That whole video, and the follow-up, were incredible. I used to trust LTT quite a bit, but after the video, I’ve just chunks of respect for LTT. Dunno if i can ever trust them.
Edit:
I work in the tech industry. I work for an A tier company that makes servers, storage and more. I cannot imagine fucking up a benchmark/performance characterisation chart THIS badly even for an internal presentation.
I have spent hours double checking and re-running tests to ensure I’m getting the right numbers.
And to see a channel as big as LTT goofing up numbers so badly, which have the potential to affect thousands of purchasing decisions, i can’t even.
We also work with vendors, who sometimes send hardware prototypes. And we can never be THIS unprofessional to them.
I will say this, and some may consider this my hot take; I feel like Linus needs to step back from responding to community feedback as well. I get that it’s his company and he probably feels responsibility to respond, but he does not respond well to criticism. The biggest tell on how his employees feel was Luke’s face during the video. It was obvious even without him saying anything that he knew the hot take response was not going to turn out well. These situations are part of being a CEO not an owner and Linus needs to show that he trusts the new CEO enough to respond accordingly. Linus continues to handle this problem in the exact wrong manner when he shouldn’t be handling it at all m
Feels like the ADHD (and maybe autism) play a good part in that.
My personal reviews from the school days were often like that: Not responding well to criticism.
Many assumptions, many ways but only a few will get it all back on track to being a trustworthy source.
And like you said: Linus needs to step back from being community feedback (lwt that the community manager handle) and let WAN show be a primarily tech talk focused live show with a community Q/A. Maybe let the CEO be a regular (once every X weeks) so community can give him targeted questions and let the other weeks be about the company/Linus/Luke/Dan and just a normal Q and A without the business talk.
If his disabilities is a hindrance to him being effective in his role at the company it is time to change roles.
A disability does not excuse this kind of behavior.
As someone who probably has undiagnosed ADHD/neurodivergence (based off first hand accounts from other people) I will agree.
I’m somewhat conflicted on the entire matter. I felt like their quality was slipping for some time and it’s been difficult to watch them.
Linus has handled almost every community crisis extremely poorly because when under pressure he gets defensive and speaks without thinking often pouring gasoline on the fire.
At the same time I can understand his motivations as the livelihoods of his now very large number of employees depends on it.
I think if LTT had responded officially and earnestly to the criticism addressing and laying out of roadmap for remediation it would have bought a lot of goodwill. I think Linux needs to be removed from LTT public relations but I don’t think that will ever happen.
Truly a sad day, glad we have GN
Yes, for some time I felt the best videos from them where the infrastructure and server ones, just Jake and Linus united in chaos. The reviews in the other hand, as soon as you look at the graphs for more then the time they are shown, something felt off.
Totally agree about the infrastructure and server point. The house and upgrade videos are great too because of the chaos and personalities. I personally like the house videos because I have similar projects to centralize my PCs and have gone through some of those struggles. The reviews at this point are just a reminder that a new product is out and to do some research if it’s something I’m interested in.
Removing him from public relations means removing him from the WAN show, which is a significant revenue source for them
As I said in another comment: Maybe remove a part of him from that and let WAN show be just a tech talk + community Q/A + anecdotes.
Maybe every few weeks give the new CEO the questions that accumulated about business for the transparency Linus wants to show/talks about.
He kinda responded to it in a forum post. One paragraph about “improving processes and communication”.
The rest was him doubling down on everything.
He literally said that they auctioned the billet block and didn’t sell it. Like… what?! Are we playing semantics here?
And he again emphasised that they didn’t want to “waste” the money to test the billet block properly, and he actually said that he didn’t want anyone to buy the billet block. In these exact words.
Is there a tl;dr? As much as I utterly respect what Tech Jesus does, I find his content utterly boring. Feels like I’m watching a presentation at work. It’s the place to look at for cold hard facts and genuine reviews though.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a little overblown? After reading all these comments I finally got around to watching the video and was honestly pretty underwhelmed and found the GN guy a little over dramatic in his framing and language of the issue.
I’m not claiming he’s doing this whole thing for attention or clout. But yeah, not seeing anything world shaking or enough to change my views on much of anything.
I think the points Steve highlighted were pretty spot on. Over the past few years I’ve continually felt an “off” vibe from LTTs videos and now I know what it is, it’s the constant corrections and edits on the content. I have to actually actively watch every second to keep an eye out for corrections and it’s just not something that should be happening if they were taking their time creating content.
GN dude literally just stated facts, with the evidence.
And that too after an lmg video called them out by name. The original video literally had the guy saying that lmg was better than others like GN or hardware unboxed.
They didn’t have to do it. Especially when there are multiple points of data pointing to their glaring inaccuracies.
He absolutely did it for clout. He currently has more traffic than he had in months. Talking about how awkward and uncomfortable the whole thing is, yet smiling through the whole video.
Is Gamers Nexus finally getting the respect they deserve?
GN has always had respect. Linus has even directed people to GN on multiple occasions. Steve from GN was invited to Linuses roast and I thought they did some stuff together (maybe one of the scrapyard wars?)
I guess my point is: there has been mutual respect from both of these guys for each other. Which makes the fact that Steve didn’t give Linus a chance to comment/add some context to GN’s video pretty shitty.
No he doesn’t “have” to reach out, but it seems really odd that they didn’t given their working relationship to date (even if it’s just two business men in the same field that knows each other).
You don’t do a call out video without a heads-up…unless you 1. Are trying to do a hit piece 2. You think he will provide enough context to change your mind and you’ll have to scrap your video or 3. You are worried he’ll scoop you or have too good of a response
Its worth noting GN probably sees LTT labs as an existential threat once they get going.
It doesn’t mean their concerns are valid now, but this isn’t some completely altruistic “think of the consumer” situation.
Have you seen Linus’s response? He played victim, ignored parts of the criticism and apparently straight up lied about the proceedings with that cooler startup.
Also this video was the result of many incidents and it seems like they never even got over the “trust me bro” thing. I honestly don’t understand why, because that was a way less spicy video on GNs side.
Man, scrapyard wars is not a set of words I’ve heard mentioned in a while. I have such fondness for old LTT stuff but stopped watching years ago as they started growing and pushing out more and more videos. I guess that’s why scrapyard wars also got rushed / dropped by the end. Doing it right just takes more time so it isn’t profitable in their business model. What a useless channel this has become.
Too large, corporate burdens. Ltt needs to slow down. Quantity over quality not cool.
Yes I think this was the main point that Steve kept coming back too. Moving too fast. And not focusing on accuracy and quality. LTT realistically has always been much more about entertainment. And I still watch them for that. Gamers Nexus Etc has always been where you go if you want the straight dry news and facts with as little opinion thrown in as possible.
Linus has a vision of what he wants to become. And I am there for it. There’s undeniable possibility and niche for what they want to do. But it relies on being methodical, accurate, and focused. Several things they’ve been owning themselves on for a while. It can be fixed. But I think George Harrison put it best.
It’s gonna take patience and time, mmm To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it To do it right
I honestly never got his channel. Does Linus actually have a tech/engineering background which makes him an authority on this stuff? Watching his videos leads me to believe that he doesn’t. He gets basic shit wrong way too often.
Linus is both knowledgable and a good entertainer. The problem is he’s grown from a casual reviewer to running a 100+ employee business, pumping out multiple videos a week with his face on it - He simply cannot possibly know anything about the product besides what’s on the script.
When he is interested in something, it really shows. The way he talks about the LTT Screwdriver or the Framework laptop for example almost never even has a correction, let alone errors. Linus just has no ability to upscale that quality.
I think it’s even more what GN has highlighted: They try to go from entertainment first to hard facts and data. It’s very clear that they have not thought this through completely.
Yes, some of their testing solutions are very sophisticated, but there are definitely problems on the management side of things. This seems very much like a structural problem. Communications goes horribly wrong in multiple ways, including errors not being corrected properly. Errors appear very frequently and the employees themselves question the quality of their videos.
Linus himself claimed that he had to improvise a workshop with employees, because they lacked training for what they were supposed to do. Furthermore that he substantially changed things on the fly, because they were garbage from his POV. All of this indicates bad management, but not learning from mistakes and making the exact same ones again proves it.
This is horseshit, no offense; Linus straight up says he’s not interested in doing it right as it’s cost $1-500… Which is nothing to them.
He’s a sales sleeze semi-technical media nerd that is at best a good entertainer.
He chooses not to enforce quality.
LTT is entertainment. Not news or credibly fact based.
Yeah, the channel was great many years ago. Basically the same time they moved to the warehouse building is when it went downhill, and fast. They started pumping out more lower quality videos, and it was nearly all covered in click bait. They also created the side channel where they tried to make funny content. That’s when I unsubscribed. I don’t know if that’s all still the same, but they clearly got caught up in trying to expand and following youtube trends that they forgot what they were good at.
He’s does not have a technical background and he’s said as much, gaming and computers are just a passion for him.
He’s an entertainer, not an authority. But he speaks so passionately it’s easy for a non-technical person to believe he’s an authority.
He’s honestly just jayz2cents with better marketing.
Except Jay is usually pretty honest and upfront about how little he knows, which now makes him miles better than Linus “I definitely benchmark better than tech jesus” sebastian.
Jays2cents is literally the car modder of tech channels. “Here’s how you install a 5.1 sound system into your waterblock”. And I mean that in a loving way.
And about 2 months ago, when called out on a bad review video (I think a 4060 ti?), Jay immediately deleted said record and posted an apology. He was humble and obviously annoyed at what they had output. He refused to film a replacement review video, instead suggesting people find a record of that product from another channel.
That is someone who knows they messed up and wants to do better.
The outlandish videos they do are pretty entertaining, I don’t see how they’re going to succeed as a data driven review channel given Linus’ temperament. Like compare them to something like rtings and it’s really night and day
Linus himself has no engineering background, but his team has many engineers. They do not make mistakes for lack of knowledge. What they need is more quality control over their videos
He was a college dropout sales rep at NCIX, the equivalent of any random dude working at Microcenter, who moonlighted at making low effort youtube videos. His 15+ years of “experience” are him figuring out literally everything as he went.
He’s more knowledgeable than the average layman, but he’s a total fucking amateur at everything he does compared to the actual experts, often including his own employees who he frequently ignores or talks over.
I think Linus is a relatively decent, somewhat funny guy, honestly. But he’s not fit for his roles besides being an on camera personality.
Watching his videos leads me to believe that he doesn’t.
Watching his videos leads me to believe that he does, the random knowledge drops he has about hardware and the deeper levels of the software stack convince me of that.
Even if he is parroting knowledge he’s getting from his engineers, and I don’t think he is, he still sounds very knowledgable. I think everyone’s simply jumping on a hate bandwagon for the fun of it.
Yeah… Anyone who thinks Linus doesn’t know much about computers is straight up wrong. He’s not an engineer but he doesn’t claim to be. Personally I don’t watch LTT for the hard data…that’s what NG is for. I also like Paul’s Hardware for general product reviews.
But with all that said, I do kind of like that this is blowing up and especially so after reading LTT’s response. Linus has done some questionable things and they always get swept under the rug…despite the arrogant responses he always gives. He deserves most the anger being directed at him because the Billet thing is the worst one yet
