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Linus Tech Tips

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What started as criticism over errors in recent YouTube videos has escalated into allegations of sexual harassment, prompting the company to hire an outside investigator. (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by phillaholic@lemm.ee to c/linustechtips@lemmy.ml
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Linus Media Group CEO Terren Tong also responded via email, saying he was “shocked at the allegations and the company described” in Reeve’s posts. He went on to note that “as part of this process, beyond an internal review we will also be hiring an outside investigator to look into the allegations and will commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”

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[–] unscholarly_source@lemmy.ca 204 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Wow quick and decisive action by CEO to call in external investigation. Reading Linus' response, it doesn't even appear that he would consider external investigation. He states that HR would conduct a thorough review. I'll be frank, I don't trust Colton to run the HR review.

I bet once this issue is resolved, we might see Terren bring in external subject matter experts to completely overhaul LMG business operations. HR consultants, Operations and Logistics consultants, Finance, etc. Up until now, LMG was/is run by a self-taught/self-made/learning-on-the-job crew. Can't do that when you're now a corp.

Edit: I would love to sub to a channel called TBT (Terren Business Tips) 😂

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Gen Zers speedrunning why big corporations have the structures they have

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[–] randomname01@feddit.nl 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'll be frank, I don't trust Colton to run the HR review.

Exactly lol, he seems like the type of dude who closes ranks and thereby perpetuates the culture of misogyny.

Also, and this might just be negative halo effect, but he just gives off really weird vibes to me - but that’s verging into needlessly speculative territory.

[–] Deceptichum@kbin.social 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, let’s jump to thinking people are creeps because of the way they look.

You’re clearly coming at this from a mature and well thought out area, not one of sexism and abuse.

[–] randomname01@feddit.nl 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It’s the other way around; I think the vibe is weird when I see him in videos and I feel like he is weird in interpersonal interactions. He seems pretty awkward and not the best at expressing himself. But at the same time I can admit that my judgement might be unfairly influenced by his looks.

I don’t think he’s weird because of how he looks, but at the same time I need to acknowledge that there’s a chance his looks do affect my impression of him and how he interacts.

[–] Deceptichum@kbin.social 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

So you're judging a guy for "acting weirdly"?

Oh wow, huge improvement.

And adding your own little disclaimer at the end like "Sorry to poison the well, it's just my biases in action but I'm going to share it with others in hopes more people can attack this man for nothing but it's also not something you should do" doesn't make it better; Admitting your problem and still doing it isn't a solution, it just makes you look like a bigger arse because you know you shouldn't yet have decided to.

[–] randomname01@feddit.nl 10 points 2 years ago

You do make a fair point, but I want to emphasise I absolutely wasn’t trying to get anyone to attack him. That’s just a logical leap you made.

As for me judging him for how he acts, it’s the sort of awkward behaviour I’ve seen from dudes who did turn out to not be too swell. But idk, it is true that it’s just speculation and you’re right in calling me out for it being based on too little.

[–] Tangentism@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

he seems like the type of dude who closes ranks and thereby perpetuates the culture of misogyny.

Perfect for HR then!

[–] randomname01@feddit.nl 3 points 2 years ago

Lmaooooooo

[–] shiveyarbles 2 points 2 years ago

Say no more, you're hired! You had us at closing ranks

[–] elouboub@kbin.social 45 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The reactions are so... reddit-ey:

I always knew it

I fee so gratified

It's what I've been saying all along

and all that stuff.

[–] arefx@lemmy.ml 52 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Its human nature not exclusive to reddit. You guys sure love talking about that place.

[–] just_a_peasant@lemm.ee 17 points 2 years ago

I knew it all along.

[–] shiveyarbles 7 points 2 years ago

That sounds exactly like what a Redditor would say

[–] mctoasterson@reddthat.com 4 points 2 years ago

I have made very few posts to Lemmy but a recent one was a neutral-ish post saying that I liked the Madison videos etc. but I'm also not jumping to boycott LTT based on the testimony of one person and also a YouTube expose. The responses I got were negative and I was also told not to "deadname" another creator... who I wager nobody would know who I am talking about if I used that name.

Long story short, the comparisons to reddit seem downright charitable so far. Pitchfork brigade bullshit. How about having a nuanced opinion on literally any topic? Or is the average Lemmy user a sanctimonious 19 year old basement socialist?

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Arent the most refugees from reddit? M That would explain why so many being the culture with them.

[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes and no. Only a fraction of Redditors migrated, and that fraction is overrepresented by people who care about privacy, ethical business models, community projects and stewardship. And we've seen that the Lemmy discussions have been a lot more humane and productive.

I myself have remained pretty silent through this entire LMG saga. Maybe I represent a silent majority? Or maybe just a few? It's time to put down the pitchforks. The company has responded, let's wait and see what comes of it. At the end of the day, vote with your wallets. The LMG fanbase is starting to move out of "concerned citizenry" territory and into "self perpetuating angry mob" territory.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 years ago

Agreed. I will stay subbed (for now) and see what comes from it.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 34 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The company has currently paused all production to improve its review processes, and CEO Terren Tong tells The Verge an outside investigator will be hired to examine the harassment allegations.

“We’ve been seeing an alarming amount of conflicts from Linus Tech Tips as it relates to their corporate connections, their flow of money, and the potential bias as a result of those things,” said Gamers Nexus host Steve Burke.

According to Gamers Nexus, Linus Tech Tips reviewed a copper cooling block from Billet Labs on the wrong GPU, then auctioned it off at a recent fan event without the company’s permission.

The afternoon after Gamers Nexus posted its video, Sebastian began responding to concerned fans in the Linus Tech Tips forums.

Reeve went on to accuse the company of barring her from videos after she reported being “grabbed multiple times in the office” and being told to “calm my tits” and “stop being such a bitch.”

He went on to note that “as part of this process, beyond an internal review we will also be hiring an outside investigator to look into the allegations and will commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] moitoi@feddit.de 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The more I read about LMG, the more the structure of the company looks like a mob.

There is one guy with his wife at the top of the pyramid. The CEO and others are below. If the top of the pyramid has what it ask for, nobody will care about what's happening.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's how companies are structured. What you want staff to be higher up the chain of command and CEOs I'm not quite sure what you're asking for

[–] Misconduct@startrek.website 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I mean... Yeah? CEOs suck if you've been paying attention. Most "chains of command" are just privileged people with connections. Then you have the lower management (let's be real fuck middle management they're almost always useless) and workers doing the actual labor and making the least. That always feels stupid to me 🤷‍♀️

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

That's how a lot of small businesses operate, unfortunately.

[–] Polar@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hopefully Madison isn't making shit up, or she's in for a world of hurt. Serious allegations like that won't be taken lightly.

[–] thisfro@slrpnk.net 33 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's one of the reasons why she is probably not making things up. And also all the hate she's getting for speaking out.

[–] stratoscaster@lemmy.zip 16 points 2 years ago

Yeah she was already getting death threats, not much of a reason to lie given the rabbid fanbase

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[–] jimmydoreisalefty@lemmus.org 12 points 2 years ago

Watched YT vid, not looking good for LTT.

Looks like a PR response politians make, with sponsors and store shoutout, just like any other video they post...

Hopefully the pressure keeps coming and LMG workers start a union, a the minimum.

[–] finthechat@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Out of the loop, can someone give me a tl;dr on who this guy is why I keep seeing this everywhere?

[–] 520@kbin.social 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Tangentism@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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.

[–] 520@kbin.social 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Tangentism@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 520@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

Yeah...any one of these issues would be bad enough...the whole trifecta does not bode well at all for Linus.

[–] ExoMonk 25 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] SquishyPandaDev@yiffit.net 5 points 2 years ago

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

[–] shiveyarbles 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't watch his videos, or frankly any YouTube or Twitch or whatever.. it seems like he is just a regular guy with faults, and people are projecting sainthood on him. Maybe he's a bit of an ahole, just like you and me.

[–] Infinity187@lemm.ee 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Wow, that's a huge assertion coming from someone who does not watch YouTube or knows nothing about the guy in question.

Edit: Also, YouTube is a place where many go to look up information from trusted sources. Many content creators on YouTube rely on putting out good quality content to make a living. What used to be a great source of information back in 2012 (speaking about Linus Tech Tips), has turned into a money grab, which puts quantity over quality to make money, thus feeding end users erroneous data and steering said users to bad decisions.

[–] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

That escalated quickly