Gamers Nexus vs LinusTechTips: Smackdown

staknhalo said:
Eh it's all info-techno-tainment - however accurate or not, whatever channel or not
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Checking temps for VRM's as can example is not Info-techno-tainment. That is real world information someone who is tech savvy appreciates. I want to know when I purchase a MOBO which is the best at handling a CPU be it overclocking or not.

So, again LTT calls out hardware reviewers saying that LTT's reviews will be better. Then going back at reviews they have done has been pretty piss poor job. Do not call out people on their product reviews when yours is shit to begin with.
 
Brackle said:
I dont think HUB or GN need 15 minutes of limelight. Almost all the real tech heavy people know they bring out top notch reviews compared to LTT.

When you call out GN and HUB saying your reviews will be better. You should make damn sure yours is top notch (Which LTT's reviews aren't). Thats why no one takes LTT seriously when it comes to reviews. LTT Is entertainment, HUB and GB are technical channels.
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There have been some claims that this was a one-off comment from one over-enthusiastic employee (that was left in the publicized video nonetheless). I don't think the comment, whether it was scripted or not, really matters much. Let's not give LTT/LMG room to scapegoat that employee. What matters is that, as GN pointed out many times, LTT/LMG is now actively and heavily marketing itself as an accurate source of product/service information that can be used for purchasing decisions via "LTT Labs", and on a huge scope of products/service categories. And they are nowhere near that standard currently.
 
Brackle said:
I dont think HUB or GN need 15 minutes of limelight. Almost all the real tech heavy people know they bring out top notch reviews compared to LTT.

When you call out GN and HUB saying your reviews will be better. You should make damn sure yours is top notch (Which LTT's reviews aren't). Thats why no one takes LTT seriously when it comes to reviews. LTT Is entertainment, HUB and GB are technical channels.
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Agree
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I had never heard of this Ross person before, but I had heard of GrapheneOS and was considering checking it out, but after this, it really seems like th eproject lead is a toxic personality I would want absolutely nothing to do with, and when someone behaves like that, you can't trust their work. I understand it isn't the first time the project has had some controversy as well, what with contentious business splits and forks in the past. What a shame. I really want a privacy centric project to succeed, but this is a total turnoff.
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Louis Rossmann is a big pro repair guy. Though he's more about right to repair and NYC real estate than repairing Macbooks, which is what he was known for. I've crossed paths with him on a subject about Hector Martin and his asshole nature like the guy from GrapheneOS. Mainly about how Hector Martin is all about that Patreon money to slowly get Linux working on Apple M series hardware. It's been 3 years and Asahi Linux isn't what I'd call a daily driver. There's a lot of open source projects that seem like they're giving the community free software when there's actually a business plan behind it. The only difference is they don't have a boss to report to.
 
Brackle said:
LTT Is entertainment, HUB and GB are technical channels.
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I agree that is what they are, but LTT has been increasingly marketing themselves as a consumer oriented tech source, based on their lab investments.

If that is how they are going to market themselves, then their feet need to be held to the fire on actually being what they say they are.
 
sc5mu93 said:
Old man Bennett should make a “reacts” video to the GN vs LTT video.

Bennett:”jackasses could have avoided this crap by not relying on YouTube to drive business model…”
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Kind of a dumb comment in this day and age, I doubt he would say that.
 
Furious_Styles said:
Kind of a dumb comment in this day and age, I doubt he would say that.
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It’s funny because IIRC he didn’t want to have to rely on YouTube (at least partially) to drive his business model and hence why hardocp is no more.

Edit: and frankly I don’t think anyone would really miss LMG if it went the same way…
 
sc5mu93 said:
Old man Bennett should make a “reacts” video to the GN vs LTT video.

Bennett:”jackasses could have avoided this crap by not relying on YouTube to drive business model…”
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The current era of "all content moving to youtube" is positively moronic.

A combination of "that being where the ad money is" and "the current gen of children don't like to read:" are to blame.

Written content will ALWAYS be superior for technical reviews. A video is great to show how something looks, and a clip can be helpful as an illustration, but the ritten version should always be the master.

It reminds me of the stupidity when Verizon sent me my FiOS bill as a video. It made me want to bash my head against a wall.

Some things are just vastly superior in written form.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
The current era of "all content moving to youtube" is positively moronic.

A combination of "that being where the ad money is" and "the current gen of children don't like to read:" are to blame.

Written content will ALWAYS be superior for technical reviews. A video is great to show how something looks, and a clip can be helpful as an illustration, but the ritten version should always be the master.

It reminds me of the stupidity when Verizon sent me my FiOS bill as a video. It made me want to bash my head against a wall.

Some things are just vastly superior in written form.
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I completely agree, but the only way for written content to exist is for enough people to pay enough for it so that it has the same or greater return on investment as free ad-based videos. But consumers aren't willing to do that.
 
I don't think anyone is really surprised at the issues that Gamers Nexus outlined in their video. The majority of the [H] community has been watching LTT to some extent throughout the years and we've all seen how the technical quality of those videos has gone down while the entertainment value has gone up. LTT grew too fast and took on so much overhead that they have no choice but to pump out videos as quickly as possible to stay above water. Linus has mentioned the quality issues in the past but that doesn't excuse the main concerns that GN pointed out. LTT is so big that their opinion on a product can make or break a company, especially if said company is small. "With great power comes great responsibility", that famous line applies to situations where Linus acts irresponsibly when reviewing tech. He's been called out by his own staff numerous times so I think it's time that he decides to either step back or make signification changes to address these problems.
 
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What it comes down to is Linus is a phony. His forced wacky persona worked for him when he was younger and he did well to build a following, but he's not passionate about tech, not anymore, he doesn't really live and breathe it, he's more interested in interior design and hoarding cash.

And this is at the heart of what went wrong, you can only go on faking it for so long, especially if you are attempting to brand yourself as some kind of crusader for consumers. He has fingers in too many pies, half his management team are recent exiles from the companies whose products he reviews, there are so many conflicts of interest that you can feel the cognitive dissonance vibrating through the screen every time he speaks. It must be exhausting living a lie on this scale around the clock.

He has close to 20m subs but views rarely rise above 2m, so his following had largely moved on, he's not the force he once was but he hasn't realised it yet. The small vocal cult of sycophants who suckle at his teat have kept his fragile ego inflated just enough to set him up for the inevitable fall.

He's definitely a narcissist, possibly a sociopath but ultimately he's an arsehole, the chickens are coming home to roost and it's wonderful to behold.
 
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I unsubbed from all their channels. I don't rely on a single outlet for information and I found them pretty entertaining but the whole Billet Labs prototype thing was just insulting.

The double down response posted on the LTT forums was just icing on the cake.

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:facepalm:
 
Bigbacon said:
Pretty sure Kyle was doing youtube videos.....
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Really?!? Did I miss them in their curmudgeonly glory? I know he did short videos showing off some features better illustrated in video vs still. I didn’t think he did review style videos.
 
Bigbacon said:
Pretty sure Kyle was doing youtube videos.....
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Kyle did videos the way videos make sense, for additional supporting info to help illustrate something that isn't clear in a written review.

Now, he was about to embark on a "show" style Youtube series on VR, but he took the job with Intel before that really took off, so we only got to see the promos.

As much as I hate all video review content, I understand why content creators feel the need to do it. Youtube has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room. Between ad blockers and the fact that kids don't like to read these days, ad revenues were just falling through the floor for non-video content. For most content creators It was move to Youtube or die.

Its a really sad reality, because videos just plain suck for most review content.
 
sc5mu93 said:
Really?!? Did I miss them in their curmudgeonly glory? I know he did short videos showing off some features better illustrated in video vs still. I didn’t think he did review style videos.
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I remember a delid video...and a fingernail that never seemed to heal.
 
KickAssCop said:
Anyone that watches LTT for reviews is a fucking moron. There I said it! lol.
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That's not fair to the watcher. Considering how popular LTT is, you can't fault someone looking at LTT videos and thinking they got a good idea about the product they are reviewing. This is why what Gamers Nexus did was good, because it points out LTT's flaws that hopefully will force LTT to change their actions, or at the very least will catch someone who looked at an LTT video and reconsider their opinion of said product. Unless you eat shit sleep tech, you wouldn't know much about Linus Tech Tips besides you've seen him without a beard as a meme.
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xDiVolatilX said:
Steve talks A LOT of shit himself. To the point that I feel like some of it is unnecessary but he still shoves it in his videos.
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He's learning! I still remember his review of the Corsair iCue 220t case, where he spent what felt like ten minutes ranting about the front panel and how it would choke off airflow...only to get to the actual numbers later on and grudgingly admit that it actually had sufficient airflow that the case temps weren't bad. A more recent review (I don't remember which case or if it was a prebuilt) with what looked like limited intake had him simply grumble sort of pro forma for about 15 seconds and then move on, and the case also had decent temperatures. So he can learn, unlike some reviewers.
 
Wow that response from Linus........Wow is all I gotta say. Looks like he doesn't really care about the consumer as he didnt even acknowledge any of the mistakes in the reviews that Steve found....

Blows my mind. I wish LTT the best after this one, but they will always have those diehard followers.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
  • The hiring of an honest to goodness journalism executive familiar with best practices from the news industry on how to properly control that reporting is accurate, that advertisers and sponsors don't result in bias, and how to keep editorial content separate from news and reviews.
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I cannot imagine the Consumer reports model working, it is too late and not what we want from LTT.

Can you imagine starting tomorrow, no we would never review an item we did not bought in a store ourselves, will never engage in some nda-embargo with anyone, never have an entity near or far engaged in review ever engaged in content that was provided by a company (access, product, interviews....) the really basic you do not need to be a journalist to know all of that.

This will lead to terrible content, reviews many weeks after product are launched with hundreds of reviews already, nothing much interesting ever, you cannot really be in the news, entertainment and serious reviews at the same time, LTT should stay a Bon Appetit-Singing competition where the food-singing is not the really point, the tech is just a reason to have an office show occurring.

They should make some effort but I am not sure they should ever pretend to have the first journalistic integrity, it is a field that was build by non journalist with 0 journalistic background institution involved and it's a bit too far you need to not be serious journalist to compete, a video denouncing LTT bad journalistic behaviour did not even do the very basic, again not having to have spent time in journalistic school to know ultra basic step to contacting LTT for comments on all the allegation they were about to do. It is a field where it is considered ok to respect a company embargo (let alone review guideline).
 
Armenius said:
It's an opinion piece, and Linus says that he's already said all there is to say about the issues later on. So he is being contradictory here. On the water block, this explanation is trying to disprove a negative. There is no way that this explanation could be confirmed as true, and it flies in the face of how anybody with a modicum of sense would think that it's okay to just auction off an engineering sample without clear communication, confirmation, and some kind of written agreement. Now that the ES is gone there is no way for Billet Labs to ever recover the opportunity and R&D costs spent developing the sample in the first place. The money gained from the auction is not going to be able to cover the total costs spent developing the ES.
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Obviously he will not sent them the money from the auction (that went to charity, they cannot divert charity money), they will pay the price of making a prototype (i imagine the R&D does not need to be redone, just the custom machining from the already existing plan).

It is really the very minimum for GN to contact Linux for comments, but GN is not a journalist and do not pretend to be and I imagine its audience do not imagine it to be either, it is just a show.

One thing that is strange in Linux comment, is that there is no we should not have done the video without having a video card available, or not release the video once we discover it does not work on a different video card, it is all about we should not have redone the video, which show where does the mentality start.
 
While I get the sentiment that this is just celeb drama essentially....rather different though considering they are celebs in our hobby space, thus MUCH more relevant and entertaining.

Unfortunately these fools have a huge influence on the market, so it's worth keeping up with.
 
I consider both of them questionable, same with a lot of the "tech tuber" community - not all necessarily bullshit, but it does seem a lot different from the old days and reviewers most often in tech. Just watching the whole shitstorm that came down a month or three ago with the Zen4 overheating issue, the hyperfixation on certain manufacturers over others (like Asus ), and conclusions asserted that were incorrect (ie , assuming exclusive guilt for one over another or that one lied and said it was fixed, when there would be further AGESA updates to address the issue pushed as soon as they were available - they could only push what they were given and told it would do etc), to say nothing for the major "break up" video another major tech-tuber did in response to this, was just like watching a disaster. I don't think that GN or anyone else is always without merit, but "Zen4 uh Asus is the devil" issue while watching that similar levels of saltiness were not directed at Gigabyte/Aorus and MSI when they had major vulnerabilities (one with an updater being poorly programmed allowing for an easy backdooring, another basically "losing" boot guard/imagesigning keys for all Intel platforms et) or other issues, was frustrating. To say nothing for the whole discussion sphere leveraging "if it bleeds it leads" style "journalism" and not framing that the issue was an unlikely one, which led to a lot of watchers believing that each Zen4 or Asus or whatever board owner had a coinflip's chance of burning itself out when in reality it was nothing of the sort; you can still responsibly cover the issue and call attention to the need for it to be fixed without exploiting panic for views...but that's not really what YouTube is about now is it?

Many "tech-tubers" seem to exist on drama and those who have some degree of success start to get a huge head about them as if the companies they review/find problems with need to kiss the ring or else they'll turn their slavering hordes of consumers against them. Maybe I'm just getting old and I remember there was always some drama, but things were different when the previous generation of "top tier" tech review sites were operating including [H].
 
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DukenukemX said:
There's a lot of open source projects that seem like they're giving the community free software when there's actually a business plan behind it.
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Even RMS feels that developers gotta eat. I don't have a problem with OSS developers getting paid--although if that's the primary focus, not getting the software written, it's likely to be a problem.
 
staknhalo said:
Eh it's all info-techno-tainment - however accurate or not, whatever channel or not. Don't deny inaccuracies and give credit for accuracy and attention to detail where it's due - but also don't hold any of these people up on a pedestal, again this ain't OnlyFans guys
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When LTT talks about OnlyFans, they are talking about their Noctua fans sponsorship. :LOL:
 
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