BriongloidStatement from Linus Tech Tips about Madison's accusations
jetsetdoritothat fucking comment đ
MarxineShould be pinned ngl
Itâs great because of how serious that post is then thereâs a totally tonally different killer joke lol
postmeridiemWonder how many international and domestic workers theyâve contract rugpulled, since this will probably be the one that flies under the radar due to all the other issues.
Iâm starting a new conspiracy that Linus knew all this was coming and thatâs why he hired the new CEO. I have no facts but I said it on the internet so people will believe me.
I know youâre kinda joking, but I think there is some truth to that. I think he made the decision because he could not manage the whole thing alone, and the workplace environment Madison described could well be caused by general stress and mismanagement
adroit balloonsystemic issues like this donât just come from nowhere. likewise, they didnât just appear, either.
workplace atmospheres like this take time to develop and⊠fester. From what Madison described, itâs been this what from, at least, the time she started, which means these behaviors, these patterns, were existing, likely for some time.
What Linus knew, when, etc. may important in a civil case, but itâs not to meâ He failed at his job, and didnât ask for help/hire help to fix the problems until faaaar too late. If it was this bad for Madison, it had to be at least as bad if not worse for others before her who simply did not (or could not) speak out, as well as other who are still there.
Systemic issues do not affect only one person, and they donât appear out of nowhere. Expect more bad news and expect that any resolution/fixes will take time and major change. If you donât see any major changes over a reasonable amount of time, donât trust claims that theyâre âworking on it."
Linus has a track record and proven history of doing/saying stupid shit. I think in this case, he recognizes that heâs just shit at his job and wants help. He most likely didnât expect the Billet issue (no way he would have known Steve would have released a vid) and if he knew about Madison coming out, heâd have tried to prevent that sooner. Hiring a CEO wonât fix the Madison problem, as that event had already occurred.
islandmonkeeeAh yes, the Tony Blair move
Thatâs a good conspiracy! I call dibs on the next one
No, he called a new CEO because he knows heâs way over his head for years now. He even spoke about retiring some years ago, thatâs how much signs he was showing. The fact he got a new CEO to handle the corpo bs is just a hint that he prefers to mess around with the hardware and just doesnât want to handle more management shit.
Managing a startup could be hard and stressful. But I couldnât think Linus would go to this extend.
After this worker coming forward, I unsubscribed from all LMG channels.
He took the blame for it in the video because he was in charge when these things happened. I donât think heâd do that if he whole point was to blame it on the new CEO.
Holy shit
This is Billet labs all over again, theyâll literally only do something if theyâre publicly called out
Yeah, itâs called lack of ethical integrity.
Itâs probably overwork, rather than a malicious lack of integrity. Guy left a to field empty and moved on with his day, well probably was sending 900 emails a day and canât keep track. Sexual harassment in the workplace? Canât think of that we have deadlines!
I know this might be a controversial take. But people in professional settings are expected to fullfil the responsibilities they agree to take on, follow thru with promises, and to turn down the things they reasonably cannot be expected or canât do. Itâs called having professional ethics.
In some ethical frameworks, intention of action is not excusable. An act or absence of act that causes harm is immoral regardless of whether the harm was intended or not.
Yeah I mean things drop through the cracks. Humans is humans.
As a foreigner in the same city as LMG the work culture is to never say no, I get in to a bunch of professional trouble when saying no. So turning down work to make yourself less busy is hard for some here. Iâm just suggesting that this may not be mallace and pure evil, the situation is a product of the work and office culture there. It would play out differently in different parts of the globe.
I never said it was malice. I said it was lack of ethics. They might be very good and nice people. But if in a professional setting they behave like this, they are unethical. If the whole industry behaves like this then the industryâs work culture is unethical. This is not rocket science. The tech sector is a toxic sludge of unprofessional pricks. The tech entertainment is worse. But thatâs not excuse. There are professional and ethical tech entertainment companies in the space who donât abuse their employees.
I am in the wrong thread man. My comments are purely based on the billet labs thing where this thread started, and those not directly involved with the sexual harassment being grouped in with the unethical lack of integrity brush.
Thatâs the interesting part. Linus wanted to make his yt channel a company. Created LMG with a loan and all. Cool. BLT that means that now the company, and by extension Linus himself as the owner, is morally responsible for all that happens within their walls. Thatâs also part of the initial ethical failure, I donât mean they cause or are to blame all the time, but theyâre responsible for dealing with it.
Linus might not have harassed anyone himself personally. But, if one of his employees harassed another of his employees, he is responsible. Worse, if he know and did basically nothing, then LMG neglected to act on its duty of care. Same reason why, when one employee goes in public to diss out and trash talk a competitor, then itâs as if it came out of Linus mouth, because itâs LMG speaking.
âBut I was busy with emailsâ is not an excuse, or âI didnât knowâ, isnât either. Your company your responsibility.
Overwork is also one form of workplace abuse. It just makes the matters worse
This is the schedule that they themselves set though. It made sense a bit to create as much content as they could in the beginning when they were first starting out and growing their channel. But theyâre extremely successful in this category and they donât have to remain beholden to the YouTube algorithm to make money what with Floatplane and so on. They literally have the ability to slow down production, do reviews, and other content in a responsible way, and they havenât.
That work load may have contributed to him not addressing or not properly handling the situation with Madison, but that is something he brought on himself. It shouldnât have been an email to a single person. This isnât some random startup with venture capital. Linus built a whole successful company. A company that should have both a PR team (who donât let him get in his feelings with reactionary remarks without getting legal counsel first), and an HR team to handle things like this. It should literally never have gotten to this point.
Lack of ethical integrity happens when youâre more focused on quantity over quality.
People arenât calling out the staff. Theyâre calling out the management.
I donât know if Madison felt safe expressing all her concerns internally, so this might be the first time they realize the extent of the issues.
You should read the thread she posted. Half of it was about management telling her to stop whining when she brought up any of the misconducts against her.
Imagine reporting that someone was being inappropriate with you only to have that person come berate you. Thatâs levels of fucked up and goes radioactive when itâs your boss.
Possibly not even then. Gamerâs Nexus called them out in that video for several errors involving their testing, methodology, and results and the sheer amount of content being pushed out the door with little to no oversight and no real meaningful attempts to correct themselves to the public, using features that other YouTube channels donât even have access to, and Linus responded by doubling down on the less important bits while not addressing any of the main points. The accountability, logical and scientifically unbiased testing, and their propensity to post information knowingly that is not true and make weak attempts to âcorrectâ that info after millions of people have viewed the content. There doesnât seem to be a plan to do anything. Linus and the new CEO have not addressed any changes to be made. They were also called out for essentially double dipping (reviewing products from companies they are actively promoting or have partnerships with while also reviewing those companies competition). That was also never addressed. Linus himself has an objectivity problem and that seems to have filtered down through the entire LMG as a whole.
A_Chilean_CyborgFinally a normal safe corporate response rather than further digging a hole for themselves.
Naw, theyâre gonna go back to playing Shovel Knight on one of the next WAN(ks) or so
I wonder if there will be a wan show at this point, I personally believe it would be a mistake from a PR point of view. He doesnât know how to keep quiet and will probably keep digging
Iâll be amazed if he doesnât fuck it up by eventually blowing up and deflect accusations on his podcast in the next 3 months or so. Iâd (almost) give him a prize if he coils hold it up for this long.
That proactivly reached out internally today hits a lot different when you hear the meeting yourself.
I donât know why some drama about a borked GPU install has been at the top of my feed for a week, and at this point Iâm afraid to ask.
TDCNI also donât fully understand why people are so furious. Yes itâs some pretty serious alligations from Madison yes, and some dumb faults has happened from overworked stressed employees because of some bad company policies. Manny big companies have these issues at some point but you donât hear about it because itâs handled internally or the company just slowly dissolves. LMG are at least open and a million times more transparent than Iâve seen many other companies be. Then own up to their mistakes now and are at least trying to fix things. Shutting down for a week is pretty drastic and for me it shows that they care.
vreraanThey threw shit at a small company by testing their product the wrong way.
I get that. Itâs not cool. Very much not cool. But everyone makes mistakes or do some stupid shit like this at some point on their lives and should at least have a chance to make things right no?
They did have a chance. Linus took the chance to respond by making excuses and deflecting blame. For fuckâs sake, he said they did not sell the prototype, they auctioned it off. Thatâs not even a valid excuse.
I understand your point, but the issue is that they had to get an insane clash back from the community to start doing these changes. I mean, Gamer Nexus made a video calling them out.
Thatâs true. And I generally donât agree with the practices that have happened. I just hope theyâll at least get their shit together and get better at treating their hard working employers. Iâm not so much of a pitchfork and torch guy and generally hope for the good in people. LMG certainly got a slap in the face now and a wake-up call it must have been. I just hope itâs enough.
Iâm not so much of a pitchfork and torch guy and generally hope for the good in people.
This is apparently rare on the internet considered whatâs being said and done. While I criticised, Iâm also hoping they just get the criticism and use it to improve, both the video quality and the working conditions. Both go intrinsically together, happier workers will produce better quality content, which in the end will be good to everyone.
People who are wishing for the death of LMG, remember these guys employ already >100 workers, many of them which have a passion for technology and probably are happy to work there.
So, get your pitchforks down and lets wait for the result of this downtime.
FireTowerTLDR: The LTT fan base has a culture of calling out bad actions by the company not because they hate them but because they hold them to standards.
A small company Billet Labs sent them a prototype to test. That prototype was designed for a 3000 series graphics card. LTT didnât have that card at hand so they asked if it was ok to use a 4000 series card. Billet said they could try but it wasnât designed for their card. LTT published a review of the prototype based on a scenario it wasnât designed for and Linus told people it was a bad product. They later agreed to return it to Billet. They ended up auctioning it off at a convention (where some of Billetâs competition was).
Ultimately LTT paid an undisclosed amount to Billet. The actual damages of selling off a start ups only prototype (possibly to their competition) after agreeing to return it, after telling people not to buy a product (which was only a prototype) based on how it performed in a situation it wasnât intended to be in is unmeasurable. They could have effectively destroyed years of work and killed the future of those people.
Linus said he didnât use the correct card because it would have cost ~$800. The issue isnât that he didnât buy that correct card itâs that he didnât decide to not publish a video on it if he couldnât do it right.
On a podcast the other week Linus praised the LTT fans for not just agreeing with everything he does, creating a toxic positive feedback loop. This is them calling him out on his errors.
Yes other companies make these same terrible decisions. But their bad actions donât justify LTTâs bad actions.
TurboDieselMinor correction, but Billet sent them a 3090; they lost it. It was found and returned eventually but yeah.
It's not owning up of you've been caught red-handed, denied any wrongdoing, and only made an apology video once your subs started tanking. At this point it just feels like damage control.
This is fineđ„đ¶âđ„Monetized apology video with self promotion. That is also important.
As I understand it, itâs not actually about this entirely. itâs that this has caused people to look into things and see that there is a long running history of poor content being pushed out due to issues in the workplace. The mishandling of the Prototype and the accusations by the employee are just extra icing on top of this already fucked up cake.
This isnât about that specifically, but the gist of it is that they basically got a one-of-a kind prototype GPU water block from a boutique startup to review, and instead of reviewing it with the correct model GPU and sending it back as requested, they did their review on the wrong card, concluded it was crap, and then sold it at auction during their convention.
decadentrebelAnd to make matters worse, insist that no amount of modification would justify buying that cooler ever. Itâs literally covering your ears and muttering la-dee-da repeatedly.
The whole thing was terribly unprofessional but he is right an $800 water block is niche.
And GN calling them out on this and a pattern of getting many things wrong with Linus doubling down on the whole thing as a response.
If you are interested there are essentially 3 problems:
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the GPU fiasco: Where they didnât just bork a install. A small 2 man startup send them their (I think only or at least best) prototype for testing and even included the correct GPU to use it with in their packet. LTT for some reason tested it on a different one (obviously not working well there) and came to the devastating conclusion that NOBODY should ever buy this. Then instead of as requested sending it back they auctioned this prototype off at an event they hosted. To top it of after being called out
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the second problem that was also called out in the video published by gamers Nexus was a consistent pattern of publishing data errors in their reviews. And if such errors are caught, they would be inadequately handled. Maybe through a post under the video or by later replacing part of the video. If they caught an error before publishing they also often would just add a small onscreen text correction with an * instead of redoing that part. All problematic as many people will miss those corrections and thus be influenced by wrong data.
Those two points are especially problematic given the reach of LTT, since they are by far the largest tech YouTube channel. And thus influence a lot of people, especially beginners. Their initial response to these problems was also extremely bad.
- the third problem was a former employee coming forward with allegations of them being an extremely toxic place to work at. With sexual harassment, intense workload and so on.
Thank you, I spent so much time combing through posts and comments and your comment is the first time it has been succintly explained.
Everything youâre told + they put ads into their âapologyâ video
What a corporate answer that says, now that the public knows we suck I guess we need to address it.
What kind of answer would you rather have. Iâm seriously asking what should the comment have been in order for you to be happy?
There is no way. Too many corp answers that were nothing but words have been published before for anyone to not be cynic about it.
But how to make it better? Do you just want LMG to disappear and leave 100 employers jobless, because thatâs not nice either.
Well, start acting on what you say and trust will come in time.
exuBased on the response above theyâre trying to do exactly that now. So maybe wait and see?