My personal thoughts
At first it came off a bit whiney, but I watched the entire thing and I’m glad I did. It shows a pattern of carelessness and in some cases complete douchebaggery of LMG.
What they did to Billet Labs is absolutely un-fucking excusable. LMG and Linus, in particular, needs to be mercilessly shamed for that until Billet Labs gets a clear and unequivocal apology and paid restitution for damages. Fucking shameful. What a bunch of pricks.
Video Description
This video is not monetized. This video covers our serious concerns regarding the data accuracy of Linus Media Group, including Linus Tech Tips, ShortCircuit, and TechQuickie, particularly as it relates to rushing content out the door to favor – by staff’s own admission – quantity over quality. As the company continues to expand into its LTT Labs direction, the importance of accurate data increases; however, even as ‘only’ entertainment, there are still certain responsibilities to the consumer and the manufacturers to report fairly (and to have defined corrections processes in place). We tried to approach this as objectively as possible and hope that viewers are able to listen to the evidence we present, particularly as it relates to significant and frequent data errors that now present in nearly every technical review video.
My biggest problem right now with LTT:
He has literally admitted that they have too much to do right now (see https://linustechtips.com/topic/1526180-gamers-nexus-alleges-lmg-has-insufficient-ethics-and-integrity/page/27/#comment-16079025)
but at the same time he doesn’t see the need to reduce the number of videos to achieve the required quality and just tells people to “stay tuned”.
I find that very strange to be honest.
It’s because Linus still has startup brain. He was squeezing blood from the stone for the first few years and his success then makes him believe that he needs to maintain that same mentality now.
Fortunately, he’s also realized that he doesn’t like running a large company and he’s hired a CEO. Unfortunately, said CEO is still stuck in his previous role and won’t actually be starting full-time for another few months. So now the company gets to sit in an awkward limbo of Linus checking out but Tarren not being ready to take over.
Once he is able to be a real CEO of LMG, I’m willing to bet things will start to dramatically change. Tarren has been running businesses as businesses for a while now and thus should know how to shape the company. He’ll be able to adjust the goals and fix the spends to align with those goals. Since the company is privately owned, as long as Linus doesn’t step on the process, it should go pretty well.
His comment didn’t address two key issues for me:
I’ve been enjoying solely the WAN Show, but hearing about constant mistakes in benchmarks while praising “We want to show factual information on benchmarks for once.”, is rubbing me in the wrong way. You can’t rush benchmarking without QA and publish those results as fact. You get to choose for accuracy, or fast to churn content.
And Linus not mentioning something concrete on the first issue is worrying to me, not showing a clear intent to ease on rushing those benchmarks.
Not to mention, it’s worth taking down a video if benchmarka are wrong even if the conclusion is “most likely to remain the same”, which one cannot conclude with certainty without redoing it. It would be better transparency wise to either not knowingly publish wrong information, or put a more clear notice on said videos besides the description and a pinned comment.