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The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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LTT has always seemed like a profit driven channel. No real reviews. MKBHD is 50/50
Are there such thing as non-profit driven review channels?
You can try to make a profit without if being your main focus I guess. There are the channels which review and take all the free samples they get and try to pump out a review on time no matter the quality to generate as many views as possible.
And then there are a few review channels who will put out their review when it is ready and good. Who will give away review copies if allowed. Those reviewers would call out shit even if it means being locked out of review copies next time. Which of course means less profit. There are even review channels which do not do sponsored ad segments. Instead they'd be relying on viewer support. But there aren't many of those.
LTT marketing themselves as a Canadian company/channel but using only US prices and availability was always a red flag for me.
If you operate any sort of international business (LTT store products are made in China) the US dollar is the currency you use. Their costs are all in USD so if they used CAD for pricing they would just be constantly jumping around with the exchange rate to make sure margins stayed constant.
I'm talking about for videos along the lines of "$500 build guide" not for their merch.
The logic still applies. If you price something in CAD for a US or international audience, you might as well price it in beans because nobody's going to have any idea how much it costs. Think of LTT as an Canadian exporter of video content.
Thinking of it that way makes sense, but it doesn't change the fact that they were (idk if they still are, stopped watching years ago) advertising themselves as Canadian content creators, with a fair bit of emphasis on being Canadian. As far as I could tell they were trying to appeal to Canadians by pushing that angle, however their videos used US pricing and availability which may as well have been in beans because it means nothing to me.
Canada is tiny. They probably receive only 5% of their views from their home country.
They should still have a Canadian price storefront
Or, at the very least, a built-in currency conversion.
Why? It's a business and they go where the money is. I don't mind LTT thinking like a business - everybody's gotta eat. But the screw-ups with Billet aren't okay and the incredibly hostile workplace described on Xitter is beyond the pale.
Didn't he even make a video where he talked about he wants to stop pushing expensive shit to people, but then he didn't because he's just a money hungry twat? I never got the appeal and found him beyond annoying. So this is just great bews, maybe his videos will stop showing up everywhere.
Mkbhd gets paid for nearly everything on his channel but he also doesn't tell you to go out and buy or not buy shit based on lies
Every large channel, and most small channels that aren't explicitly charities, are profit-driven. I'd actually say being visibly profit-driven is usually a good sign because it means you know where their money comes from. What's worse is when you don't know who's funding them -- that's when you get paid misinformation peddlers.
Media is a business. If you're not their paying customer, you're the product. That's why stuff like Patreon and LTT's paid merch is a good thing.
The real problems are that the company runs in an extremely, dangerously unprofessional way - well beyond normal startup mayhem. Combine that with the break-neck pace they try to put out content, and the fact that Linus himself has an ego the size of Cleveland, and it means that they're a danger to themselves and others. And Linus taking every problem personally means the company can't change properly. He needs to take a leave of absence and bring in some dispassionate experts fix things at his company, and when he comes back he's just another employee who does things by the book and lets the CEO run things under the new model until he learns the ropes.
But I worry that the company is screwed regardless - they might not be able to come back from this, and even if they can the loss of revenue might exceed their operating costs and runway. For Linus himself and the rest of the leadership? Good. That's appropriate comeuppance. But it's a big group, and that will probably mean layoffs, and I feel bad for the people at the bottom who'll be hit by the shit rolling downhill.