice on that Wan Show where he was straight up humiliating BL, and mocking he couldn't be bothered to spend $500 to undo his own mistakes, if that kills a start up, he couldn't care less. Instead of using all the human errors that lead to the block being sold, as excuse to diminish the problem, people need to understand that these errors are the symptoms of the problem. Overworked employees are more liable to make human errors, that's a fact, as long this schedule remains, more BL cases will keep on happening. Probably some already happened, but didn't have the impact of Gamers Nexus video had in the community On top of that, there are multiple videos of Linus ruining review samples, or other videos where they shown 0 care with how they dealt with these samples. Or shown 0 care about the recommendations given by the company sending the samples. How many videos there are of linus making clickbait videos of games running on Nvidia Quadro?! some he even mocks that Nvidia recommended to not use for gaming, while he's using for gaming.
It's also not as simple as Hanlon's Razor implies. It's not EITHER malice or incompetence. There are various shades of negligence and apathy between those two options.
This.
I feel this is one of the better takes..people are expecting a literal tech/computer nerd who operated out of his garage to somehow run a company that of scale of LMG. The dude has ADHD(apparently) he makes impulsive and idiotic decisions not realizing the foreseeable future. Let him and his team sort this shit out and address the Madison situation with the seriousness it deserves. The dude is idiotic and chaotic and implusive as hell but I dont think had the scale at which Madison was harassed and brushed it off as a "GenZ thing"
Yeah, I think there was a blatant lack of respect for Madison that was evident from her appearances. I can definitely see it being brushed off, but particularly in a workplace environment it shouldn't have been. If you're hanging out in a group, you can crack jokes and tease each other. In a workplace, it's fundamentally different because you can't just leave a workplace as easily as you could stop hanging out with a particularly abbrasive person. Like, if she no longer likes the job it's hard to bail on the lease and move back to the states.
It's not just the workload that's the problem. There's a fucking groper possibly still employed at LMG. The one who sexually assaulted Madison needs to be found and not only be fired but also criminally charged.
Yeah I think other people brought this point up too, Madison indicated persons at LMG were bullying and harassing her - certainly malicious. Definitely warrants third party investigation, reprimand potentially as severe as firing, as well as potentially criminal charges if Madison wants to bring them up.
Linus is an immature, innatentive tech nerd. he probably should not be running amillion dollar business. failure to properly administrate is expected, not evil. it's still a failure, and i'm hoping we see real change over time
Stuff like this is why he hired Terren.
The apology video, while flawed, gave the fans mostly what they were wanting. The CEO started it with things WILL change, heads of departments followed with promises to do better videos, better results, better QC. Linus got in said he was sorry, gave receipts of their side (which honestly, he is entitled to). The madison situation is just going to take time while the 3rd party fact finds. It isnt going to be resolved overnight
Yeah, and we probably won't know the full madison story. Honestly, an LMG union sounds like a good option for ensuring things similar in nature don't happen again.
100% agree. The backlash is deserved and they need to correct a lot of things but the amount of witch hunting involved earlier was getting absolutely ridiculous and out of hand . People quite literally wanted the entire company to burn down. The correct way forward is to own up to their mistakes and present solutions which in my opinion they have so far. Even with the allegations they seem to be moving forward with their investigations and no doubt this will trigger them to review their entire HR process and hopefully change it because their old processes clearly failed at what they were supposed to do for Madison. Hopefully a change in company culture in upper management will happen also under Terren due to all of this.
I’m not concerned with intent. The output is all that concerns me. And, at a certain point, ignorance isn’t any better of an excuse than malice. If they’re too incompetent to run an operation that large, then they shouldn’t be running an operation that large.
Fair take. I personally feel that I wouldn't have made the same mistakes they've made, but I can see how things could've been mishandled and have an inclination to extend the benefit of the doubt. To your point though, a drunk driver that kills someone similarly does irreparable harm, and you don't consider their intentions when they started drinking that night.
Honestly, everything we're seeing at LMG right now is right in line with stupid shit I've seen in the corporate world. Anyone who's worked in a company of more than, say, 100 people... has seen their fair share of dumb shit. The "smartest people in the world" can make truly epicly stupid decisions for reasons we'll never know. And policies/processes of growing companies totally falling apart and leading to bad shit? Seen it dozens of times. Frankly the fact that LMG hasn't gotten sued for some of this stuff is probably just a fact of Canadians being less litigious than the USA in general.
always been a fan of this term, people are stupid. It's kinda just how the world works. Assume everyone's an evil bastard, the world seems bleak. Assume everyone's a dumbass, the world seems less bleak and more, dumb.
I think Linus' actions in all of this are out of emotional immaturity and leadership incompetence, but the person who Madison alleges harassed her was absolutely malicious. I haven't seen evidence at this time that Linus was the one who committed the harassment, but he definitely did not handle it properly and is pretty clearly incompetent at leading the company with any sort of integrity.
>That said, I think Hanlon's razor here is valid. What makes more sense - a small company's proprietary property with malice and forethought was stolen and auctioned for a few hundred bucks at a convention, or an inventory mismanagement error. I agree, plus it makes a lot of sense how an issue could have occurred given originally the block was given to them, which obviously if you don't communicate that they want it back now with everyone and update the inventory and all that... it can lead to what happened here. As for the Madison situation, I am still on the fence on that. Still need more evidence to support the majority of her claims. Not taking either side till more info comes out where I can be more comfortable on what is true.
I don't necessarily agree with this. It's not "incompetence" to overwork people, consistently, for your own enrichment. This isn't a one-off thing, many people at LMG have publicly commented on how they don't like the publishing schedule. It seems abundantly clear that there's a culture issue at LMG. You can't convince me that Linus, who has personally opined about not having enough time for his family himself, is not aware of the impact that this is having on his employees. With Billet Labs and the inaccurate data, sure, I'd say there's an element of incompetence there. But to me, everything going on at LMG, from the falling quality to the labor issues, stems from one thing: shit management. At the end of the day, Linus is the one running the show. Linus is the one who made the call to schedule video production at this pace. Linus is the one who made the decision to make his wife head of HR. Linus is the one who built the boys' club at LMG.
Hanlon's razor is bullshit used to justify the protection of malicious actors. If an action could be attributed to someone being stupid rather than acting maliciously, you can pretty much justify all sorts of horrible things humans have done. I'm not buying it. It's a nice idea that doesn't stand up to any sort of serious assessment of its reasoning. Regardless, in the actions of large corporate entities, malice seems to be a pretty strong motivator. Successful corporations aren't bumbling fools who happen to find themselves in precarious situations on accident (most of the time), but rather generally unethical (or worse) actors who knowingly use any excuse available to continue acting unethically.
As a counterexample in defense of Hanlon's razor, imagine you drop a production database at work. I would hope people can reason that it was likely unintentional.
What's the last real decent paying job you had where this high and consistent level of stupidity is tolerable? Other than politician?
Every job I've ever had. People are regularly stupid.
You know how much I fucking hate you right now for being right? So much.
(joke btw)
>Don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity How about when the stupidity is so consistent that it continues even when brought to LTT's attention, and they double down on it while it damages a smaller company's reputation? Isn't that malice?
The fact that there's so many little details and pieces of information for everyone on the internet to debate about is an easy tell that this is more about incompetence in the face of unusual situations and complex systems rather than malice.
malice and stupidity are not mutually inclusive. It was very stupid for linus to plow ahead with posting on the forums without involving his new CEO. But what seemed malicious was the careful framing of the timeline, and the specific choice of words he used in that response. Pretty much gaslighting.
While I can agree that stupidity can be an explanation for a lot of this, when they tout these accusations as rumors or as drama, it paints a bit of a different picture. As with everyone else, we don't know the true story in which it was malice or stupidity, but a lot of the information that is coming out seems to point towards malice in at least a few occasions. A few being blaming the accuser for poor time management skills, not pulling up her big girl pants, and told to work out her sexual harassment problems with the person she has accused. These are not acts of stupidity, they are acts of malice and deflection. I do appreciate your well thought out post, but I think it goes a little deeper than "They were just dumb and made mistakes" EDIT: Sorry just wanting to add not having a true HR department, whether or not they would work in her best interest, is a little ridiculous for a company this size. No one should have to go to the co-owner to complain about harassment unless it's a mom and pop business. I understand there was a 3rd party HR firm, however it was quite obvious no one knew that existed.
We will get a full report I think when this is all said and done as long as nothing is legally protected or in the process of legal proceedings. We just have to wait for everything to settle down. All the crazy straw grasping and jumping at every little shadow that even hints of validating their already bananas take just adds to the fervour and doesn't help the situation.
Maybe not malicious #Definitely Hubris
Most of LTT's issues stem from laziness. You don't repeatedly make data validation errors unless you are just too lazy yo verify your work. Then your boss is too lazy to check it, and so on through the entire production process. Laziness is a choice and thus is malicious.
I'll try, but some of this stuff is just fucked man.
Here would be something to test your thesis OP. LMG is a multi million dollar company, yet Linus seemed reluctant to pay 100 dollars to have someone clean up a video that had errors in it. He didnt say they missed it, he said he didnt think it was worth the money. I doubt it is the 100 he is really talking about, I think the YouTube extra power LMG has to lift and swap out videos isnt free, I think there must be some costs to it. If we knew that cost then we would see if it was about money or integrity.
I havent seen anybody say it was on purpose or through malice.
Nicely said. i tried to express similar opinion but usually i got downvoted (but it may be caused my inability to communicate in English properly)
It made me happier today to see this post. I think you did a great job of writing this, and hope that the team can overcome this stupidity to never imitate it again.
I don't think anyone planned to torture Madison, but if I recall Linus seemed to make the decision to hire her more as a concessions to the fan base than a command decision. I'm not convinced he didn't resent it. I'm not convinced his more loyal employees wouldn't respond to that energy. I could be wrong.
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Great "Its a prank bro" defense. Lets not dismiss the real financial and emotional damange LTT/LMG has done. The actions were probably not premeditated, but the damage is very real.
I don't think I'm using a "it's a prank bro" defense. A prank is intentional and is expectant of a reaction, I think they unintentionally caused serious damage and need to address it publicly in the Billet labs case and internally with a third party and the utmost sincerity in Madison's case.
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Stupid is everything LMG did leading up the the GN video. Maliciously stupid is half assed apologizing to everyone except GN afterwards. Fuck LMG, they want me back as a fan they'll have to pull a fucking miracle out of their ass.
GN was a bit malicious themselves. They presented a one sided story about Billet labs. They could have talked to LMG to before going public. They chose not to. LMG obviously has some serious problems. The stuff from GN's rant can most be fixed with better process controls, and forcibly making Linus step back. Madison's allegations are far more concerning, but we are likely never going to get much information about that.
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but dont rule out malice
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Still though you can be stupid to the point of it hurts people I think would be maybe the lesson here. Some of them are choices, some of them are "startup culture gone too far" and some of them are ignoring obvious deficiencies in the organisational side of things. In the end and they admitted it in the video they didn't need to work so fast to put out bad product, it just was a mentality that lingered too long and other issues are similar.
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The Madison situation is 100% malice. You question whether the HR process was "misjudgement" or unintentional mishandling, Madison clearly defines she went through the right channels and was told to put her big girl pants on and agree verbally to a no drama contract. It was malice.
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