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While I don’t doubt for a moment that LTT fan base is likely filled to the brim with fanatics… I don’t want to completely go all in on that story as much as the Madison story. That kid’s youtube channel has a dubious history on it’s own. It appears that the channel was purchased with all the subs that it had, not actually grown. I don’t necessarily believe that they “deserved” the play button if they bought subs. Not to say they deserved to be harassed, but you can’t expect not to be if you do things in a really shady way.
I could be wrong… I dunno. But I’d encourage a little more research before accepting this story.
There’s absolutely no excuse for hounding a child to suicide.
Correct, but I can’t blame LTT for that. That’s the raving zealot LTT fanbase.
No, but you did suggest you should expect this level of abuse for the “shady” act of buying subs and buying a YouTube button someone else feels they’re entitled to.
Ultimately if a group of people whose unifying property is you and they’re hounding a child in your name you are absolutely responsible for doing everything in your power to stop them abusing that child.
Not to say they deserved to be harassed, but you can’t expect not to be if you do things in a really shady way.
Is what I said. As in I don’t believe that they should have been harassed, but the internet being the internet… we know that’s what happens when people do shady shit like that.
Linus can’t control idiots that just watch his videos. He was on record as “don’t bother this person” in several places. And I’ve not seen any case where Linus “sent” people to harass this kid. So yes… even if the group is ultimately unified by Linus… I can’t necessarily blame him.
None of which contradicts anything I said.
Holy shit. It just keeps getting worse.
Not surprised. Toxic people have toxic followers.
Can someone explain to me followers and the seemingly weird cult that forms. LTT, Sony, Microsoft, Apple etc. Why are people weirdly defensive of these companies and ignore evidence, death threats etc?
Same as with politics.
People make something stupid (and usually toxic) the center of their identity, and develop a parasocial obsession with it due to having nothing going on in their own lives and want to latch onto someone elses success… especially if that someone else displays the same unhealthy/bad traits that they personally have and identify with, to the point that any threat to, or criticism against, their idol, is seen as the most egregious of personal attacks on them as a person. So they strike out as if they’ve been personally done the worst wrong imaginable.
We like to think we’re evolved, but ultimately we’re still tribal creatures. It’s just that the tribes are a bit wider these days.
I forget the name of the bias/fallacy, but it’s something like “I love and support X. If X is bad, then I support something bad, then I’m bad. Since I’m a good person, and I support X, then X must be good or I wouldn’t support them”
It’s probably a quirk of how we make decisions - we don’t consciously make decisions. Instead, we might weigh out the options and that affects our choice, but in the moment we choose subconsciously. It might feel like we made a decision consciously, but sometimes at the last second we deviate from the course we chose (or upon choosing, realize that despite our thoughts we actually have already made up our mind otherwise)… Then we have to rationalize that choice, or start down a long and challenging road of constant introspection
Is there more to this than just a reddit screenshot posted on what’s clearly a clickbait shithole of a website?
I remember seeing the video of the play button, and kind of expected the guy to get a lot of hate. It resulting in harassment and suicide wouldn’t surprise me considering how Youtube people are. However, I’m not going to accept such a wild story without some credible evidence, especially since this is also the type of hoax internet losers would make up for clout.
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you want more evidence?
More than 0? Yes. All you’ve provided is a link to an article with more ads than words.
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Linus responded to it. I doubt he’d respond if it was fake.
https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/t1e1if/you_destroyed_my_life/
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You are the worst fanboy
I never noticed you until today and every single one of your comments is just fanboy defends his idol against anything and everything.
You are an excellent example of the problem.
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Good to see, but I don’t think LTT is going to lose most viewers. At least not anytime soon. They still have an insane amount of views per video and all they really have to do is look like they’re sorry and most of the internet will forget about it. I think LTT, if they continue down this path, should be defunct.
I don’t watch or follow their content and was impressed that they get at least a million views for every video, and they post almost everyday I guess. Holy shit
Not to mention they have so many channels that act as “fluff” that (lack of a better word) normies view casually and move on.
Emotions are high right now. It’s not a trend. I bet most of their subscribers don’t know about what’s going on and wouldn’t care either way. If lmg promise to do better and nothing big comes out, this will be forgotten in two weeks.
I’m curious if findings do come out. Would YouTube cancel or demonitize them?
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Let’s see what happens in a month or 3.
Even Reddit lost viewers, but they are almost back to original.
People will forget and carry on with LTT subscription.
You are absolutely right that this won’t lead to their collapse. But i would still say that in both reddits and LTT’s case, even if the numbers revert back, it will have an affect longterm.
For reddit the content quality has likely gone down and suddenly there is a viable alternative in Lemmy, which might have never gotten the chance to get of the ground otherwise. Within a month Lemmy suddenly has a decent amount of content, some communities have migrated here, and we have a number of high quality apps to choose from.
With LTT i think this does also have the potential to hurt them, even if the subscriber numbers come back up. They’ve been in a process of rapid expansion for a while now, so merely getting back to those numbers or slightly growing won’t cut it. Additionally i think with floatplane and the lab they’ve been heavily investing into their image as a reputable and trusted company for consumers. Particularly the lab where they’ve heavily invested. Even if ultimately the average less informed consumer is their target market, for that they will also need enthusiasts to recommend them to those.
happy to contribute to the unsub count
The thing is, although LTT is important to Linus, his wife, and with direct ties, the viewers have many choices today with regards to the tech YouTubers of different nature. This makes it easy to just move one. LTT is a mass marketed channel, not particularly niche in any area of tech and there are many like it.
Maybe, but with their size LTT can do crazy shit like water-cooling an entire server room with a pool.
I was never subbed anyway, but I also made sure to find a LTT vid and click on “don’t recommend channel” on YouTube.
Nuking from orbit is the only way to be sure.
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OOTL, what’s going on here?
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WHOA WHOA WHOA WHAT
The Billet Labs thing was unfortunate but I think they are capable of apologizing, learning lessons, and turning things around.
But that’s not just a toxic work environment that Madison is describing. That’s CRIMINAL. That’s actually unforgivable. Just given how many people knew about it, I don’t think it can be fixed by firing some people. And don’t even think about a sorry video.
Being transparent about your business, comes with pros and cons. Right now a female employee shared her end of the story to the web on why she quit, and you’re seeing the reaction to it.
Edit: This amplified the ongoing issue about LTT and their information integrity, which is very likely due to root causes that Linus repeatedly ignored, or worse, believed he was right and everyone was wrong.
Didn’t she leave about two years ago?
Yeah, but she hadn’t talked about it publicly because of fear of harassment, death threats, etc from the community
Sounds like a great community if true…
I had to look it up myself. These two links seem to cover the controversy pretty well.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-recent-criticism-of-linus-tech-tips-explained/
https://fandomwire.com/the-linus-tech-tips/
Edit:
Found this one too which is straight from the horse’s mouth: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741.htmldeleted by creator
And former employee Madison’s experience working there: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741
I was also the one tasked with managing the Only Fans account. Something I said I didn’t want to do.
Why the hell does a technology review channel need an OnlyFans account? wtf
It was an April fools thing, they didn’t post anything explicit for the short time it was up
Because it was part of an april fools joke a year or two back.
Drama
No doubt lol. There’s bigger fish to fry. I’m so glad I’m learning to not participate in trendy drama. Especially when the activists won’t even take time out of their super righteous elite life to tell you what’s going on. It must be huge! Lol
Nah, nothing big outside of it being LTT and Gamer’s Nexus calling them out.
In a nutshell, LTT was given a prototype of a product that they basically said was shit due to testing the product outside of the specified parameters that company told them to test in and, instead of sending the prototype and other stuff that the company sent to LTT for testing back to said company, LTT auctioned the prototype off. Gamer’s Nexus made a video calling out stuff like this happening as well as the inconsistency of LTT’s testing lab data to point out that LTT is basically doing rush job videos for money and is starting to do more harm than good. Linus himself gets involved and shifts blame to everybody else except himself and his staff. On top of all this going on, a former LTT employee started going off about workplace harassment with some pretty serious accusations (but no hard evidence).
There’s a lot more stuff going on with the nitty-gritty, but that’s more or less the gist of things.
Thanks for the info, I appreciate it.
Shitty of him to sell the device but that’s the biz if you don’t put every little thing in fine print.
Them’s the breaks.
What needs to be in the fine print of LTT confirming they’re going to return it… to then turn around and sell it after confirming they’re going to return it?
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They admitted it in their own video… GN also showed emails that came direct from the company.
https://youtu.be/0cTpTMl8kFY?t=800
From LTT’s own video. They show an email from “Felix”
I’ll transcribe so you’re not wasting time trying to pause the video if you’re on mobile or something. Bold is my edit.
Right. We Originally said you could keep it because we thought it would be good for you to have it for future builds - it wasn’t so you could sell it (whether for charity or not). Then when Linus clearly didn’t like it, we asked for it back and you agreed. That was a [redacted] prototype and we’re a very small company. Do you plan to reimburse us for the money it cost? You agreed to send it back and we planned our finances accordingly. This is not okay at all."
Edit: For completeness. The redacted portion was the cost of the prototype itself.
You must have an elite life too then, because the links to what happened are posted everywhere.
Hobbydrama, which is always enjoyable.
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These things are always temporary. They’ll lose subs for a moment, but then it’ll bounce back like nothing
Well, it seems like they’ve finally admitted to a lot of this from GN (thanks Steve). But, can we at least give them a chance to correct?
Little behind, eh?
Have a read through the pinned post in this community, then ask again.
/edit: https://lemmy.ml/post/3412121 (it’s not pinned anymore)
Uh, wow. Was not aware of this, at all. I was aware of some previous workplace stuff from what, a few months ago. But dam.
Who is this Linus Sex Tips and what he did?
Okay, now seriously, I know who he is but I’m too lazy to check what he did.
Well on monday it started off with another channel pointing out that their data is systemically crap, overworked crunching empolyees, and they robbed some indie startup company, and now it’s all about how they have an incredibly toxic work enviroment and sexual assault alligations.
Thanks for the reminder.
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