- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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I was on the fence regarding wether or not to stay subscribed to his YouTube and floatplane.
The “apology” video started to push me towards staying on board until HE LITERALLY SHRUGGED before his apology.
They are talking the talk about doing better, being more accurate, and going over the videos more thoroughly and then they let that COMPLETELY slide? If no one who watched that video ever said “Hey maybe a shrug before your apology might be sending the wrong message?” than there is definitely somethings NG massively wrong at LMG.
The to top things off this Madison stuff comes out of the woodwork?
Yeah, I’m done with LMG. l hope that the talented people who work there either get rid of Linus completely or are able to move on to roles in healthier places.
Genuine question: People pay $5 a month to watch videos from that channel on Floatplane?
At the time it was worth it for all the exclusives that you would never see on YouTube. Plus my experience was that they served a better video and audio quality than Youtube.
I hope that the talented people who work there either get rid of Linus completely or are able to move on to roles in healthier places.
Same. I’m particularly hoping that Emily goes somewhere else where she can present more technical content. Her videos are clearly more technical than the rest of LTT and she has a particularly calm and pleasant demeanor while explaining things, like a really good teacher.
She would probably do well elsewhere.
Remember, everyone! Don’t just unsubscribe, click “Don’t recommend channel”!
About time they’re stopping spreading misinformation. Crucify the creeps!
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.”
Finally, someone in this shit fest of a management structure realized that having the owners of the company investigate themselves isn’t the smartest idea here.
I will be interested to see how much power the new CEO really has over operations, or if Linus predictably has got such a founder’s syndrome that he tries to “fix” the problems himself (which he can’t, of course, since he clearly doesn’t believe he has a workplace culture issue in the first place).
The quality and partner/sponsor issues are mostly expected from getting investor money and expanding quickly. The harassment issues are probably a preexisting problem from existing management. So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.
Expect Linus to be reigned in and no longer be responding directly to these issues. Despite that he didnt sell the company, the people/banks that gave him the money to expand will not be happy to lose their money.
So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.
I don’t think it’s that unusual, really. LTT and Linus specifically have had people accuse him before of being unprofessional or creating a toxic work environment or bolstering a toxic fanbase or putting out bad content or all those things. Things I didn’t know about because I just started getting into his stuff a couple of months ago. But all those things are being reexamined now because he lost favor for a second. The Gamer’s Nexus video opened him up to be criticized where normally he’d have a loyal fanbase that would rush to his defense. But even then, it wasn’t until he made that first bad response and Gamer’s Nexus responded to the response and called out his gaslighting on the topic that a lot of the controversy blew open.
People who had long been ignored or felt like they weren’t safe to speak out against the harm they felt LMG or Sebastion had done to them saw an opportunity to let their voice be heard. And people who had been ignored in the past are being looked at again in new context and by more people. This is a common thing. People often feel frightened to speak out about something because they feel they’ll be dismissed or punished for it. Everything from people simply telling them to suck it up because that’s just life to people threatening violence to people getting you blacklisted. This is why after just a couple of sexual abuse allegations started coming out, an entire flood of them suddenly were made public and #MeToo happened. That was a case where speaking out against producers, writers, directors, actors, or anyone else big in the motion picture industry would usually be an end to your career, so most people weren’t willing to do it. And most of the ones who had spoken out in the past were made fun of, actually laughed at, before being blacklisted and relatively forgotten by the wider audience. An individual victim had no power to do anything, but once a few did, some of the others joined, and then it became a movement.
The LTT scandal won’t be anywhere near the same size as that, of course. It’s one relatively small company. But my point is that it’s the same phenomenon at a different scale. The group and specifically Linus have a fan base that has been absolutely brutal to dissenters before. Sebastion on the WAN show and in previous replies to criticism always dismisses it as invalid and that emboldens his fanbase to hit back at people who are, “Just hating,” or, “Don’t understand what they’re talking about!” The Gamer’s Nexus videos started to form a little wedge between Sebastion and his fans as they showed how he wasn’t being fair to them either. That created an opening.
Can someone sum up the controversy? I’ve seen quite a bit but not sure exactly what’s what.
Basic summary which will miss a lot of context because it looks like this is all really a few years coming:
(For ease of flow, I will be using quotation marks in much of this comment, but these are paraphrasing, not direct quotes.)
A YouTube channel called Gamer’s Nexus (GN) put out a video talking about Linus Tech Tips (LTT/LMG) and how they have, through incompetence, negligence, or malice, been putting out bunk data and doing really bad hardware reviews at least in the past year, and some guessing of why it happened. In that video, GN also addressed a controversy over Billet Labs, a relatively new company that is trying to build water blocks for custom water loops. LTT did a video with their prototype some time back, in which they lost the 3090Ti that was sent with the block, Linus decided to instead use it on the 4090 someone grabbed by accident, complained that the water block didn’t work, and went on to say it’s an overly expensive gimmick that didn’t work and no one should ever buy it despite not testing it on the hardware that it was made for. At the time, Linus was called out for this and dismissed criticism saying, “Even if the block had done better on the proper hardware, it was impossible it could have improved,” and, “None of it changes the conclusion that no one should ever buy it.” Billet Labs asked for their prototype (and GPU) back, and LMG said they would send it back. They asked for it back again, were told it would be shipped soon. Then LMG auctioned the block off to the public at the Linus Tech Expo (LTX).
In response to the GN video, Linus Sebastion, owner, founder, and Chief Visionary Officer of LMG, posted on the LTT forums several things such as, “The Gamer’s Nexus video was journalistic dishonest because they didn’t contact us before releasing the video. If they had, they would have gotten important context such as how we didn’t sell the water block, we auctioned it off for charity. And we’ve already come to an agreement with Billet Labs to reimburse them for the block.” The rest of the post went on to deflect blame and never really address the crux of GN’s video which was mostly about the bad data LMG has been putting out in their videos, seemingly caused by an untenable release schedule. GN responded in their weekly news video calling out Linus’ response for gaslighting, lying, and more. He also contacted Billet Labs and found out that they had not come to an agreement for reimbursement, and in fact that since the water block had been auctioned off that they only heard back from LMG about two hours AFTER GN’s first video had been released.
After that, people on Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, and other social media started looking back at previous accusations against LTT, LMG, Linus Sebastion, and other related entities and saw a long pattern of bad behavior that had mostly been dismissed in the past. A former employee, Madison Reeve, posted a long series of posts on X (Twitter) detailing a toxic work environment mostly consisting of toxic management treating employees like they should be happy to work there when they have a nearly impossible task of getting a tremendous amount of content out at an accelerated rate for a barely livable wage for the city that they’re in. But on top of that experience that she said was shared with many other employees, she as a woman also faced a lot of misogyny and even some sexual harassment, eventually culminating in her self-harming quite seriously simply in the hopes that she wouldn’t get in trouble for taking a day off.
Since Madison’s allegations, LTT made an apology video which did not really address the sexual harassment allegations or even the toxic workplace stuff. What it did have, however, were a couple of humorous seques to their sponsors, some bloopers, LTT merch, a reminder to visit the LTT store, and Linus again trying to deflect the blame away from himself. In my opinion, the apology comes off worse than tone deaf, it comes off as downright insulting even if you pretend that they didn’t know about the Madison Reeves accusations before making it. Now, finally, they have gotten Linus to potentially shut the fuck up like he probably should have from the start and the recently-hired new CEO is stepping in to say, “I’m appalled at these accusations, we’re going to not only conduct our own review but also hire someone to review us.” Keep in mind, however, this was someone who, when it was announced that they’d hired him, Linus said on the WAN Show that he’d been a shadow-CEO working at the company for six months to make sure that he fit with the corporate culture and got along with management. Meaning that he knew about their toxic management before he formally accepted the job.
So it seems like Linus is a self-centered, unempathetic kinda boss, who doesn’t have even a correct understanding of how to be a better employer.
On the other hand, that is how 90% of all owner/bosses of all business I’ve ever interacted with are.
There isn’t a point to this observation I’m just sad about it :(
I don’t understand why people are so enraged. I do understand actually : you all love the drama. It’s great, plus you can act offended and make it personal. Some of you look like you are on some personal mission with pitchfork in one hand and a big justice boner in the other. Chill.They are a big private company is not connected to you, they haven’t done anything to you directly. Or did they make you buy a cpu that is actually just a tad slower? Come on.
