Gamers Nexus vs LinusTechTips: Smackdown

The funny part about all of this is that I have been a long time critic of Linus as someone who really doesn't know his shit. Someone who became popular because he was a charming sales guy, not because he actually understands what he is talking about.

I had just started to warm up to Linus a little bit, seeing how he in some videos was starting to call out unacceptable behavior from industry, but I don't have enough time to watch all of the content he puts out, so I hadn't caught any of these blatant errors.

The credibility here is 100% on the side of Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus, and 0% on the side of Linus. he is going to have to prove that he is not just a shill that gives sponsors and partners favorable reviews, and glosses over factual errors in his content just so he doesn't have to hurt his Youtube video metrics.

If Linus doesn't take this by the horns, and transparently talk about how he promises to improve, and what controls, checks and policies they are putting in place as a result, he risks losing any and all credibility he has. He has been talking a big pro-consumer game when it comes to setting up the new lab, but now he needs to put the necessary journalistic controls in place in order to get there.
 
I think Linus needs a big mea culpa out of this.

Linus already came clean about how he thinks he is a decent content guy, but is not a manager, which is why he made the choice to step back from leadership and hire a CEO.

I think the worst mistake LMG can do is to double down, push back and hope this goes away. The concerns that have been highlighted are real. They need to own the issues, and be transparent and show how they are going to fix them.

I'd like to see:
  • A discussion about a new QA review process that looks at the content and makes sure it is accurate before it goes life, and has the authority to stop a video from going out, until it is properly re-recorded and re-edited and fixed to meed all content quality standards.
  • New policies put in place when it comes to retractions and corrections, and how they are handled transparently and loudly and are not brushed under the rug in the name of youtube metrics.
  • New policies regarding independence from sponsors and affiliates when it comes to reporting, reviews and other content.
  • 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.

Take this as an opportunity to become better, not as one to dig in, and this can actually be a good thing.

Let's see how it goes.

If Linus comes out all defensive when he finally addresses this (because he will have to address this eventually) he will lose a ton of credibility.
 
I have defended LTT's intentions in the past, but if this video is even significantly accurate (does not even have to be 100%), this makes LTT / LMG / Linus look REALLY bad. Not just their words, not just their actions...worse...it makes their intentions look bad. Linus and that new CEO need to get internal comprehensive input from across the company about what has and is happening, determine the actions they need to take internally, start the process, and then release a detailed public response with a schedule of updates on the progress of future actions to improve things.

This isn't like that first LTT video GN did on the "trust me bro" lack-of-warranty situation. In fact I thought that first video, although it had a good message, was a bit unprofessional in its tone. And I am sure it is part of the reason why Linus is hostile to them now. It should have stuck to the facts without the "funny" edited parts mocking the disagreement between Linus and Luke on the WAN show. I suspect neither Linus nor Luke appreciated that coming from people they considered friendly colleagues in the industry. But LTT did not cause harm to anyone but themselves in that situation. And it was relatively simple for LTT to resolve.

This video on the other hand is systematically pointing out a level of disregard to the integrity and quality of everything they do. And that situation with Billet Labs goes beyond integrity/quality...that is an ethical and moral issue. This video also sticks to the facts and doesn't include any "funny" mocking on a personal level. Until LTT honestly addresses this, I wouldn't trust anything at all that comes out of them.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I like seeing some journalistic integrity from the side of Gamers Nexus.

I've been impressed by them in the past.
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While I'm ALWAYS impressed with GN coverage of anything they do. Steve has and does make me cringe a lot of the time also. In fact he makes me cringe more than Linus does. 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. That's not to say he isn't accurate, he prides his work on integrity and accurate and methodology, yet still some of the bullshit he adds is not needed lol. All that being said he is my absolute #1 YouTube outlet I go to for a trusted non bias review of whatever the tech GN is reviewing. I fully trust his assessments and always have.
 
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LTT has been used in more than a few discussions I’ve had on these boards, with apparently users not understanding that LTT should never be cited as a useful journalistic or data driven source.

Glad this has come out as it should make it significantly more obvious the reasons why. Their testing methodologies have been known to be garbage for a long while for anyone paying attention.
 
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Screenshot_20230815-101336.jpg
 
LTT has always been "IT Jackass" at best, wish we would the the world a favor and take a long walk off a short pier, I've grown tired of blocking his seemingly never ending torrent of channels on youtube
 
The problem with LTT is the naked greed, and the attempt to conceal it behind a thin veneer of integrity, an artificial edifice of efficacy that they have erected around the money grubbing reality of the business.

Many people are focused on the copper block incident, understandably so, that is truly disgusting, but for me it's the posting of videos that contain false information that ALWAYS favours the product being reviewed, and leaving them up so that a million noobs and consumers who are out searching for information and advice are effectively being tricked into making choices based on falsehoods. And then abusing their access to tools that few YT creators have access to which allow them to slyly switch out the video for a corrected version without altering view counts or upvotes etc, that is at the heart of what's wrong with the company.

Props to GN for not going too deep there, I felt the video was very restrained and balanced, but that behaviour is indicative of a culture that lacks any kind of moral compass. Viewers are the reason LTT exists and to have no problem feeding them bad data tells us all we need to know.

Something is rotten at the heart of LMG.
 
FLECOM said:
LTT has always been "IT Jackass" at best, wish we would the the world a favor and take a long walk off a short pier, I've grown tired of blocking his seemingly never ending torrent of channels on youtube
Click to expand...
I stopped watching LTT for quite sometime. I can't stand the person and the videos. Actually I can't stand his whole team. They behave like idiots with camera so I treated them as such.
For me even Tech Jesus really needs to cut down on words. He keeps repeating himself. His videos are also unwatchable. Only ones I watch these days is Hardware Unboxed and read up on techpowerup reviews. Maybe an occasional one from Hardware Canucks as the guys there act professional. And the website I always forget where Brent posts his stuff.

LTT and for the most part most of the other websites/youtubers are on my shit list. GN has content but man it takes a long time to get to the point.
 
KickAssCop said:
GN has content but man it takes a long time to get to the point.
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I think their goal is over-explaining to avoid ambiguities and add technical flavor, at the sake of conciseness, yet ironically I've seen various times this lead to confusion as many don't watch (or properly parse) the entire video since they're often so long :p

Their correct vs incorrect liquid cooler radiator mounting video is an example of this where they made another 20 minute follow-up, with Steve half-amused that people were confused (when the lead was buried like 3/4 of the way through the original video and could have been summarized in a minute).

Edit: back when they kept their website more up-to-date it was sometimes useful to check in comparison (particularly benchmark graphs). Apparently hasn't been updated since last year though.
 
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KickAssCop said:
GN has content but man it takes a long time to get to the point.
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I agree with you here. I enjoy their very informative videos, but the length it takes to get there is exhausting sometimes. As far as LTT I mainly watch their $5,000 AMD/Intel upgrades for the comedy aspect, but nothing else.
 
cageymaru said:
LTT is strictly entertainment only. Nobody in there right mind ever used them as a reference for purchases.
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I see them variously referred to on forums, by way of 'LTT tested this and <insert finding here>' so regardless of whether some are more on the ball there are no doubt users who will read it and then tell others and the attribution lost in the process as opinions are formed and shared ('I heard that...', or the worse overconfident version, 'That's incorrect, <finding> has been found <better/worse>').

One user I know a little more about on a forum even informs hardware purchase decisions at their company and has referenced them in the past (there's no chance it's a sole influence but their content does have a broad reach and audience regardless of how it's presented).

In fact the way it's presented as informative entertainment is probably a more subtle influence tbh, since viewers are likelier to watch more if it's entertaining than drier but more rigorous videos. Positive familiarity builds a preference towards people and there's an implicit trust forming (which can also be seen when people become unexpected apologists for them in the face of valid critique).
 
Odigo said:
Linus posted a response to his forums:

https://linustechtips.com/topic/152...nd-integrity/?do=findComment&comment=16078641

"There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.

To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.

Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.



With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...



I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.



Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.



Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).



With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.



We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.



Thanks for reading this"
Click to expand...
Note that when I might say "you" I am talking to Linus' response.
  • To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.
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.

  • To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.
By the looks of it, these were not growing pains, but growing strokes. If you observed so many issues needing corrections during and after production, backed up by comments from your own staff, then maybe you should have slowed down and corrected course before completely going off the rails. So you're right that it was your responsibility, but the fact that you didn't care shows a lot about your character as a leader.

  • Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
How long have you been operating LTT for? What are the primary demographics of your audience again? You are selling yourselves as an authority on PC hardware to young and impressionable people. The lack of care in relaying information to that audience again reveals a lot about your character. The fact that you could not learn and improve over the years since starting LTT, focusing instead on "entertainment" as an excuse, shows us you're not a good person.

  • With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...
This, again, shows your lack of care in creating your content. It's obvious that you did absolutely no planning when creating the video, that it was completely off the cuff. You could have talked to Billet Labs for the proper specifications on testing before moving forward and would have avoided this altogether. And how, exactly, is this just "misreading the room?" So, you're blaming it on your audience and Billet Labs for your own fuckup?

  • I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.
It's an engineering sample, you clown. That testing methodology would have been fine if you actually tested it properly and included the fast that it was ES in your conclusions (that nobody could buy) before declaring "nobody should buy this."

  • Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.
"My bad." Yes, I'm sure that makes the situation all the better for Billet Labs, who potentially lost tens of thousand of dollars and hours in development.

  • Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).
The language Linus used, TWICE: "Nobody should buy this product." That is devastating to a startup company trying to get their feet off the ground. It is an engineering sample, you fucking idiot. It wasn't meant for anyone to buy.

  • With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
No, Linus is a hypocrite because he has a tendency to always wave issues away as no big deal as he is doing in this very post and the clips from the WAN show Steve included in his video. It's telling when you'd rather destroy a startup company rather than spend resources to get your facts right. Linus has shown his true colors out in public many times, and any kind of response he would have given to Steve had he reached out beforehand would not have changed the content or substance of the video.

  • We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
No, because you effectively destroyed a startup company with your actions. I don't absolve Billet Labs of blame here, as they should have been smart enough to have a legally-binding contract between LMG and themselves before handing off their ES to a reviewer, but that doesn't absolve LMG for their own actions. In the absence of the threat of a lawsuit, you should just be good human beings. The actions taken and the waving away of the severity of those actions later tells us a lot about LMG's lack of integrity.

  • Thanks for reading this.
No, thank you for cementing what an absolute piece of shit you are.
 
Armenius said:
Note that when I might say "you" I am talking to Linus' response.
  • To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.
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.

  • To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.
By the looks of it, these were not growing pains, but growing strokes. If you observed so many issues needing corrections during and after production, backed up by comments from your own staff, then maybe you should have slowed down and corrected course before completely going off the rails. So you're right that it was your responsibility, but the fact that you didn't care shows a lot about your character as a leader.

  • Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
How long have you been operating LTT for? What are the primary demographics of your audience again? You are selling yourselves as an authority on PC hardware to young and impressionable people. The lack of care in relaying information to that audience again reveals a lot about your character. The fact that you could not learn and improve over the years since starting LTT, focusing instead on "entertainment" as an excuse, shows us you're not a good person.

  • With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...
This, again, shows your lack of care in creating your content. It's obvious that you did absolutely no planning when creating the video, that it was completely off the cuff. You could have talked to Billet Labs for the proper specifications on testing before moving forward and would have avoided this altogether. And how, exactly, is this just "misreading the room?" So, you're blaming it on your audience and Billet Labs for your own fuckup?

  • I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.
It's an engineering sample, you clown. That testing methodology would have been fine if you actually tested it properly and included the fast that it was ES in your conclusions (that nobody could buy) before declaring "nobody should buy this."

  • Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.
"My bad." Yes, I'm sure that makes the situation all the better for Billet Labs, who potentially lost tens of thousand of dollars and hours in development.

  • Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).
The language Linus used, TWICE: "Nobody should buy this product." That is devastating to a startup company trying to get their feet off the ground. It is an engineering sample, you fucking idiot. It wasn't meant for anyone to buy.

  • With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
No, Linus is a hypocrite because he has a tendency to always wave issues away as no big deal as he is doing in this very post and the clips from the WAN show Steve included in his video. It's telling when you'd rather destroy a startup company rather than spend resources to get your facts right. Linus has shown his true colors out in public many times, and any kind of response he would have given to Steve had he reached out beforehand would not have changed the content or substance of the video.

  • We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
No, because you effectively destroyed a startup company with your actions. I don't absolve Billet Labs of blame here, as they should have been smart enough to have a legally-binding contract between LMG and themselves before handing off their ES to a reviewer, but that doesn't absolve LMG for their own actions. In the absence of the threat of a lawsuit, you should just be good human beings. The actions taken and the waving away of the severity of those actions later tells us a lot about LMG's lack of integrity.

  • Thanks for reading this.
No, thank you for cementing what an absolute piece of shit you are.
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Well said! If you posted that in LTs forum they would go crazy (lot of fan boys sticking up for LT obviously).
 
I'm surprised at the lack of the usual "you're just jealous of how much money LTT makes for having *fun*"

He finally dropped the mask further enough for more to notice.
 
In my mind, LTT and Gamers Nexus serve different markets.

If you want a 40-minute video where every facet of a product is tested in excruciating detail, Gamers Nexus is the review you want to watch. If you just want a 10-minute summary review of a product, LTT is the place to go.
 
Armenius said:
Note that when I might say "you" I am talking to Linus' response.
  • To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.
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.

  • To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.
By the looks of it, these were not growing pains, but growing strokes. If you observed so many issues needing corrections during and after production, backed up by comments from your own staff, then maybe you should have slowed down and corrected course before completely going off the rails. So you're right that it was your responsibility, but the fact that you didn't care shows a lot about your character as a leader.

  • Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
How long have you been operating LTT for? What are the primary demographics of your audience again? You are selling yourselves as an authority on PC hardware to young and impressionable people. The lack of care in relaying information to that audience again reveals a lot about your character. The fact that you could not learn and improve over the years since starting LTT, focusing instead on "entertainment" as an excuse, shows us you're not a good person.

  • With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...
This, again, shows your lack of care in creating your content. It's obvious that you did absolutely no planning when creating the video, that it was completely off the cuff. You could have talked to Billet Labs for the proper specifications on testing before moving forward and would have avoided this altogether. And how, exactly, is this just "misreading the room?" So, you're blaming it on your audience and Billet Labs for your own fuckup?

  • I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.
It's an engineering sample, you clown. That testing methodology would have been fine if you actually tested it properly and included the fast that it was ES in your conclusions (that nobody could buy) before declaring "nobody should buy this."

  • Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.
"My bad." Yes, I'm sure that makes the situation all the better for Billet Labs, who potentially lost tens of thousand of dollars and hours in development.

  • Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).
The language Linus used, TWICE: "Nobody should buy this product." That is devastating to a startup company trying to get their feet off the ground. It is an engineering sample, you fucking idiot. It wasn't meant for anyone to buy.

  • With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
No, Linus is a hypocrite because he has a tendency to always wave issues away as no big deal as he is doing in this very post and the clips from the WAN show Steve included in his video. It's telling when you'd rather destroy a startup company rather than spend resources to get your facts right. Linus has shown his true colors out in public many times, and any kind of response he would have given to Steve had he reached out beforehand would not have changed the content or substance of the video.

  • We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
No, because you effectively destroyed a startup company with your actions. I don't absolve Billet Labs of blame here, as they should have been smart enough to have a legally-binding contract between LMG and themselves before handing off their ES to a reviewer, but that doesn't absolve LMG for their own actions. In the absence of the threat of a lawsuit, you should just be good human beings. The actions taken and the waving away of the severity of those actions later tells us a lot about LMG's lack of integrity.

  • Thanks for reading this.
No, thank you for cementing what an absolute piece of shit you are.
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Epic post. This wasn't written over a smoke break, that's for damn sure.
 
Absalom said:
silly and unprofessional
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This is what I always thought of LTT, therefore I never went to them for any serious advice, however these "informative and unfortunate" revelations show that their unprofessionalism goes much deeper than I have ever thought. And it is indeed fuelled by greed.

To not remove a clearly and seriously wrong video immediately when you realize it is wrong, is not just unprofessional, it ought to be criminal.
Not spending a few more hours on videos to make sure they get it right is just plain scummy corporate behavior, that someone who came up from the consumer side and not the "management type" should be immune to.

Until now I believed while unprofessional Linus at least has the consumer's interest in mind. Clearly that is no longer the case, if it ever was.
 
SeymourGore said:
Yeah, just finished it - might've just been the way the videos were spliced but Linus didn't look good at all. Especially the GPU water block footage, real douch-ey.
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He is a douchebag. I've been saying this for the last 5 years now - his videos have devolved into nothing more than clickbait entertainment to flex his personal wealth. Totally out of touch with viewers.
 
I think Stever handled tt well in the video, very well,as did HUB in the new podcast today. LTTs many issues span back at least 3 + years beyond what GN Showed.
 
Paul and LTT for my tech news and updates, that's my vibe. GN is like having to attend a mandatory training class for work.
 
staknhalo said:
Hardware Unboxed gets their name into the 15 minute limelight by comparing LTT upscaling to GN upscaling


View: https://youtu.be/TcSkrkXd2H0
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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.
 
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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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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