Linus Media Group CEO Terren Tong also responded via email, saying he was “shocked at the allegations and the company described” in Reeve’s posts. He went on to note that “as part of this process, beyond an internal review we will also be hiring an outside investigator to look into the allegations and will commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”
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Wow quick and decisive action by CEO to call in external investigation. Reading Linus’ response, it doesn’t even appear that he would consider external investigation. He states that HR would conduct a thorough review. I’ll be frank, I don’t trust Colton to run the HR review.
I bet once this issue is resolved, we might see Terren bring in external subject matter experts to completely overhaul LMG business operations. HR consultants, Operations and Logistics consultants, Finance, etc. Up until now, LMG was/is run by a self-taught/self-made/learning-on-the-job crew. Can’t do that when you’re now a corp.
Edit: I would love to sub to a channel called TBT (Terren Business Tips) 😂
Not to say Colton can’t do the job, but HR is a department that needs to be independent of all other departments and the voice of the HR manager needs to be considered more important than the voice of most of the other managers because they’re the ones dealing with the humans that make the company.
Oh exactly, he oversees many functions that are traditionally held by separate people. You can’t juggle those functions in parallel without degradation in quality and proper oversight… Which seems to be the theme over the past couple of days…
From what I can tell, LMG has, for some time, run HR through an outside firm (in the leaked meeting audio, he mentions this firm multiple times), so he’s probably referring to them rather than Colton.
So it isn’t an external audit. They work for him.
Yeah I’ve recently come across the same understanding… In my management career I’ve never worked with a third party HR, so I don’t know how effective that model is.
It is useful for parts of HR like properly filing tax forms, employee leave requests, onboarding/off boarding, etc. Basically they can handle paperwork type things, but are generally not so great at conflict resolution and culture type things.
Gen Zers speedrunning why big corporations have the structures they have
You know that a cultural and organizational happy medium somewhere between LMG’s YOLO approach and IBM exists, right? It’s not a binary XOR.
Americans view everything in binary, it’s either right or wrong, no other variables exist.
Up until now, LMG was/is run by a self-taught/self-made/learning-on-the-job crew. Can’t do that when you’re now a corp.
Linus hired an experienced CEO who, I’m sure started these kind of discussions of creating a cohesive work environment several months ago.
Realisticly he was brought in last month so he wouldn’t have had time to properly analyse the corporate side of the company. Right now this is the best time or a fresh face on the top who could create change from the top down where these kind of discussions now has real weight behind them.
I think the best way to discourage misogyny is to suspend Linus who would be looked at as the source of it for 30 days and demote Colton who failed in his duties to protect every employee at LMG. Get someone outside LMG to manage Human Resources. Maybe one day that trust might return.
Realisticly he was brought in last month so he wouldn’t have had time to properly analyse the corporate side of the company.
I understand that. The person I replied to said “up until now” and I pointed out that that wasn’t true as of a couple of months ago.
Correction to my original comment: up until 7 weeks ago…
But while I’m sure discussions have been started, having been exposed to new leadership in my experience, it does take a while before new leadership can really roll out required changes. Most of the time spent in the first 30-60 days is to listen and understand the lay of the land (which Terren also mentioned). But even then, grave issues like the ones Madison called out usually won’t be known to new leadership until later, unless a report/exposure is made (like what Madison did).
Most of the time spent in the first 30-60 days is to listen and understand the lay of the land
I heard the smart thing is to walk in the front door, “let that sink in”, and then immediately burn everything you just inherited to the ground 😅
LMAO
Now I’m just trying to imagine Terren walking into LMG with a sink 😂
You mean Linus hired the amoral cowboy he learned from.
I’ll be frank, I don’t trust Colton to run the HR review.
Exactly lol, he seems like the type of dude who closes ranks and thereby perpetuates the culture of misogyny.
Also, and this might just be negative halo effect, but he just gives off really weird vibes to me - but that’s verging into needlessly speculative territory.
Oh yeah, let’s jump to thinking people are creeps because of the way they look.
You’re clearly coming at this from a mature and well thought out area, not one of sexism and abuse.
It’s the other way around; I think the vibe is weird when I see him in videos and I feel like he is weird in interpersonal interactions. He seems pretty awkward and not the best at expressing himself. But at the same time I can admit that my judgement might be unfairly influenced by his looks.
I don’t think he’s weird because of how he looks, but at the same time I need to acknowledge that there’s a chance his looks do affect my impression of him and how he interacts.
So you’re judging a guy for “acting weirdly”?
Oh wow, huge improvement.
And adding your own little disclaimer at the end like “Sorry to poison the well, it’s just my biases in action but I’m going to share it with others in hopes more people can attack this man for nothing but it’s also not something you should do” doesn’t make it better; Admitting your problem and still doing it isn’t a solution, it just makes you look like a bigger arse because you know you shouldn’t yet have decided to.
You do make a fair point, but I want to emphasise I absolutely wasn’t trying to get anyone to attack him. That’s just a logical leap you made.
As for me judging him for how he acts, it’s the sort of awkward behaviour I’ve seen from dudes who did turn out to not be too swell. But idk, it is true that it’s just speculation and you’re right in calling me out for it being based on too little.
he seems like the type of dude who closes ranks and thereby perpetuates the culture of misogyny.
Perfect for HR then!
Lmaooooooo
Say no more, you’re hired! You had us at closing ranks
This situation is awfull and, i mean, i know sexual harasement is very serious and its really insensitive to joke about but i really cant help it, so if you are sensible to that type of comments then dont read it and feel free to downvote, ill understeand, so here i go, you have been warned:
Linus sex tips.
Thanks. Though you don’t need to tell oversensitive people to not be offended as they’ll be offended anyways.
Don’t be so sensitive then, it’s just a joke!
Easy as.
An essay of a premise for a three-word joke, this is the only way forward.
I can’t believe you said that
I can believe.
Do you believe?
expired
Believen’t.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
I believe I do believe.
People like you?
Linus give us a sex tip
“we hired”: there’s going to be the findings they tell management, the report with the findings management allows them to add, and the findings that management tells us about.
This means nothing until you hear independently from the employees themselves about substantive changes.
Is it safe to say if the dude in the video wasn’t passively crapping on HUB and GN this would never have happened?
Probably not. All the issues were there, someone would have pointed it out for some reason at some point.
deleted by creator
imo it’s the natural outcome of the kind of growth they’ve experienced while not putting significant effort into using outside consultants or hires to get their corporate structure right.
I think the problem was the lab idea. When they started going along the lab idea I did feel like it was not really there area of expertise and I thought it was odd that other companies were so interested. In order for the lab results to be trustworthy the company has to be far more open and professional than LTT really is. They probably have to allow external auditors to come in and have a look from time to time which wasn’t something they really seem to account for.
Like don’t get me wrong, it’s a great idea and it’s probably something the world needs, but I wouldn’t have thought that they were the people to carry it out. I’ve always seen LTT as Top Gear but with computers.
GN probably would’ve done it anyway. He is not completely in the right because as unbiased as he wants to be, at the end of the day, he is still criticizing a competitor. I doubt those comments actually prompted his response. They had a lot of examples in their video and have probably been compiling it for a while.
Edit: I mean to say that criticizing a competitor can damage your reputation. I think GN was entirely justified in creating the video. The point I was trying to make is that, after the backpack warranties scandal, Steve basically came out saying that they would be paying closer attention to LMG’s credibility. So I think this video would’ve come out eventually regardless of whether or not staff at LMG made those remarks about GN.
He is not completely in the right because as unbiased as he wants to be, at the end of the day, he is still criticizing a competitor.
You can use this to question whether his motives are pure, but suggesting he is “not completely in the right” is just weird. He is well within his rights to criticise a competitor. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I agree. I worded my initial comment poorly. I just meant that it can be damaging to your own reputation to criticize competitors. GN is completely in the right.
Yes, how dare he criticize a competitor in the hopes of making them a better competitor
What unassailable logic.
I worded my original comment poorly. It can be bad for your reputation to criticize a competitor, but GN was completely right to make this video. It just has a lot of potential to backfire.
Steve pointed out that most of the errors were caught by himself and not addressed previously. I’d imagine with their previously close ties that the GN crew planned on reaching out privately, but after being thrown under the bus they decided to go full on ass blast.
My point was that Steve has probably been keeping these examples on hand for a while, because he seemed pretty skeptical of the ethics at LMG after the backpack scandal. At most, I think the comments from LMG might have pushed GN to release that video sooner than they had originally planned.
So it’s basically wrong to criticize a competitor?
I worded that poorly. In general it is not in your best interest to criticize a competitor. GN was absolutely right to make that video, I’m just saying that due to them being competitors, it has more potential to backfire.
GN gave LMG a rope to pull them up with so they could be better, LMG tied it into a noose and hung themselves. GN did pretty much exactly the right thing to allow LMG to improve themselves.
True, Linus is absolutely terrible at handling criticism. Dude needs to just lets himself cool off for 24 hours and have some people read things before he posts and it wouldn’t have become such a mess.
I mean they were already starting the process of changing things, though not as much as they should have. In reality LTT should have started restructuring years ago to account for their bigger size. If they had started around 2021 the allegations probably could have been avoided. Unfortunately hindsight is 20/20 so they are stuck with the consequences of past mistakes and being reactive, an almost always worst position to be in, instead of proactive. I really do hope that everyone emerges on the other side of this okay, and by everyone I do mean the victims as well, provided the allegations are true.
What are you talking about; is your brain broken!? Them throwing shade at established testing sources has nothing to do with allegations of sexual harassment! That’s not how causation works…
Or are you one of those “she’s lying!” people that never believes women, despite the fact that 81% of US women experience sexual assault/harassment in their lifetime? Glad their new CEO is taking this more seriously than people like you…
No, but the comments by their staff that op was referring to stoked the fire that created all the exposure and I imagine prompted her to come forward too.
Exactly. Thanks for getting it
Jesus Christ you’ve got a problem. You’re picking fights which aren’t there.
You have to admit the timing is interesting. Why come forward now, perhaps, if it is true, she never would have felt comfortable coming forward unless she felt that there was public support. I literally think that is the only point the comment was making, and here you are, going off the rails accusing somebody of not caring. That is absolutely not what I read from the comment.
Thank you
I care a lot about this shit. I make damn sure I’m not toxic at work. Especially around women. I’ve worked as a minority as a man on teams and they are absolutely always just bracing for some dude to be a shithead to them. It’s just constantly in the back of their heads, if not the front
I’ve been a part of a sexual harassment investigation as a witness to someone’s terrible treatment and I hope my testimony helped get the guy ultimately fired.
It’s something we all have to be good about and speak up about
What in the god damned milky way are you going on about?
Linus’s dude shitting on GN about testing -> GN responding with a very thorough takedown of how bad they are with their mistakes, largely because they focus on content quantity even though the employees all say they’re too fast and kinda burned out on it -> People chat around how LTT is probably a bad place to work and Linus doesn’t care about employees -> Madison sees that the narrative of a bad LTT workplace being accepted and it is a good time to bring up her terrible experience with a very good chance she’ll be listened to this time
That’s it. The original comment in LTT’s video set it in motion. And if Steve never responded I seriously doubt we’d be at a place where people would be talking about how employees there are treated.
But please, continue on with the insults, I’m sure in your not-broken brain it all makes sense.
This is the best response the CEO has, well done for doing it so quickly.
And I think it’s the worst outcome for the ex-employee. Just from a process perspective now these external investigators are going to dig through the entire history, to prove or disprove every claim, which could bring up a lot of traumatic incidents, or reveal personal information that people like to keep private. Even if people get fired for their behavior based on this incident report, it’s going to be traumatic to relive.
The fact that two years have lapsed since the incident isn’t going to make the investigation easier. So in all probability there will be insufficient data to make a determination either way. So the investigation is going to be both traumatic, and probably hollow because a determination won’t be made. And the published report will feel a little empty and almost gaslighting. But that’s what time does, time is like water, it erodes everything.
Assuming I will continue watching LTT after this whole fiasco, I just hope James, Riley, Dan, Plouffe, Alex and Jake (of the top of my head. I usually like most of the hosts) are not responsible for the potential allegations and are just the nice tech bros they are presented as. If some of them are, oof :(
TBH… I have a feeling some of who you named are part of who she is calling out.
iirc James would have technically been her boss during her time there.
I will stay optimistic but if anything should come out from the external investigation they supposedly want to do that someone was actually responsible, I stand behind the decision of either termination or at least a proper disciplinary action.
The more I read about LMG, the more the structure of the company looks like a mob.
There is one guy with his wife at the top of the pyramid. The CEO and others are below. If the top of the pyramid has what it ask for, nobody will care about what’s happening.
That’s how a lot of small businesses operate, unfortunately.
That’s how companies are structured. What you want staff to be higher up the chain of command and CEOs I’m not quite sure what you’re asking for
I mean… Yeah? CEOs suck if you’ve been paying attention. Most “chains of command” are just privileged people with connections. Then you have the lower management (let’s be real fuck middle management they’re almost always useless) and workers doing the actual labor and making the least. That always feels stupid to me 🤷♀️
The reactions are so… reddit-ey:
I always knew it
I fee so gratified
It’s what I’ve been saying all along
and all that stuff.
Its human nature not exclusive to reddit. You guys sure love talking about that place.
I knew it all along.
That sounds exactly like what a Redditor would say
It’s almost as if we’re on a platform that imitates it.
I have made very few posts to Lemmy but a recent one was a neutral-ish post saying that I liked the Madison videos etc. but I’m also not jumping to boycott LTT based on the testimony of one person and also a YouTube expose. The responses I got were negative and I was also told not to “deadname” another creator… who I wager nobody would know who I am talking about if I used that name.
Long story short, the comparisons to reddit seem downright charitable so far. Pitchfork brigade bullshit. How about having a nuanced opinion on literally any topic? Or is the average Lemmy user a sanctimonious 19 year old basement socialist?
Arent the most refugees from reddit? M That would explain why so many being the culture with them.
Yes and no. Only a fraction of Redditors migrated, and that fraction is overrepresented by people who care about privacy, ethical business models, community projects and stewardship. And we’ve seen that the Lemmy discussions have been a lot more humane and productive.
I myself have remained pretty silent through this entire LMG saga. Maybe I represent a silent majority? Or maybe just a few? It’s time to put down the pitchforks. The company has responded, let’s wait and see what comes of it. At the end of the day, vote with your wallets. The LMG fanbase is starting to move out of “concerned citizenry” territory and into “self perpetuating angry mob” territory.
I think you’re right about the silent majority. This whole amplifying rage over thing is wild to see in real time. It’s scary how many people have Internet brain rot, check these ratios on most any push back to the rabid behaviour.
Agreed. I will stay subbed (for now) and see what comes from it.
These YouTube companies almost always end up like this. Reminds me of the rooster teeth shit
Which time? lmao
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company has currently paused all production to improve its review processes, and CEO Terren Tong tells The Verge an outside investigator will be hired to examine the harassment allegations.
“We’ve been seeing an alarming amount of conflicts from Linus Tech Tips as it relates to their corporate connections, their flow of money, and the potential bias as a result of those things,” said Gamers Nexus host Steve Burke.
According to Gamers Nexus, Linus Tech Tips reviewed a copper cooling block from Billet Labs on the wrong GPU, then auctioned it off at a recent fan event without the company’s permission.
The afternoon after Gamers Nexus posted its video, Sebastian began responding to concerned fans in the Linus Tech Tips forums.
Reeve went on to accuse the company of barring her from videos after she reported being “grabbed multiple times in the office” and being told to “calm my tits” and “stop being such a removed.”
He went on to note that “as part of this process, beyond an internal review we will also be hiring an outside investigator to look into the allegations and will commit to publish the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Watched YT vid, not looking good for LTT.
Looks like a PR response politians make, with sponsors and store shoutout, just like any other video they post…
Hopefully the pressure keeps coming and LMG workers start a union, a the minimum.
That escalated quickly
Out of the loop, can someone give me a tl;dr on who this guy is why I keep seeing this everywhere?
Linus Sebastian is a YouTube tech guru that rose to prominence in the last few years with his channel, Linus Tech Tips, and has created something of an enterprise around his content called Linus Media Group
More recently his work has become somewhat…sloppy, with errors here and there, recommended practices ignored on the odd occasion, but nothing so big as to cause anyone major damage. Linus has a default PR mode for when these issues come about, and it usually worked…
Until last month.
Last month, Linus reviewed a prototype of an all new type of water-cooling block (basically a replacement for a fan that can be way more efficient) for GPUs. This block was expensive, and expensive to make, but by all reasonable measures, has a very good cooling impact to show for it. It was made by a startup firm of two people, and they sent Linus a prototype with a supported GPU.
The GPU ended up disappearing into the aether, and Linus opted to use an unsupported GPU to test the cooling block, which resulted in inferior cooling performance. Linus ended up trashing the block in his review.
He then went and auctioned off the prototype without the knowledge of the manufacturer, only offering to make them whole once it had already been auctioned off.
Linus tried to deal with it in his usual PR way, once Gamers Nexus started reporting on the goings on. But these weren’t small errors, these were the mother of all PC tech journalistic fuckups, and he refused to acknowledge them as such. That is not only enough to get someone immediately fired, it’s enough to get them industry-blacklisted.
It’s gotten so bad that the CEO and CFO of Linus Media Group have come out directly and thrown Linus under the bus for his fuckery.
And that’s before we come on to the topic of this post, the SA allegations…
Edit: minor name corrections.
He then went and auctioned off the prototype without the knowledge of the manufacturer, only offering to make them whole once it had already been auctioned off.
There’s a few bits more around this that have come to light that makes it even worse…
The manufacturer emailed asking for the cooling block to be returned as it was their only prototype and LMG said they would return it, with the manufacturer chasing several times before LMG admitted that they had auctioned it off for charity.
They only offered compensation once the situation had been revealed in that expose video the other day.
The way I see it, this could well be a career ender for Linus. He gets his hands on novel, unreleased hardware, and then he botches the review and gives it to the highest bidder. Potentially a competing company.
No one is going to trust him with their pre-release hardware ever again after this.
Heck, if this was any reasonably sized company, I suspect we’d already be hearing about lawsuit settlements of significant sums of cash.
Its definitely going to wipe out any standing he has with others in the industry: he gave a scathing review about a prototype that they had failed to correctly install, despite clear instructions with a compatible GPU card sent to them. Add that to the constant incorrect and misinformation that is often caught in post production with on-screen corrections
It seems that allure of increasing revenue streams with a ridiculous production turnaround had a direct impact on their quality and integrity and now with the allegations that Madison has come forward with, it would appear the rot had set in long before it was noticeable to external parties.
Its going to play out over the next week or so whether LMG is in a death spiral.
Yeah…any one of these issues would be bad enough…the whole trifecta does not bode well at all for Linus.
Large tech reviewer. Runs his own company called Linus Media Group (LMG). Called out another review channel called Gamer Nexus(GN). GN hit back with a video detailing gross inaccuracies in LMG published test results. For example outliers of 300%. This has opened the flood gates for people to remind the Internet what a horrific company LMG has been for many years. Basically LMG glorifies the grind mindset and promote the typical hostile work environment that is the epitome of startups
This is my best summary, it is long so sorry about that but there’s a lot to it.
Linus is probably the largest tech youtuber there is.
He’s been rapidly expanding his company, building out a full lab that is trying to rigorously test products (mostly in an automated way) so that consumers can have confidence that a $50 power supply isn’t going to shit the bed, or that this GPU will get you the same performance in these games at this resolution so save your money, etc.
The initial controversy is that they have issue with the automated testing where results were often super wrong and that slipped it’s way to multiple videos and instead of taking the videos down and correcting them, they left them up and just had a little text graphic over the video with the correction. Many youtubers do that kind of post video correction, but LTT does it a lot. Additionally they tested an $800 prototype watercooler on a 4090 when it was built only for a 3090ti which pretty much invalidates the entire test, but they still gave a conclusion that the watercooler sucked and was a bad product. That could tank that company. They did not bother re-testing with the proper GPU because Linus felt no one should buy an $800 watercooler block anyway. Additionally(x2) they reviewed a mouse and said it was terrible because the glide was really bad. Turns out there were protective stickers on the mouse feet that needed to be removed. They took multiple days to correct the video and by that point the damage was done.
The second controversy is around a Madison (former employee) where she received tons of verbal abuse, degradation, from various LMG employees/management and some even sexual harassment. There was a lot of hand-waving of her raising those complaints as “causing drama” and to “calm your tits” and other various things. She suffered a lot mentally from it and even “cut her own leg” just to go to the ER to have a day off. Her write up is pretty long and fairly brutal.
I think a large part of the issue is everyone is incredibly overworked at that company and crunching every day to release as much content as possible which leads to a fuck ton of errors, very heated and emotionally charged employees and lack of oversight over serious issues. Couple that with rapid expansion of employees without a functional HR (I think someone was hired recently) and the vast majority of people effectively “learning on the job” how to be a manager, director, leader, etc. and it’s just an explosion waiting to happen. And it has exploded quite spectacularly.
I’ll be curious to see if they turn it around and also what comes from the outside investigation.
no matter what happened…It’s definitely not the best idea to advertise how you shut down production for over 100 people over something that could have been done through the proper and existing channels…it screams narcissist.
Seems like every mistake Linus makes he gets called a narcissist. If he sneezes do we call him a narcissist?
Production needed to shut down for various valid reasons.
- with 15+ million subscribers across however many channels, not everyone might be in the loop. They have to be informed. This is evident with constant posts asking what’s going on.
- the current and existing channels are not working, and require a review. You need to shut down production to fully assess the problem.
- if production didn’t shut down, I bet he would be called a narcissist for continuing to release videos.
Linus fucked up. Bad. But I don’t envy his fame. Everything he does, whether right or wrong, if damn if he does, damn if he doesn’t. Let him and Terren have the time to try to fix it.
I don’t watch his videos, or frankly any YouTube or Twitch or whatever… it seems like he is just a regular guy with faults, and people are projecting sainthood on him. Maybe he’s a bit of an ahole, just like you and me.
Wow, that’s a huge assertion coming from someone who does not watch YouTube or knows nothing about the guy in question.
Edit: Also, YouTube is a place where many go to look up information from trusted sources. Many content creators on YouTube rely on putting out good quality content to make a living. What used to be a great source of information back in 2012 (speaking about Linus Tech Tips), has turned into a money grab, which puts quantity over quality to make money, thus feeding end users erroneous data and steering said users to bad decisions.
Hopefully Madison isn’t making shit up, or she’s in for a world of hurt. Serious allegations like that won’t be taken lightly.
Comments like these are exactly why people don’t come forward, or take years to do so.
That’s one of the reasons why she is probably not making things up. And also all the hate she’s getting for speaking out.
Yeah she was already getting death threats, not much of a reason to lie given the rabbid fanbase
