Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls

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.

Basically, ltt auctioned off a small startups best prototype after telling them they'd get it back. This is after they fucked up the testing and gave them an unfair horrible review.

This comes after a long line of testing fuckups that required corrections that were never properly made, on a pretty frequent basis.

And to top it all off, a former employee was bullied and sexually harrassed until she quit.

They are running their business like teenage kids. An adult pointed out some flaws and they decided they're a minority and are being oppressed. In reality the adult has 15 times less viewer following than the self proclaimed victims. Also, they treat their crew like dog shit and with that came allegations of misogyny which their behaviour seem to support the idea they are, in fact mistreating women. But without concrete evidence these will have to be considered allegations for the time being.

Cross-post from /c/technology

One additional point I think some others left out, in a recent LTT lab tour video, an employee took potshots at GamersNexus and HardwareUnboxed by saying LTT wasn't reusing benchmark test results and implying GN and HUB were. HUB responded on twitter pointing out they they'd rerun many benchmarks and pointed to some quality issues in LMG tests. Linus responded on the WAN show in a pretty dismissive way and mentioned journalistic integrity or something. This seems to have lead GN to make that 45 minute video which includes a bunch of evidence from LMG videos.

Toxic workplace accusations aside for a moment, some of this might have blown over were it not were Linus's shitty handling at every turn. He probably could've diffused some of this current situation, but just keeps being dismissive and adversarial. Steve of GN said they'd been thinking about these issues for the past few months, but I'm not sure this video would've dropped this week or in quite the same format had Linus not fucked up his response on the WAN show.

gamernexus went over everything, It is fairly damning.