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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Linus Tech Tips
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Out of the loop, can someone give me a tl;dr on who this guy is why I keep seeing this everywhere?
Linus Sebastian is a YouTube tech guru that rose to prominence in the last few years with his channel, Linus Tech Tips, and has created something of an enterprise around his content called Linus Media Group
More recently his work has become somewhat...sloppy, with errors here and there, recommended practices ignored on the odd occasion, but nothing so big as to cause anyone major damage. Linus has a default PR mode for when these issues come about, and it usually worked...
Until last month.
Last month, Linus reviewed a prototype of an all new type of water-cooling block (basically a replacement for a fan that can be way more efficient) for GPUs. This block was expensive, and expensive to make, but by all reasonable measures, has a very good cooling impact to show for it. It was made by a startup firm of two people, and they sent Linus a prototype with a supported GPU.
The GPU ended up disappearing into the aether, and Linus opted to use an unsupported GPU to test the cooling block, which resulted in inferior cooling performance. Linus ended up trashing the block in his review.
He then went and auctioned off the prototype without the knowledge of the manufacturer, only offering to make them whole once it had already been auctioned off.
Linus tried to deal with it in his usual PR way, once Gamers Nexus started reporting on the goings on. But these weren't small errors, these were the mother of all PC tech journalistic fuckups, and he refused to acknowledge them as such. That is not only enough to get someone immediately fired, it's enough to get them industry-blacklisted.
It's gotten so bad that the CEO and CFO of Linus Media Group have come out directly and thrown Linus under the bus for his fuckery.
And that's before we come on to the topic of this post, the SA allegations...
Edit: minor name corrections.
There's a few bits more around this that have come to light that makes it even worse....
The manufacturer emailed asking for the cooling block to be returned as it was their only prototype and LMG said they would return it, with the manufacturer chasing several times before LMG admitted that they had auctioned it off for charity.
They only offered compensation once the situation had been revealed in that expose video the other day.
The way I see it, this could well be a career ender for Linus. He gets his hands on novel, unreleased hardware, and then he botches the review and gives it to the highest bidder. Potentially a competing company.
No one is going to trust him with their pre-release hardware ever again after this.
Heck, if this was any reasonably sized company, I suspect we'd already be hearing about lawsuit settlements of significant sums of cash.
Its definitely going to wipe out any standing he has with others in the industry: he gave a scathing review about a prototype that they had failed to correctly install, despite clear instructions with a compatible GPU card sent to them. Add that to the constant incorrect and misinformation that is often caught in post production with on-screen corrections
It seems that allure of increasing revenue streams with a ridiculous production turnaround had a direct impact on their quality and integrity and now with the allegations that Madison has come forward with, it would appear the rot had set in long before it was noticeable to external parties.
Its going to play out over the next week or so whether LMG is in a death spiral.
Yeah...any one of these issues would be bad enough...the whole trifecta does not bode well at all for Linus.
This is my best summary, it is long so sorry about that but there's a lot to it.
Linus is probably the largest tech youtuber there is.
He's been rapidly expanding his company, building out a full lab that is trying to rigorously test products (mostly in an automated way) so that consumers can have confidence that a $50 power supply isn't going to shit the bed, or that this GPU will get you the same performance in these games at this resolution so save your money, etc.
The initial controversy is that they have issue with the automated testing where results were often super wrong and that slipped it's way to multiple videos and instead of taking the videos down and correcting them, they left them up and just had a little text graphic over the video with the correction. Many youtubers do that kind of post video correction, but LTT does it a lot. Additionally they tested an $800 prototype watercooler on a 4090 when it was built only for a 3090ti which pretty much invalidates the entire test, but they still gave a conclusion that the watercooler sucked and was a bad product. That could tank that company. They did not bother re-testing with the proper GPU because Linus felt no one should buy an $800 watercooler block anyway. Additionally(x2) they reviewed a mouse and said it was terrible because the glide was really bad. Turns out there were protective stickers on the mouse feet that needed to be removed. They took multiple days to correct the video and by that point the damage was done.
The second controversy is around a Madison (former employee) where she received tons of verbal abuse, degradation, from various LMG employees/management and some even sexual harassment. There was a lot of hand-waving of her raising those complaints as "causing drama" and to "calm your tits" and other various things. She suffered a lot mentally from it and even "cut her own leg" just to go to the ER to have a day off. Her write up is pretty long and fairly brutal.
I think a large part of the issue is everyone is incredibly overworked at that company and crunching every day to release as much content as possible which leads to a fuck ton of errors, very heated and emotionally charged employees and lack of oversight over serious issues. Couple that with rapid expansion of employees without a functional HR (I think someone was hired recently) and the vast majority of people effectively "learning on the job" how to be a manager, director, leader, etc. and it's just an explosion waiting to happen. And it has exploded quite spectacularly.
I'll be curious to see if they turn it around and also what comes from the outside investigation.
Large tech reviewer. Runs his own company called Linus Media Group (LMG). Called out another review channel called Gamer Nexus(GN). GN hit back with a video detailing gross inaccuracies in LMG published test results. For example outliers of 300%. This has opened the flood gates for people to remind the Internet what a horrific company LMG has been for many years. Basically LMG glorifies the grind mindset and promote the typical hostile work environment that is the epitome of startups
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamers-nexus-vs-linus-tech-tips-billet-labs-review-controversy