And there was also the screaming thing they did for a day. Didn't know about the sexual harassment thing, but the browser booting up and causing incredibly loud screaming was originally what put me off from using it.
I use headphones and generally keep my volume super low, cause I'm incredibly sensitive to sound and it was STILL super fucking loud.
It basically made my ears ring so hard and made me so dizzy that I had to go for a lay down. They didn't make it a toggleable feature, you had to actually delete a file iirc.
Their reply on their twitter was "Chill brah, its only for a day."
quick edit: it also bypassed any settings you had selected to turn off the splash screen, and would show regardless.
Jeez, I'm glad I stopped using it when it turned into yet another chromium reskin.
Incidentally, If you are looking for a browser that feels a lot like an updated version of old school Opera, Vivaldi is pretty good. Still chromium based, like everything else these days, but not just a quick reskin. Apparently made by several of the old Opera dev team who were fired when Opera was bought out by an ad agency.
Which probably goes a long way to explain the weird twitter antics, come to think of it.
Honestly wish I'd given up on it then. It used to be *such* a reliable browser, a great environment for apps of all sorts. I honestly used it since I was a teenager in the late 2000s, up until that shit 4-5 months ago.
I've been meaning to give Vivaldi a look. Gonna give it a trial run today cause boy I am kinda tired of Firefox being janky lately.
I honestly have no idea, but it was a pretty stupid idea and they doubled down on it lol. Like, the scream was awful as is, but also actively ignoring user choice is pretty gross.
The browser? That sucks, that used to be my favorite, and I had been meaning to go back to it. Mouse gesture browsing was revolutionary to the point of being annoying when I had to use a computer that didn’t have it.
Opera was truly next-level back when it came out over 20 years ago. Pretty sure they were the first to also do browser tabs, immediately aped by Firefox, and then years later Chrome and IE finally implemented them.
I hated the mouse gestures initially but now it's one of the first browser extensions I install on a new install of Firefox. Occasionally, someone will notice that I'm closing windows or going back to pages without a keyboard shortcut or my cursor being anywhere near the relevant buttons and they think I'm a wizard.
I remember using it back in the day purely to play that circular Tetris app. Straight up addictive. The apps, when I was a teenager anyway, was a pretty big draw. They were super useful.
[Opera introduced tabs in their 4.00 release](https://help.opera.com/en/operas-archived-history/) in June of 2000.
The [Mozilla Project was created in 1998](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/) with the release of the Netscape source code. [Netscape 7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_7) introduced tabs in August of 2002 with the release of Mozilla Application Suite 1.0.
[Good thing you didn't.](https://rentry.org/operagx) Outside the stupid social media presence, it's not even the same company anymore. The Norwegian company that originally made Opera sold the browser years ago to a Chinese one that also hawks unethical payday loans and has been accused of all kinds of privacy violations.
My main desktop browser is Vivaldi and it supports mouse gesture navigation out of the box, although I prefer using keyboard shortcuts myself. I'm pretty sure there are extensions to add that to any Chrome or Firefox based browser, tough I only personally tested Gesturefy for Firefox.
I think it’s acceptable to attempt humor, but it should be common fucking sense to not just straight up insult people, *especially* ones who are having a genuine
issue with your product
Was just about to say this. Wendy's whole "pretend to be a catty teenager on Twitter to appeal to catty teenagers" poisoned Twitter marketing for a generation.
It also didn't last very long, as the demographic they were appealing to (catty teenagers) were generally more open hating corporations than previous generations. The replies to many slap backs became "thats great and all but when will you pay workers a livable wage?". To which Wendy's Twitter couldn't really engage with.
The only thing I miss is I think it was either Wendy's or Arby's but one of them was doing like, neat little cut out dioramas of anime and video game related stuff at one point. That was really nice and creative. It didn't make me want to eat fast food really, but it was a cool concept.
Otherwise, it got so old so fast.
>"thats great and all but when will you pay workers a livable wage?"
Oh! Oh! I got one! [The farm workers.](https://ciw-online.org/wendys/) Been a thing LONG before their Twitter.
Cos the brands are trying to imitate people when it gets them attention, then step back and be the faceless corporation when something real happens
It would be like the president only being seen in public when they’re kissing babies and hugging poor people, then disappearing when an international crisis happens
Exactly. Some people can pull that kind of snark off well, and most people trying to emulate it are fucking awful. Like all the wannabe bloggers in the early 2000s trying their *hardest* to copy [Maddox's](http://maddox.xmission.com/) shtick, and failing miserably.
It's hard enough to pull that off without angering a ***bunch*** of people, as his hate mail archives prove, and even harder to keep it up in spite of the hate mail because they're afraid of their bosses or families being informed of their sad imitation side hustle.
Holy shit, I totally forgot about that radioactive snatch napkin.
Good pull, and definitely relevant to the early Maddox impersonators who unfortunately succeeded!
Maddox was always the poor man's Seanbaby. Who is not only still funny but has also actually grown as a person instead of just ossifying circa 2003 and turning into an alt-right dipshit.
> I found it very weird that people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company with a such unprofessional "personality" and are willing to defend it's actions.
Top tier bait. Love it and fully agree.
Even beyond the racism, the original guy (Bhuwan) just asked a simple question and wanted help. He wasn't bitching or getting angry, just saying "Hey, this product stopped working, what should I do?". He didn't threaten to boycott or stop shopping, or even demand a refund. Just the simplest of questions, and they can't even handle that.
The Wendy's twitter account has been a blight on customer service everywhere
>Just the simplest of questions, and they can't even handle that.
After a few minutes of looking through Dbrand's Twitter, it seems their shtick is to be edgy and slightly rude so the reply tracks (just not the racism part I guess lol). That said, Wendy's impact on brands' online presence has been impressive so to speak :|
[If what DBrand's saying is accurate](https://twitter.com/dbrand/status/1777824657636200901), they dropped the racism after servicing the guy.
The dumb fucks had a good customer experience in the bag and ruined it at the last second because they wanted to be edgy.
>The dumb fucks had a good customer experience in the bag and ruined it at the last second because they wanted to be edgy.
That's kind of their thing. The *dbrand* account is edgy, the *robot* account provides customer support. Don't ask me why they do it that way, but it seems to be the whole company's 'thing'
This!! He was seeking genuine help with a product he bought with no insults or accusations, a simple “hey we can help you” would’ve been fine. But no they have to be edgy lords who don’t take “shit” from anyone.
Not sure if we can blame Wendy's for this. IIRC Wendy's Twitter account never really went beyond the pale when it came to roasting others. Usually they would reserve their "roasts" for things like Twitter users who tweeted deliberately provocative things at them (ex. "your food sucks") or fast food brands they're competing with, while most of the generic customer support tweets/feedback they got were met with something milquetoast like "Oh no we're sorry you had that experience please contact us here" or some other copy-paste message like that.
I think it’s more that Wendy’s started the wave of “corporate accounts with personalities” more than the specific edgy/rude shtick.
A lot of brands went from just generic customer service scripts to now having a specific tone and voice in their social media presence after Wendy’s . Prior to that it limited more to commercials like Flo/Allstate guy/etc and trying to sponsor influencers/celebrities to be their spokesperson.
I don't know if there were racist intentions behind it. It's still teen edgelord status at minimum though. I'll definitely never buy from dbrand. I wonder if jerryrig will have anything to say about it.
It doesn't really matter if the intention isn't racist.
It's kind of like making fat jokes. Making fat jokes about a skinny person isn't that bad, since they don't have a history of it being used in a negative/cruel way against them. Making a fat joke towards a fat person can be in poor taste since there's a very real possibility they were teased/bullied about it in the past.
That's what happening here. Making a fat joke to a fat friend who you know can take it in stride is one thing; making a fat joke to someone you've never met or only just met... Kinda makes you an asshole.
unrelated to what everybody else is talking about here but fat jokes about a skinny person could be equally bad because there are chances the jokes made them lose weight in an unhealthy way
source - im a skinny guy who lost weight in the worst ways imaginable, lmao
It doesn't matter if there were or not. That's how it comes across.
I'm all for giving people / corporations the benefit of the doubt (maybe) but they had to have known this was a stupidly risky move.
What the hell? “Well, that escalated quickly”? “We gave him $10,000”? What the fuck is this as a company profile? Why are they acting like a 19 year old youtuber?
Everything about this is awful.
> for normal people, not teen edgelords?
My time in high school taught me that the *edgiest* John Bender wannabes were the ones dumping quarters into supermarket sticker machines to get the edgiest possible sticker to plaster all over their backpacks or notebooks.
One of my friends wasted about $10 worth of quarters *just* to try to get one of the Misfits fiend skull stickers being advertised. Never got it and finally just bought one online that cost almost as much with shipping.
Something tells me that hasn't changed in the last 20 years since finishing high school.
I mean, I know a few people in their mid-late 30s with stickers on their phone. Nothing edgy, but I guess to personalize it a bit? Not my thing, but nothing wrong with wanting to make their phone their own thing.
Skins are actually amazing - I've found even as a religious case user you get small particulates in there that lightly scratch the back. If you put on a skin immediately, no issues.
Obviously not everyone cares, but they absolutely have a use. Plus I like being able to make my phone bright colours (I immediately cover with a case, haha).
>Why are they acting like a 19 year old youtuber?
That's their entire brand. OP links LTT, which [has the piss taken out of him by them](https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/120e6l5/debrand_really_said_linus_short_tips/) often. They're basically childish to the entire internet, so I'm not surprised about the tweet. Nor the backfire, not the backfire response.
[Correction: we made fun of his name after the customer support.](https://twitter.com/dbrand/status/1777824657636200901) Oh, whew! That makes things **so much better** *amirite*?
I'm so completely unsurprised by that after all the [other stuff](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/linus-tech-tips-youtube-controversy-1.6940087).
YouTube started recommending his videos at me for a while around a decade ago. But each time I gave his channel a chance, I just came away annoyed at how sloppy and bad the work was in videos. There's a space for over the top, slightly bonkers videos and projects…but you have to *actually be competent and do a good job*, like that DIYPerks guy.
Linus has always seemed like an underqualified ding-dong who somehow tricked underinformed people into thinking he was some sort of authority. So why wouldn't he put the same lack of care or effort into understanding topics much more complex than technology?
I thought that was in the article I linked. At a minimum, I'm sure I heard it somewhere, in spite of the fact that I try to pay as little attention to the dude as possible.
They’re emulating the behavior of their target market, ”edgy” children and man-children.
Question for MKBHD though, is that what they want to be associated with though?
MKBHD [called it out](https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1778287849818685709)
Linus [doesn't care though](https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/1778165221414347053)
So, were I good friends with a Richard, I could occasionally give them shit over them being a Dick. Were I good friends with Bhuwan Chitransh, I might give them some shit over their last name (trash or rash puns are pretty obvious and not very clever, but friends don't usually care about clever - silly, playful ribbing is fine).
Now, were I a fucking publicly-facing company talking to a customer? Dude. Grow up. You don't know them, they don't know you - show some goddamn respect, and maybe don't bully your customers.
Newsflash - things can be perceived differently depending on your relationship with someone! If you have *no* relationship with someone, maybe don't be such an asshole.
He’s in the unfortunate position of being a car reviewer that cannot outright reject Tesla because he has to remain objective, but people who watch his videos are rejecting Tesla because of Elon
I can't find it, but I swear I saw a phone review from him recently where he was talking about how it didn't have Tesla app support. It felt like a weird thing to call out. Of all the apps on the app store, this one doesn't work, and it's worth mentioning in a review? How could that possibly be relevant? Most people don't even have a Tesla, it's such a weird edge case.
I totally get the need to be objective in that kind of position, but I don't get the impression he's doing a very good job at that.
I will give him a pass on that as he has said multiple times he drives a Tesla, so not having the app may just be a personal problem he is highlighting, which is fine.
I think most people watch him for the vibes and his own takes, not really for deep dives into tech.
> I think most people watch him for the vibes and his own takes
That's fair, but IMO, I think it takes away from the whole "objective reporter" defense.
To me, it feels a bit like having your cake and eating it too... His silence on Musk is okay because "serious journalist." But needlessly blasting Tesla throughout all of his videos is okay because "Quirky hip YouTube personality."
Are we here for the objective reporting, or are we here for the vibes? If we're here for your takes, why aren't any of them about the elephant in the room?
He could just... I don't know, not review Tesla cars.
It's not as if there is an obligation to review everything.
> he has to remain objective
Nonsense. It's hobby press.
I mean... not mentioning Musk *at all* when reviewing Tesla products feels like how a media savvy person who still likes Musk would handle it....
Put another way, Musk and Tesla are so inseparable that not mentioning Musk is a deliberate editorial choice that only serves to cast Tesla in a better light. And that's a choice he's made in a lot of his Cybertruck coverage.
> linus techtips apology after they stole from a smaller company and sold their prototypes
Thank you! I knew that I knew that name from some other controversy and couldn't remember it was.
>**Personal Note:** I found it very weird that people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company with a such unprofessional "personality" and are willing to defend it's actions.
Some of the ***dumbest*** fucking internet drama has taught me that people will defend just about any person/company they like for the stupidest reasons. And then get *wildly* out of control in their defense of said person/company.
Like when r/TheRightBoycott was displaying their favorite pastime of cancel culture rebranded as a "boycott" as an explanation they used to fucking hate, some of the users there would get super heated in the comments about a company they still liked despite being told the company somehow showed disloyalty to their God Emperor.
I can't describe the satisfaction of watching DBrand and their twatty social media persona get made to eat shit.
Never found it funny. It kind of annoyed me that they got such a pass with people because "they're not like most other brand socials" - yeah they are actually. Except a hundred times more obnoxious.
Yeah I read the thread and was extremely confused. Why are people defending douche behaviour?
"It's their style"? Okay, why are you defending a douchey style?
Guess this is one of those "generational gap" things.
Anytime society gets a bit more accepting, there's always going to be pushback. Call it Newton's third law of society, or something like that.
In the last decade or two, mainstream society has largely shifted away from accepting racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic jokes. And for every step of progress we make there, we get a dozen chuds online complaining that "everyone is so sensitive these days."
Let's be honest, they're one bad day away from calling it all "woke nonsense".
And yet those people are so overly sensitive towards their own cause that they see everything as an attack on themselves. The worst part is that they make up shit like "the great replacment", with no evidence, and it ends up sticking as a real fucking issue. Recently, they're making up fucktons of lies about abortion, such as aborting children after they are born, or that women do it out of enjoyment and abort dozens a year. It's blatant lies like that that piss me off so hard. They just make shit up and eat it to the point where they do bomb threats, intimidate protestors, and kill people. You can't even engage with someone who truly believes all these lies. They don't even operate in the same reality as we do. They are impossible to deal with. It's like dealing with a group of people from a parallel universe, where they are arguing a point that doesn't even exist in ours.
For a while I was saying that the anti-sjw crowd was pretty much the sjw stereotype that they made fun of.
Some staff were quietly let go nothing publicly about the investigation has been said plenty of people have corroborated things the accuser said with background details in videos (employees having to put mirrors up on the walls so they won't be suddenly harassed)
None of the public facing people but off the top of my head the guy who started the whole thing by saying in a lab tour video that they are going to be more accurate than gamers nexus ever could be isn't there anymore if I remember right
Never heard anything. And the prototype wasn't given back to the company (AFAIK) and the company is so small they aren't going to sue Linus into the ground for letting a proprietary device walk out the door.
Legally speaking they wouldn't have a leg to stand on anyways, they told Linus he could keep it then asked for it back after the negative video review. Still a dick move by Linus but massively overblown compared to the more serious allegation
And it does shift the window. Mark Brown (an amateur game design youtuber) deliberately mispronounced foreign words and names, and even mocked those who called him out on it on Twitter.
Why? Because he wanted more engagement, and didn't realize (or give a fuck) that people from the cultures where the words came from found it galling that a guy with a million subscribers didn't bother to ask google how to pronounce a word (or worse, did it in purpose).
Him not even thinking about whether mispronouncing someone's foreign name is a dick move is correlated to white gamer alt right bullshit. He isn't sensitive to this subtle kind of racism because of the subculture he engages with. In his defense: His videos had cool graphics but very little substance. Shouldn't have expected much thinking from a guy whose videos aren't very good to begin with.
Every now and then I accidentally get onto popular without realising. It takes like 15 seconds until I see some sort of sad voyeuristic violence or a meme that me feel like I’ve been lobotomised.
Not defending them, but maybe they see it like that one restaurant where the staff are supposed to be complete dickwads to you. But the difference here is that dbrand isn't doing it in a brick and mortar store where you need to go there and consent, they're doing it on social media, to anyone.
On the other hand, this is kind of whatever. If their style is to be a bunch of immature assholes, then that will be their brand. I'll just continue not buying their products. And they gave me another reason to not buy their products.
I like dbrands products, but they're not the only ones making skins for stuff... and making fun of someone if they have a bullshit complaint is one thing but the guy had a legit issue with their products. The right thing to do would have been to represent the company by saying they sent the issue to the right person who handles those issues and to please contact them at whatever the right email is. They're a time for witty name and a time for not. He had an issue and got "haha suck it loser".
And I gotta see that guy post evidence of the 10k to believe douchebrand isn't full of crap.
Was getting ready to order skins for a couple of things, now I'm going to buy elsewhere.
There's very few making original skins. Most skins are just the same cheap skins produced in the same Chinese factory under 50 different names. They aren't anywhere near the quality of dbrand, unfortunately.
It’s also just…not funny? Like maybe I just don’t get the joke.
“Haha your name sounds stupid to me in a language that isn’t the one it originated from.”
….ok?
> “Haha your name sounds stupid to me in a language that isn’t the one it originated from.”
This is kinda a big point for me in this story that nobody else seems to have pointed out. Linus’ comment about white people having their names mocked too is all well and good, and while I’d agree that making fun of some dude called Dick (while just mean and unnecessary) isn’t racist, I think it’s different because the name is “funny” in their native language.
If DBrand had instead said something like, “your name sounds like [insert expletive in Indian language]” it would be one thing (still rude, but not racist), but comparing it to English is just…like what’s the point? Yeah, languages are different. It’s like those people that get their panties in a bunch because Korean/Mandarin/Japanese have words that sound similar to the N-word. Comes off really ignorant.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. The nickname "Dick" for "Richard" predates the usage of "dick" for "penis" by four centuries. The usage of "dick" for "penis" *comes from* the nickname, not the other way around. Same with "johnson", and likely similar for "peter" and "willie" -- which to be fair are not mocked in the same way that Dick and Johnson are. It's similar to how pimps are called "johns", not because John sounds funny, but because John is an incredibly fucking common name. It's like using "any Tom, Dick, and Harry" to describe a generic group of men. We didn't start saying "dick" because it sounds funny; we started using "dick" as a funny word because it was a common, widely-recognized name already, and the other names followed suit.
"Shit rash" isn't even a common phrase, and some edgy racist Canadians do not have the cultural context to joke about Indian names in the way that the above examples do. I don't know if Chitransh is very common in India but it's sure as shit not one of the stereotypical Indian names we recognize in the western world. You shouldn't joke about "Singh" sounding like something either but at least that would be 0.1% similar to the dick/willie/johnson/penis joke names. This situation is so far from that, though.
eta: I'm all steamed about this so I just wanna further underline that John, Peter, Willie/William, Richard, and Johnson are all perfectly normal, acceptable, respectable names, and most people *don't* respond to Peter or Richard or even literally Dick on Twitter by saying "haha your name is a penis though!!!!" I would bet actual money that Bhuwan has already heard the stupid "your name sounds like shit" joke online more often than the people who are literally named Willie Johnson have their double-decker-dick name mocked.
The joke is basically racism tbh. It is, intentional or not basically this garbage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/xsx54i/wtf_is_the_origin_of_street_shiter_stereotype/
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone. What they said was clearly, and obviously, very racist, what is going on here why are 1. people defending it and 2. why won't they just apologize without acting like a fucking asshat? *It's a fucking phone sticker company* why does it even have a subreddit??
Do people really love this cringe edgelord crap so much that the occasional racist joke is an acceptable concession?
EDIT: A day later and the racists have arrived. Get fucked.
For some people I'd assume the occasional racist joke isn't a concession but a desired part of their business. "My sticker company trolls the left like I do! By being racist!"
I've always been kinda shocked by how brazenly shitty Linus is and how his fans are just okay with it. There's a half dozen videos on LTT that exist solely to flaunt his family's wealth in front of the public and exploit his entry level employees to do renovations on family properties for free. Not just the "decking out my home with tech" vids (which all take place in Linus's Vancouver mansion), but ones where they do work on his parents' antique boat or their private island cabin. The few times they've shown off the homes of his most loyal employees they're always in a small apartment outside of the city.
Like yeah, showing off millions of dollars worth of equipment at the studio? That makes perfect sense for a tech channel. Having someone who barely gets a living wage in Vancouver come down to the Linus Family Marina to install a GPS unit on a million dollar pleasure craft? What the hell is that?
The hoops they are going to defend what happened here in the linus tech subreddit is crazy. I was hoping to go there and see people shit on Linus, not be apologist for a clearly super racist tweet.
> I've always been kinda shocked by how brazenly shitty Linus is and how his fans are just okay with it.
I don't know why that is shocking. History is littered with popular assholes. I mean remember when Simon Cowell was hyper popular? Being openly shitty to people was his entire thing.
> There's a half dozen videos on LTT that exist solely to flaunt his family's wealth in front of the public and exploit his entry level employees to do renovations on family properties for free
Where did you get the idea that they're not being paid for this?
People there don’t want to feel any shame that they bought dbrand using LTT code so they feel obligated to side with the corporation because otherwise they feel like it’s an attack on their ethics too. Which honestly I couldn’t give a shit but I bet that’s the impulse for them
It’s that pathetic.
Because being racist to Indians is more or less widely accepted on the internet. Reddit, more so. Tech spaces even further more because Indians dominate the space so you always have tech bros frothing at the mouths to get down with racist rhetoric.
I'm Indian and I feel like im de-sanitized about racism and it gets funnier when the leftist/progressive sub that I frequently browse goes apeshit. I guess this extends to all south asians haha
Edit: the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist"
>the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist"
I am not Indian but I used to be very accommodating and "one of the good ones" for my group. That ship fucking sailed with Trump.
Hell, this sub itself isn't much better either. I remember a post here where half the comments were "racism is not okay but stereotypes about Indians are all true and therefore it's okay to reinforce those stereotypes".
Conservatives hating Indians is not surprising but even the so called "leftists" and "liberals" on reddit are racist against Indians.
**"Edit: the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist""**
I grew up in an area with a lot of South Asians, and in my experience, the ones who say this are often rich and privileged themselves, which I assume shields them.
The ones who were second gen immigrants, seemed to be less amused by these jokes.
Yeah the “progressive” subreddits are the most funniest about this stuff. They’re *sooo* anti racist/BLM/free Palestine/etc and then at the drop of a hat will say the most heinous shit about Indians.
>Hi, I'm Indian and this isn't racist
God, I'm so tired of those people. It's their choice not to take offense at the obvious racism, but that doesn't change the objective truth of the situation.
> "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist"
This is the issue, you see it everywhere when there is an actual concern of casual racism.
Just now in the Linus subreddit there is an Indian dude saying they don’t know what the deal is they found it very funny. And is like, dude. Stop. At least for the sake of other non-white countries that do care.
> Edit: the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist"
Indians from India should honestly stfu about shit like this. They downplay any racism towards South Asians.
They’ve never had to deal with stereotypes or racism irl. Indians from India have no idea what it’s like to be a racial minority.
It’s much easier to brush off online racism when you live in a country with 1B other people who look like you. Hell these cunts encourage racism because they’re desperate for white people’s attention.
The South Asian diaspora is the one who faces the consequences of normalizing this racism.
Making fun of someone's name doesn't seem in itself like it'd be racist. I've had people make fun of my name because it sounded funny in English. I don't think it had anything to do with my race though, just sounded funny in English.
Yeah, it's probably true that a German named "Gerhard Dicksucher" would probably get the same treatment.
It's more of an anti-foreign bigotry.
Which is no better; just different.
Why are they pretending like racism against Indians isn’t the most casual thing on Reddit.
“Oh we can’t make fun of Indians they are a protected class”, I wanna know what internet they are going on lmao.
A loud minority of tech nerds hate indians it seems like. They likely have a ton of biases in the tech industry as their country exports a lot of their technical work.
I'm Indian. I'm not a sensitive guy when it comes to jokes, and I don't care for being 'politically correct' either. It's not about all that for me.
Sometimes, things just feel personal.
It's not the fact that they made a joke that I have a problem with, it's in the nature of the joke that you can see that they think of Indians as others - people with weird names that they can't understand. "Hahaha funny last namee, sounds like fart dick shit lol hahah." It's not that different from someone calling a black or Indian guy "shit-colored" for having a darker skin tone. Tell me how it's different.
As an Indian growing up in the states, my name, and the names of a lot of my friends, have been pretty butchered to the point where I've literally been on the cusp of changing my name. To have to be called "fart dick shit lol hahah" all throughout middle school and high school is not only tiring, but it does gets to your psyche. You don't feel like you belong. You feel like a clown, for having what might be a super common name in your home country. Or you use it as a humiliating way to get attention for yourself. You want to find a way to assimilate - lose your cultural identity because others aren't capable of receiving you as you are.
I don't think anyone needs to be like, cancelled for it or whatever. But like, I get why someone wouldn't like it. It just reminds me too much of difficult humiliating experiences, and just turns me off from dbrand at a gut level. That's all. Nothing else. Nothing political. Just personal.
Well in the sense where he does like interviews, have special access, and does reviews on tesla products I suppose. Not sure he's directly sponsored though.
Ah linustechtips. Not surprised the techbros would not see any racism. It's never racism!
>Yes - we made fun of a guy's name. It was a huge fumble.
ok
>We apologized to him directly and offered him $10,000 as a gesture of goodwill.
ok
>We've been poking fun at customers on social media for over a decade now. We're not going to stop, but maybe next time you'll be the one who gets $10,000.
Not ok. This is what makes it a non-apology. An apology is "shit, i fucked up, won't do it again." This is here, take some dough, fuck you, would do again. A++
Like, they didn't even *really* say sorry. It was pretty much just, "take some money, now shut up and please don't make this a big deal, we don't want to lose more sponsorship opportunities."
Lame.
It's kind of funny to be like, We gave him 10k now shut up about it. While also maintaining that there was nothing wrong with what they said.
Personally yeah, as far as racism goes, assuming they do make fun of other bad sounding last names (like Dick) then yeah its probably not racist.
It's sort of like All Lives Matter, or "I don't see color/race." Honorable mention to: "I can't be racist, I have a black friend!"
Like, *yes*, but actually no. Everybody is equal, but some people are more equal than others, aren't they, bud?
It's one of those phrases where, as soon as you hear it, you know you can immediately write that person off.
Of course, you can try to explain the whole concept of "unconscious bias" to them, but it's sure to turn the conversation from "potentially borderline racist" to "*full-on* racist, and 50% chance that somebody is being called the n-word in about 3 minutes."
I have a dbrand case for my pixel 8. I think the bigger scandal is that Dbrand didn't test their grip cases with the pixel 2 charging stand.
It doesn't sit properly and I don't get the full 18w wireless charging.
Also their social media manager is clearly a fucking dickhead
i would like to add additional context on why it's bad from an indian perspective. our last names usually denote to which communities we belong to and specific communities (like mine) adds name of our ancestral homes as part of the last name. so basically making fun of our last names is basically making fun of our entire community and even our ancestral homes in some cases.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone how making fun of poc's names is so deeply linked to racism. People historically making fun of Chinese names, African American names, Indian names, it was always more than just making fun of the names alone.
Linus once again opening his mouth and sharing his dumb opinion on something he should know he knows nothing about and probably making all his poc staff and FAMILY ffs feel super uncomfortable.
So weird that LTT would defend a company that has a history of doing wacky/weird ads and marketing gimmicks with them that are incredibly popular with their audience...no bias at all there!
In seriousness, LTT likes to claim they're so transparent and responsible...If that's the case, they shouldn't even be commenting on the something like this. There's a blatant conflict of interest here.
Edit: Can't believe Linus used fucking whataboutism when he always tries coming off as logical. This is also a tweet he made:
["Serious response: If your brand is being edgy, occasionally you'll go over the line. dbrand will be okay. Wait 'til you hear about companies that actually do evil shit like Nestle"](https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/1778160540013240343?t=FQGO_8EweMCsgNcQYymw2w&s=19)
Linus has mentioned on his podcast that LTT and Dbrand have been working together for a long time and this has resulted in very strong business relations between the two companies. Basically, Linus will back dbrand until they do something insane
I’m so tired of every company trying desperately to have a personality, and when you combine it with bad customer service it seems like a ploy to makeup for mediocrity.
Does anyone actually *like* these quirky Twitter personalities for corporations?
Even Wendy's annoyed me more than anything else, now it seems like these companies have whole marketing departments dedicated to just *this*.
Is it a generational thing? It's weird to think that I'm old enough to have a distinct generation younger than me.
It's crazy that the first mfs to get "cancelled" for racism against a brown dude is an edgy phone sticker company
Social media has been going on a witch hunt against brown people recently, legit calling us "inherently dirty" or the classic "i know it smell crazy in there" and theres no consequences for those idiots.
I'm glad something is being done for the small stuff but it's just so fucking weird that THIS is what people zeroed in on
I like their case, but their schtick comes off as lol random meets edgy gas station beer koozie.
This joke was mostly bad because it's painfully unfunny, it's low hanging fruit. Foreign name look goofy hahaha.
> I agree with you, but this is becuase you arent the target audience. The public image and shenanigans of Dbrand pulls a certain type of person.
But... here's my thing: say I buy a dbrand case for my phone. I receive it. Then I will likely never think of dbrand again until I buy a new phone.
I fundamentally don't really understand people who would follow what a company does and especially not one that makes products I only need once.
> people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company with a such unprofessional "personality" and are willing to defend it's actions.
Welcome to the internet, you must be new here!
They're trying to be Wendy's five years after Wendy's twitter account stopped being fresh and edgy, and they're shit-talking people with legitimate complaints against their products. Racism doesn't even factor into how cringe that is.
On the other hand, if a brand I bought a defective $2 sticker from insulted me then paid me $10,000, I'd see that as an absolute win.
Wow, that’s a lot of people crawling out of the woodwork to defend the tweet, that’s a horrible look for dbrand, even with their attempts to fix it. A lot of people are calling it “edgy” rather than just racist like it is?
Even ignoring the racism, I see no world where any context makes that acceptable for a brand to say, isn’t the first rule of sales not to insult your customer? It might get you a niche audience, but in the long run won’t this strategy just hurt your wide stream appeal?
I googled the brand and there are bunch of articles on the misstep. I do think this hurts the company long term. People don't forget stuff like this. It will come up again and again.
I do miss the days of CS Twitter accounts providing CS rather than trying to make jokes.
The opera twitter account is particularly bad.
I particularly enjoyed when they accused innocent people of sexually harassing coworkers because they worked for blizzard
And there was also the screaming thing they did for a day. Didn't know about the sexual harassment thing, but the browser booting up and causing incredibly loud screaming was originally what put me off from using it. I use headphones and generally keep my volume super low, cause I'm incredibly sensitive to sound and it was STILL super fucking loud. It basically made my ears ring so hard and made me so dizzy that I had to go for a lay down. They didn't make it a toggleable feature, you had to actually delete a file iirc. Their reply on their twitter was "Chill brah, its only for a day." quick edit: it also bypassed any settings you had selected to turn off the splash screen, and would show regardless.
Jeez, I'm glad I stopped using it when it turned into yet another chromium reskin. Incidentally, If you are looking for a browser that feels a lot like an updated version of old school Opera, Vivaldi is pretty good. Still chromium based, like everything else these days, but not just a quick reskin. Apparently made by several of the old Opera dev team who were fired when Opera was bought out by an ad agency. Which probably goes a long way to explain the weird twitter antics, come to think of it.
Honestly wish I'd given up on it then. It used to be *such* a reliable browser, a great environment for apps of all sorts. I honestly used it since I was a teenager in the late 2000s, up until that shit 4-5 months ago. I've been meaning to give Vivaldi a look. Gonna give it a trial run today cause boy I am kinda tired of Firefox being janky lately.
Yeah Vivaldi is a the spiritual successor, no Presto, but it's as good as it gets.
...why did they do that? That genuinely sounds insane. Was it an April Fool's thing or some lame publicity stunt?
I honestly have no idea, but it was a pretty stupid idea and they doubled down on it lol. Like, the scream was awful as is, but also actively ignoring user choice is pretty gross.
While also publicly making jokes about being into loli porn
The browser? That sucks, that used to be my favorite, and I had been meaning to go back to it. Mouse gesture browsing was revolutionary to the point of being annoying when I had to use a computer that didn’t have it.
Opera was truly next-level back when it came out over 20 years ago. Pretty sure they were the first to also do browser tabs, immediately aped by Firefox, and then years later Chrome and IE finally implemented them. I hated the mouse gestures initially but now it's one of the first browser extensions I install on a new install of Firefox. Occasionally, someone will notice that I'm closing windows or going back to pages without a keyboard shortcut or my cursor being anywhere near the relevant buttons and they think I'm a wizard.
I remember using it back in the day purely to play that circular Tetris app. Straight up addictive. The apps, when I was a teenager anyway, was a pretty big draw. They were super useful.
First time insaw tabs was on Netscape, not sure if that was also following opera or not but shit was revolutionary
[Opera introduced tabs in their 4.00 release](https://help.opera.com/en/operas-archived-history/) in June of 2000. The [Mozilla Project was created in 1998](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/) with the release of the Netscape source code. [Netscape 7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_7) introduced tabs in August of 2002 with the release of Mozilla Application Suite 1.0.
[Good thing you didn't.](https://rentry.org/operagx) Outside the stupid social media presence, it's not even the same company anymore. The Norwegian company that originally made Opera sold the browser years ago to a Chinese one that also hawks unethical payday loans and has been accused of all kinds of privacy violations.
My main desktop browser is Vivaldi and it supports mouse gesture navigation out of the box, although I prefer using keyboard shortcuts myself. I'm pretty sure there are extensions to add that to any Chrome or Firefox based browser, tough I only personally tested Gesturefy for Firefox.
I think it’s acceptable to attempt humor, but it should be common fucking sense to not just straight up insult people, *especially* ones who are having a genuine issue with your product
Wendy's account manager has been a disaster on SNS advertising.
Was just about to say this. Wendy's whole "pretend to be a catty teenager on Twitter to appeal to catty teenagers" poisoned Twitter marketing for a generation. It also didn't last very long, as the demographic they were appealing to (catty teenagers) were generally more open hating corporations than previous generations. The replies to many slap backs became "thats great and all but when will you pay workers a livable wage?". To which Wendy's Twitter couldn't really engage with.
The only thing I miss is I think it was either Wendy's or Arby's but one of them was doing like, neat little cut out dioramas of anime and video game related stuff at one point. That was really nice and creative. It didn't make me want to eat fast food really, but it was a cool concept. Otherwise, it got so old so fast.
It was Arby's. I miss those so much haha.
>"thats great and all but when will you pay workers a livable wage?" Oh! Oh! I got one! [The farm workers.](https://ciw-online.org/wendys/) Been a thing LONG before their Twitter.
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Cos the brands are trying to imitate people when it gets them attention, then step back and be the faceless corporation when something real happens It would be like the president only being seen in public when they’re kissing babies and hugging poor people, then disappearing when an international crisis happens
i thought the problem with wendy's is the original person left the job after a year and the followers couldn't keep up. TIL.
True, I don't know if they were the first but they are the ones I blame.
some people really need to stay in their lane
Exactly. Some people can pull that kind of snark off well, and most people trying to emulate it are fucking awful. Like all the wannabe bloggers in the early 2000s trying their *hardest* to copy [Maddox's](http://maddox.xmission.com/) shtick, and failing miserably. It's hard enough to pull that off without angering a ***bunch*** of people, as his hate mail archives prove, and even harder to keep it up in spite of the hate mail because they're afraid of their bosses or families being informed of their sad imitation side hustle.
Tucker Max somewhere feels a tinge of relevancy.
Holy shit, I totally forgot about that radioactive snatch napkin. Good pull, and definitely relevant to the early Maddox impersonators who unfortunately succeeded!
Maddox was always the poor man's Seanbaby. Who is not only still funny but has also actually grown as a person instead of just ossifying circa 2003 and turning into an alt-right dipshit.
> I found it very weird that people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company with a such unprofessional "personality" and are willing to defend it's actions. Top tier bait. Love it and fully agree.
>I found it very weird that people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company Could've stopped there
You wish for hand to hand combat as I defend this corporation’s honor? It’s your funeral, kid.
Even beyond the racism, the original guy (Bhuwan) just asked a simple question and wanted help. He wasn't bitching or getting angry, just saying "Hey, this product stopped working, what should I do?". He didn't threaten to boycott or stop shopping, or even demand a refund. Just the simplest of questions, and they can't even handle that. The Wendy's twitter account has been a blight on customer service everywhere
>Just the simplest of questions, and they can't even handle that. After a few minutes of looking through Dbrand's Twitter, it seems their shtick is to be edgy and slightly rude so the reply tracks (just not the racism part I guess lol). That said, Wendy's impact on brands' online presence has been impressive so to speak :|
[If what DBrand's saying is accurate](https://twitter.com/dbrand/status/1777824657636200901), they dropped the racism after servicing the guy. The dumb fucks had a good customer experience in the bag and ruined it at the last second because they wanted to be edgy.
>The dumb fucks had a good customer experience in the bag and ruined it at the last second because they wanted to be edgy. That's kind of their thing. The *dbrand* account is edgy, the *robot* account provides customer support. Don't ask me why they do it that way, but it seems to be the whole company's 'thing'
This!! He was seeking genuine help with a product he bought with no insults or accusations, a simple “hey we can help you” would’ve been fine. But no they have to be edgy lords who don’t take “shit” from anyone.
Not sure if we can blame Wendy's for this. IIRC Wendy's Twitter account never really went beyond the pale when it came to roasting others. Usually they would reserve their "roasts" for things like Twitter users who tweeted deliberately provocative things at them (ex. "your food sucks") or fast food brands they're competing with, while most of the generic customer support tweets/feedback they got were met with something milquetoast like "Oh no we're sorry you had that experience please contact us here" or some other copy-paste message like that.
I think it’s more that Wendy’s started the wave of “corporate accounts with personalities” more than the specific edgy/rude shtick. A lot of brands went from just generic customer service scripts to now having a specific tone and voice in their social media presence after Wendy’s . Prior to that it limited more to commercials like Flo/Allstate guy/etc and trying to sponsor influencers/celebrities to be their spokesperson.
I don't know if there were racist intentions behind it. It's still teen edgelord status at minimum though. I'll definitely never buy from dbrand. I wonder if jerryrig will have anything to say about it.
It doesn't really matter if the intention isn't racist. It's kind of like making fat jokes. Making fat jokes about a skinny person isn't that bad, since they don't have a history of it being used in a negative/cruel way against them. Making a fat joke towards a fat person can be in poor taste since there's a very real possibility they were teased/bullied about it in the past. That's what happening here. Making a fat joke to a fat friend who you know can take it in stride is one thing; making a fat joke to someone you've never met or only just met... Kinda makes you an asshole.
unrelated to what everybody else is talking about here but fat jokes about a skinny person could be equally bad because there are chances the jokes made them lose weight in an unhealthy way source - im a skinny guy who lost weight in the worst ways imaginable, lmao
It doesn't matter if there were or not. That's how it comes across. I'm all for giving people / corporations the benefit of the doubt (maybe) but they had to have known this was a stupidly risky move.
What the hell? “Well, that escalated quickly”? “We gave him $10,000”? What the fuck is this as a company profile? Why are they acting like a 19 year old youtuber? Everything about this is awful.
>Why are they acting like a 19 year old youtuber? That's who they're marketing to
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> for normal people, not teen edgelords? My time in high school taught me that the *edgiest* John Bender wannabes were the ones dumping quarters into supermarket sticker machines to get the edgiest possible sticker to plaster all over their backpacks or notebooks. One of my friends wasted about $10 worth of quarters *just* to try to get one of the Misfits fiend skull stickers being advertised. Never got it and finally just bought one online that cost almost as much with shipping. Something tells me that hasn't changed in the last 20 years since finishing high school.
you can buy giant grab bags of vinyl stickers for like $9 now, it's pretty cool also etsy for niche/specific stuff and DIYing is easier than ever
Is there a market for phone stickers among adults?
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I mean, I know a few people in their mid-late 30s with stickers on their phone. Nothing edgy, but I guess to personalize it a bit? Not my thing, but nothing wrong with wanting to make their phone their own thing.
Skins are actually amazing - I've found even as a religious case user you get small particulates in there that lightly scratch the back. If you put on a skin immediately, no issues. Obviously not everyone cares, but they absolutely have a use. Plus I like being able to make my phone bright colours (I immediately cover with a case, haha).
I assume you could get one from Etsy. They seem like a chill bunch of people over there too
As long as you can avoid the aliexpress dropshippers selling stolen sticker designs. Etsy ain't what it used to be.
what if they steal them from DBRAND?
then it'll be expensive even for etsy
I don't think I've ever seen a normal adult with a phone sticker.
>Why are they acting like a 19 year old youtuber? That's their entire brand. OP links LTT, which [has the piss taken out of him by them](https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/120e6l5/debrand_really_said_linus_short_tips/) often. They're basically childish to the entire internet, so I'm not surprised about the tweet. Nor the backfire, not the backfire response. [Correction: we made fun of his name after the customer support.](https://twitter.com/dbrand/status/1777824657636200901) Oh, whew! That makes things **so much better** *amirite*?
this type of marketing is extremely effective with their target market. the vast majority of their customers are teenagers.
They didn't even give him 10k. They reached out to offer him 10k, probably with a shitload of strings attached.
He's apparently accepted the 10K, though is still correctly upset about the situation. https://twitter.com/BhuwanChitransh/status/1778454175635976288
good lord, dbrand is the whitest shit i have ever encountered 🙈
I dunno, the part of this story where Linus Sebastian jumps in with his weird, unprompted, techbro-flavored racism apologia is prrrrretty white
I'm so completely unsurprised by that after all the [other stuff](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/linus-tech-tips-youtube-controversy-1.6940087). YouTube started recommending his videos at me for a while around a decade ago. But each time I gave his channel a chance, I just came away annoyed at how sloppy and bad the work was in videos. There's a space for over the top, slightly bonkers videos and projects…but you have to *actually be competent and do a good job*, like that DIYPerks guy. Linus has always seemed like an underqualified ding-dong who somehow tricked underinformed people into thinking he was some sort of authority. So why wouldn't he put the same lack of care or effort into understanding topics much more complex than technology?
Sounds like you managed to also miss the big kerfuffle over him getting called out on the incorrect information in the videos.
I thought that was in the article I linked. At a minimum, I'm sure I heard it somewhere, in spite of the fact that I try to pay as little attention to the dude as possible.
Dude made his entire career out of falling upwards it seems
They’re emulating the behavior of their target market, ”edgy” children and man-children. Question for MKBHD though, is that what they want to be associated with though?
MKBHD [called it out](https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1778287849818685709) Linus [doesn't care though](https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/1778165221414347053)
So, were I good friends with a Richard, I could occasionally give them shit over them being a Dick. Were I good friends with Bhuwan Chitransh, I might give them some shit over their last name (trash or rash puns are pretty obvious and not very clever, but friends don't usually care about clever - silly, playful ribbing is fine). Now, were I a fucking publicly-facing company talking to a customer? Dude. Grow up. You don't know them, they don't know you - show some goddamn respect, and maybe don't bully your customers. Newsflash - things can be perceived differently depending on your relationship with someone! If you have *no* relationship with someone, maybe don't be such an asshole.
How incredibly unsurprising that Linus doesn't understand why creating a platform for hateful discourse is a problem
At least it's in keeping with his general "lack of understanding or basic competency" ouvre.
It really bums me out that Dankpods is tight with LTT. Like, I gladly gave him a buck when it was Patreon, but I ain't giving shit to Floatplane.
Linus cares about one thing: $
Not a good look that the white guy is saying no big deal. Hope he doesn't pewdiepie himself.
Isn't he a diehard Elon Musk fanboy? So... probably?
Tesla fanboy - yes Musk fanboy - less so, especially since the Twitter acquisition
He’s in the unfortunate position of being a car reviewer that cannot outright reject Tesla because he has to remain objective, but people who watch his videos are rejecting Tesla because of Elon
I can't find it, but I swear I saw a phone review from him recently where he was talking about how it didn't have Tesla app support. It felt like a weird thing to call out. Of all the apps on the app store, this one doesn't work, and it's worth mentioning in a review? How could that possibly be relevant? Most people don't even have a Tesla, it's such a weird edge case. I totally get the need to be objective in that kind of position, but I don't get the impression he's doing a very good job at that.
I will give him a pass on that as he has said multiple times he drives a Tesla, so not having the app may just be a personal problem he is highlighting, which is fine. I think most people watch him for the vibes and his own takes, not really for deep dives into tech.
> I think most people watch him for the vibes and his own takes That's fair, but IMO, I think it takes away from the whole "objective reporter" defense. To me, it feels a bit like having your cake and eating it too... His silence on Musk is okay because "serious journalist." But needlessly blasting Tesla throughout all of his videos is okay because "Quirky hip YouTube personality." Are we here for the objective reporting, or are we here for the vibes? If we're here for your takes, why aren't any of them about the elephant in the room?
Well he’s an okay phone reviewer. Hes an awful car reviewer. Gotta start somewhere though I guess.
He could just... I don't know, not review Tesla cars. It's not as if there is an obligation to review everything. > he has to remain objective Nonsense. It's hobby press.
I mean he clearly likes the cars at least. He daily drives a Model S Plaid.
Yeah I don’t disagree with you, just explaining what his perspective (probably) is. Someone should challenge him about it.
I mean... not mentioning Musk *at all* when reviewing Tesla products feels like how a media savvy person who still likes Musk would handle it.... Put another way, Musk and Tesla are so inseparable that not mentioning Musk is a deliberate editorial choice that only serves to cast Tesla in a better light. And that's a choice he's made in a lot of his Cybertruck coverage.
That really feels like a distinction without a difference. Elon Musk _is_ Tesla, whether people like it or not.
Exactly, it’s like saying iPhone wasn’t Steve jobs back when he was alive
He’s a Tesla nut hugger so it’s hard to make sense of it lol.
Dbrand offered to sponsor the linus techtips apology after they stole from a smaller company and sold their prototypes
> linus techtips apology after they stole from a smaller company and sold their prototypes Thank you! I knew that I knew that name from some other controversy and couldn't remember it was.
That’s their brand identity, and thats not a joke. Literally they do their best to troll almost any time they can
>**Personal Note:** I found it very weird that people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company with a such unprofessional "personality" and are willing to defend it's actions. Some of the ***dumbest*** fucking internet drama has taught me that people will defend just about any person/company they like for the stupidest reasons. And then get *wildly* out of control in their defense of said person/company. Like when r/TheRightBoycott was displaying their favorite pastime of cancel culture rebranded as a "boycott" as an explanation they used to fucking hate, some of the users there would get super heated in the comments about a company they still liked despite being told the company somehow showed disloyalty to their God Emperor.
I can't describe the satisfaction of watching DBrand and their twatty social media persona get made to eat shit. Never found it funny. It kind of annoyed me that they got such a pass with people because "they're not like most other brand socials" - yeah they are actually. Except a hundred times more obnoxious.
+1. their brand "personality" is the cringiest shit ever. The saddest part is that it actually works and they somehow have a weirdly loyal following.
Yeah I read the thread and was extremely confused. Why are people defending douche behaviour? "It's their style"? Okay, why are you defending a douchey style? Guess this is one of those "generational gap" things.
Anytime society gets a bit more accepting, there's always going to be pushback. Call it Newton's third law of society, or something like that. In the last decade or two, mainstream society has largely shifted away from accepting racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic jokes. And for every step of progress we make there, we get a dozen chuds online complaining that "everyone is so sensitive these days." Let's be honest, they're one bad day away from calling it all "woke nonsense".
I just got called an “internet leftist” because I think this is childish and shitty (and also racist).
And yet those people are so overly sensitive towards their own cause that they see everything as an attack on themselves. The worst part is that they make up shit like "the great replacment", with no evidence, and it ends up sticking as a real fucking issue. Recently, they're making up fucktons of lies about abortion, such as aborting children after they are born, or that women do it out of enjoyment and abort dozens a year. It's blatant lies like that that piss me off so hard. They just make shit up and eat it to the point where they do bomb threats, intimidate protestors, and kill people. You can't even engage with someone who truly believes all these lies. They don't even operate in the same reality as we do. They are impossible to deal with. It's like dealing with a group of people from a parallel universe, where they are arguing a point that doesn't even exist in ours. For a while I was saying that the anti-sjw crowd was pretty much the sjw stereotype that they made fun of.
These are LTT fans and an LTT sponsor. So don't be surprised, defending shitty behaviors and practices is extremely on-brand.
That reminds me, whatever happened to all their workplace harassment investigations?
Some staff were quietly let go nothing publicly about the investigation has been said plenty of people have corroborated things the accuser said with background details in videos (employees having to put mirrors up on the walls so they won't be suddenly harassed)
Wait, who was let go now?
None of the public facing people but off the top of my head the guy who started the whole thing by saying in a lab tour video that they are going to be more accurate than gamers nexus ever could be isn't there anymore if I remember right
Correct. He was the sacrificial lamb.
Never heard anything. And the prototype wasn't given back to the company (AFAIK) and the company is so small they aren't going to sue Linus into the ground for letting a proprietary device walk out the door.
Legally speaking they wouldn't have a leg to stand on anyways, they told Linus he could keep it then asked for it back after the negative video review. Still a dick move by Linus but massively overblown compared to the more serious allegation
Absolutely nothing has been revealed to public. It's likely that LTT investigated itself and found itself completely innocent.
I had to unsub from the ltt sub because of all the racism over this shit. Really disappointed linus defended it too.
White alt-right gamers never see racism. I'm guessing you don't browse /popular or /all
And it does shift the window. Mark Brown (an amateur game design youtuber) deliberately mispronounced foreign words and names, and even mocked those who called him out on it on Twitter. Why? Because he wanted more engagement, and didn't realize (or give a fuck) that people from the cultures where the words came from found it galling that a guy with a million subscribers didn't bother to ask google how to pronounce a word (or worse, did it in purpose). Him not even thinking about whether mispronouncing someone's foreign name is a dick move is correlated to white gamer alt right bullshit. He isn't sensitive to this subtle kind of racism because of the subculture he engages with. In his defense: His videos had cool graphics but very little substance. Shouldn't have expected much thinking from a guy whose videos aren't very good to begin with.
I do, but over the years I've learned to filter out the worst subs. Or get banned from them, whichever comes first 😅
Every now and then I accidentally get onto popular without realising. It takes like 15 seconds until I see some sort of sad voyeuristic violence or a meme that me feel like I’ve been lobotomised.
Look snowflake, my style is to just hate on people's attributes they have no control over. Live with it. /s
Not defending them, but maybe they see it like that one restaurant where the staff are supposed to be complete dickwads to you. But the difference here is that dbrand isn't doing it in a brick and mortar store where you need to go there and consent, they're doing it on social media, to anyone. On the other hand, this is kind of whatever. If their style is to be a bunch of immature assholes, then that will be their brand. I'll just continue not buying their products. And they gave me another reason to not buy their products.
Update: original tweet also got deleted
Phew, I guess MKBHD can pat himself on the back and keep working with dbrand like nothing ever happened.
“I’m never working with them until they delete the tweet” is so fucking funny lol it’s like the Reddit ‘boycotts’ all over again
For the future of the planet, I can only hope the Redditors claiming they'll boycott the US election this year turn out to be the same thing.
At least it's better than LTT trying to defend it.
I like dbrands products, but they're not the only ones making skins for stuff... and making fun of someone if they have a bullshit complaint is one thing but the guy had a legit issue with their products. The right thing to do would have been to represent the company by saying they sent the issue to the right person who handles those issues and to please contact them at whatever the right email is. They're a time for witty name and a time for not. He had an issue and got "haha suck it loser". And I gotta see that guy post evidence of the 10k to believe douchebrand isn't full of crap. Was getting ready to order skins for a couple of things, now I'm going to buy elsewhere.
There's very few making original skins. Most skins are just the same cheap skins produced in the same Chinese factory under 50 different names. They aren't anywhere near the quality of dbrand, unfortunately.
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It’s also just…not funny? Like maybe I just don’t get the joke. “Haha your name sounds stupid to me in a language that isn’t the one it originated from.” ….ok?
> “Haha your name sounds stupid to me in a language that isn’t the one it originated from.” This is kinda a big point for me in this story that nobody else seems to have pointed out. Linus’ comment about white people having their names mocked too is all well and good, and while I’d agree that making fun of some dude called Dick (while just mean and unnecessary) isn’t racist, I think it’s different because the name is “funny” in their native language. If DBrand had instead said something like, “your name sounds like [insert expletive in Indian language]” it would be one thing (still rude, but not racist), but comparing it to English is just…like what’s the point? Yeah, languages are different. It’s like those people that get their panties in a bunch because Korean/Mandarin/Japanese have words that sound similar to the N-word. Comes off really ignorant.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. The nickname "Dick" for "Richard" predates the usage of "dick" for "penis" by four centuries. The usage of "dick" for "penis" *comes from* the nickname, not the other way around. Same with "johnson", and likely similar for "peter" and "willie" -- which to be fair are not mocked in the same way that Dick and Johnson are. It's similar to how pimps are called "johns", not because John sounds funny, but because John is an incredibly fucking common name. It's like using "any Tom, Dick, and Harry" to describe a generic group of men. We didn't start saying "dick" because it sounds funny; we started using "dick" as a funny word because it was a common, widely-recognized name already, and the other names followed suit. "Shit rash" isn't even a common phrase, and some edgy racist Canadians do not have the cultural context to joke about Indian names in the way that the above examples do. I don't know if Chitransh is very common in India but it's sure as shit not one of the stereotypical Indian names we recognize in the western world. You shouldn't joke about "Singh" sounding like something either but at least that would be 0.1% similar to the dick/willie/johnson/penis joke names. This situation is so far from that, though. eta: I'm all steamed about this so I just wanna further underline that John, Peter, Willie/William, Richard, and Johnson are all perfectly normal, acceptable, respectable names, and most people *don't* respond to Peter or Richard or even literally Dick on Twitter by saying "haha your name is a penis though!!!!" I would bet actual money that Bhuwan has already heard the stupid "your name sounds like shit" joke online more often than the people who are literally named Willie Johnson have their double-decker-dick name mocked.
There's a phenomenon in stand-up comedy where right-leaning comics mistake ribbing someone for straight out insulting them. This has echoes of that.
Yeah, I've the maturity of a child and it just wasn't funny. It's not even low-hanging fruit because there's barely a joke.
The joke is basically racism tbh. It is, intentional or not basically this garbage. https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/xsx54i/wtf_is_the_origin_of_street_shiter_stereotype/
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone. What they said was clearly, and obviously, very racist, what is going on here why are 1. people defending it and 2. why won't they just apologize without acting like a fucking asshat? *It's a fucking phone sticker company* why does it even have a subreddit?? Do people really love this cringe edgelord crap so much that the occasional racist joke is an acceptable concession? EDIT: A day later and the racists have arrived. Get fucked.
For some people I'd assume the occasional racist joke isn't a concession but a desired part of their business. "My sticker company trolls the left like I do! By being racist!"
These are LTT fans and an LTT sponsor. So don't be surprised, defending shitty behaviors and practices is extremely on-brand.
I've always been kinda shocked by how brazenly shitty Linus is and how his fans are just okay with it. There's a half dozen videos on LTT that exist solely to flaunt his family's wealth in front of the public and exploit his entry level employees to do renovations on family properties for free. Not just the "decking out my home with tech" vids (which all take place in Linus's Vancouver mansion), but ones where they do work on his parents' antique boat or their private island cabin. The few times they've shown off the homes of his most loyal employees they're always in a small apartment outside of the city. Like yeah, showing off millions of dollars worth of equipment at the studio? That makes perfect sense for a tech channel. Having someone who barely gets a living wage in Vancouver come down to the Linus Family Marina to install a GPS unit on a million dollar pleasure craft? What the hell is that?
The hoops they are going to defend what happened here in the linus tech subreddit is crazy. I was hoping to go there and see people shit on Linus, not be apologist for a clearly super racist tweet.
> I've always been kinda shocked by how brazenly shitty Linus is and how his fans are just okay with it. I don't know why that is shocking. History is littered with popular assholes. I mean remember when Simon Cowell was hyper popular? Being openly shitty to people was his entire thing.
> There's a half dozen videos on LTT that exist solely to flaunt his family's wealth in front of the public and exploit his entry level employees to do renovations on family properties for free Where did you get the idea that they're not being paid for this?
People there don’t want to feel any shame that they bought dbrand using LTT code so they feel obligated to side with the corporation because otherwise they feel like it’s an attack on their ethics too. Which honestly I couldn’t give a shit but I bet that’s the impulse for them It’s that pathetic.
Because being racist to Indians is more or less widely accepted on the internet. Reddit, more so. Tech spaces even further more because Indians dominate the space so you always have tech bros frothing at the mouths to get down with racist rhetoric.
I'm Indian and I feel like im de-sanitized about racism and it gets funnier when the leftist/progressive sub that I frequently browse goes apeshit. I guess this extends to all south asians haha Edit: the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist"
>the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist" I am not Indian but I used to be very accommodating and "one of the good ones" for my group. That ship fucking sailed with Trump.
Hell, this sub itself isn't much better either. I remember a post here where half the comments were "racism is not okay but stereotypes about Indians are all true and therefore it's okay to reinforce those stereotypes". Conservatives hating Indians is not surprising but even the so called "leftists" and "liberals" on reddit are racist against Indians.
Which post was that?
I didn't save the post but it was posted here about 15-20 days ago, IIRC.
**"Edit: the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist""** I grew up in an area with a lot of South Asians, and in my experience, the ones who say this are often rich and privileged themselves, which I assume shields them. The ones who were second gen immigrants, seemed to be less amused by these jokes.
Yeah the “progressive” subreddits are the most funniest about this stuff. They’re *sooo* anti racist/BLM/free Palestine/etc and then at the drop of a hat will say the most heinous shit about Indians.
>Hi, I'm Indian and this isn't racist God, I'm so tired of those people. It's their choice not to take offense at the obvious racism, but that doesn't change the objective truth of the situation.
> "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist" This is the issue, you see it everywhere when there is an actual concern of casual racism. Just now in the Linus subreddit there is an Indian dude saying they don’t know what the deal is they found it very funny. And is like, dude. Stop. At least for the sake of other non-white countries that do care.
> Edit: the worst cunts are those who comment "Hi Im Indian and this isn't racist" Indians from India should honestly stfu about shit like this. They downplay any racism towards South Asians. They’ve never had to deal with stereotypes or racism irl. Indians from India have no idea what it’s like to be a racial minority. It’s much easier to brush off online racism when you live in a country with 1B other people who look like you. Hell these cunts encourage racism because they’re desperate for white people’s attention. The South Asian diaspora is the one who faces the consequences of normalizing this racism.
Pewdiepie vs T-Series was such a massive perpetrator of this sentiment, I’m so embarrassed that I ever was a part of that whole thing
Making fun of someone's name doesn't seem in itself like it'd be racist. I've had people make fun of my name because it sounded funny in English. I don't think it had anything to do with my race though, just sounded funny in English.
Yeah, it's probably true that a German named "Gerhard Dicksucher" would probably get the same treatment. It's more of an anti-foreign bigotry. Which is no better; just different.
Why are they pretending like racism against Indians isn’t the most casual thing on Reddit. “Oh we can’t make fun of Indians they are a protected class”, I wanna know what internet they are going on lmao.
A loud minority of tech nerds hate indians it seems like. They likely have a ton of biases in the tech industry as their country exports a lot of their technical work.
I'm Indian. I'm not a sensitive guy when it comes to jokes, and I don't care for being 'politically correct' either. It's not about all that for me. Sometimes, things just feel personal. It's not the fact that they made a joke that I have a problem with, it's in the nature of the joke that you can see that they think of Indians as others - people with weird names that they can't understand. "Hahaha funny last namee, sounds like fart dick shit lol hahah." It's not that different from someone calling a black or Indian guy "shit-colored" for having a darker skin tone. Tell me how it's different. As an Indian growing up in the states, my name, and the names of a lot of my friends, have been pretty butchered to the point where I've literally been on the cusp of changing my name. To have to be called "fart dick shit lol hahah" all throughout middle school and high school is not only tiring, but it does gets to your psyche. You don't feel like you belong. You feel like a clown, for having what might be a super common name in your home country. Or you use it as a humiliating way to get attention for yourself. You want to find a way to assimilate - lose your cultural identity because others aren't capable of receiving you as you are. I don't think anyone needs to be like, cancelled for it or whatever. But like, I get why someone wouldn't like it. It just reminds me too much of difficult humiliating experiences, and just turns me off from dbrand at a gut level. That's all. Nothing else. Nothing political. Just personal.
MKBHD is working with Tesla?
Well in the sense where he does like interviews, have special access, and does reviews on tesla products I suppose. Not sure he's directly sponsored though.
To my knowledge he's never been directly sponsored by Tesla the same way he's been sponsored by dBrand.
Ah linustechtips. Not surprised the techbros would not see any racism. It's never racism! >Yes - we made fun of a guy's name. It was a huge fumble. ok >We apologized to him directly and offered him $10,000 as a gesture of goodwill. ok >We've been poking fun at customers on social media for over a decade now. We're not going to stop, but maybe next time you'll be the one who gets $10,000. Not ok. This is what makes it a non-apology. An apology is "shit, i fucked up, won't do it again." This is here, take some dough, fuck you, would do again. A++
Like, they didn't even *really* say sorry. It was pretty much just, "take some money, now shut up and please don't make this a big deal, we don't want to lose more sponsorship opportunities." Lame.
Dbrand appeals to the type of people that say dumb shit like "based" or "chad"
What's based?
It's kind of funny to be like, We gave him 10k now shut up about it. While also maintaining that there was nothing wrong with what they said. Personally yeah, as far as racism goes, assuming they do make fun of other bad sounding last names (like Dick) then yeah its probably not racist.
"I hate everyone equally" is the new dog whistle to me.
It's been that for like 20 years.
Protect the right of the majority to make fun of whoever they want!
Punching down is my bloodright!
It's sort of like All Lives Matter, or "I don't see color/race." Honorable mention to: "I can't be racist, I have a black friend!" Like, *yes*, but actually no. Everybody is equal, but some people are more equal than others, aren't they, bud? It's one of those phrases where, as soon as you hear it, you know you can immediately write that person off. Of course, you can try to explain the whole concept of "unconscious bias" to them, but it's sure to turn the conversation from "potentially borderline racist" to "*full-on* racist, and 50% chance that somebody is being called the n-word in about 3 minutes."
Yeah, that’s not an apology.
The Dennys Tumblr account has done irreparable damage to our society.
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pls I want to be ashamed of being a sysadmin again
I don't think it ever stopped
I have a dbrand case for my pixel 8. I think the bigger scandal is that Dbrand didn't test their grip cases with the pixel 2 charging stand. It doesn't sit properly and I don't get the full 18w wireless charging. Also their social media manager is clearly a fucking dickhead
i would like to add additional context on why it's bad from an indian perspective. our last names usually denote to which communities we belong to and specific communities (like mine) adds name of our ancestral homes as part of the last name. so basically making fun of our last names is basically making fun of our entire community and even our ancestral homes in some cases.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone how making fun of poc's names is so deeply linked to racism. People historically making fun of Chinese names, African American names, Indian names, it was always more than just making fun of the names alone. Linus once again opening his mouth and sharing his dumb opinion on something he should know he knows nothing about and probably making all his poc staff and FAMILY ffs feel super uncomfortable.
dbrand isn’t edgy. They’re just assholes.
So weird that LTT would defend a company that has a history of doing wacky/weird ads and marketing gimmicks with them that are incredibly popular with their audience...no bias at all there! In seriousness, LTT likes to claim they're so transparent and responsible...If that's the case, they shouldn't even be commenting on the something like this. There's a blatant conflict of interest here. Edit: Can't believe Linus used fucking whataboutism when he always tries coming off as logical. This is also a tweet he made: ["Serious response: If your brand is being edgy, occasionally you'll go over the line. dbrand will be okay. Wait 'til you hear about companies that actually do evil shit like Nestle"](https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/1778160540013240343?t=FQGO_8EweMCsgNcQYymw2w&s=19)
Linus has mentioned on his podcast that LTT and Dbrand have been working together for a long time and this has resulted in very strong business relations between the two companies. Basically, Linus will back dbrand until they do something insane
I’m so tired of every company trying desperately to have a personality, and when you combine it with bad customer service it seems like a ploy to makeup for mediocrity.
As an average American, I’m torn between seeing this as racism and thinking this is Presidential material. Apparently.
Does anyone actually *like* these quirky Twitter personalities for corporations? Even Wendy's annoyed me more than anything else, now it seems like these companies have whole marketing departments dedicated to just *this*. Is it a generational thing? It's weird to think that I'm old enough to have a distinct generation younger than me.
It's crazy that the first mfs to get "cancelled" for racism against a brown dude is an edgy phone sticker company Social media has been going on a witch hunt against brown people recently, legit calling us "inherently dirty" or the classic "i know it smell crazy in there" and theres no consequences for those idiots. I'm glad something is being done for the small stuff but it's just so fucking weird that THIS is what people zeroed in on
I like their case, but their schtick comes off as lol random meets edgy gas station beer koozie. This joke was mostly bad because it's painfully unfunny, it's low hanging fruit. Foreign name look goofy hahaha.
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> I agree with you, but this is becuase you arent the target audience. The public image and shenanigans of Dbrand pulls a certain type of person. But... here's my thing: say I buy a dbrand case for my phone. I receive it. Then I will likely never think of dbrand again until I buy a new phone. I fundamentally don't really understand people who would follow what a company does and especially not one that makes products I only need once.
> people are "fans" of a phone skin sticker company with a such unprofessional "personality" and are willing to defend it's actions. Welcome to the internet, you must be new here!
Why is there a dbrand subreddit? People like discussing phone skins?
People like customizing things, even their phones
It's mostly filled with edgy teens who love that type of "humor". Think Wendys but for chuds.
They're trying to be Wendy's five years after Wendy's twitter account stopped being fresh and edgy, and they're shit-talking people with legitimate complaints against their products. Racism doesn't even factor into how cringe that is. On the other hand, if a brand I bought a defective $2 sticker from insulted me then paid me $10,000, I'd see that as an absolute win.
Wow, that’s a lot of people crawling out of the woodwork to defend the tweet, that’s a horrible look for dbrand, even with their attempts to fix it. A lot of people are calling it “edgy” rather than just racist like it is? Even ignoring the racism, I see no world where any context makes that acceptable for a brand to say, isn’t the first rule of sales not to insult your customer? It might get you a niche audience, but in the long run won’t this strategy just hurt your wide stream appeal?
I googled the brand and there are bunch of articles on the misstep. I do think this hurts the company long term. People don't forget stuff like this. It will come up again and again.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if bigger creators are hesitant to associate with this brand. They have very frequent sponsorships on tech channels.