this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Linus Tech Tips

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[–] net00@lemm.ee 153 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Sounds convincing, however businesses don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. For me to trust and support this content again, the investigation of the allegations needs to produce conclusive evidence. The whole quality drama passed to the background after Madison showed up what really went inside LMG

Either LMG admits wrongdoing and dishes out consequences to those involved, or they present verifiable and damning evidence showing no abuse occurred. Unlike bootlickers at reddit and ltt forums, I don't side with businesses against people. If you live in this world and not in your mom's basement you'd understand why.

If LMG comes out with "we found nothing," "no conclusions could be made," or something along those lines without evidence, then fuck them. Not good enough.

I vote with my wallet (and time), and I won't deal with more corpo BS while abusing emplpyees. Before any smartasses come here with the usual "you live in society" crap. Yeah I can't go live in the woods like a hermit to be morally right, but I can sure as hell drop a shit tech yt channel.

EDIT: taking another look, the second half of the video was more defensive nonsense. Basically claiming they aren't a twitter sweatshop, they are the victims, and some heavily edited parking loot footage as "proof"

And the turnover rate is at best a shaky argument, One can argue since it's mostly guys, they're not gonna be at the same situation to be bullied, insulted and sexually harassed until leaving. It doesn't seem the culture will be fixed anytime soon, so I'm just gonna stop wasting more time with it.

[–] h3rm17@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The burden of proof works the exact opposite way. You make a claim, then you need to support verifiable and damnable evidence. Not the other way around.

[–] net00@lemm.ee 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

This isn't a court trial tbh, and what has come forth from Madison's side (testimonies, recording, consistency) is more than enough for me to put the ball entirely on LMG's side.

No reason to keep giving businesses the benefit of the doubt when in many cases they have every advantage over the situation.

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[–] threethan@reddthat.com 111 points 1 year ago (13 children)

They did an okay job of addressing the accuracy issue, but failed to even mention the issues of workplace culture and absurd quotas.

It does not matter if workers start and stop their shifts at particular time - as strictly required by law - when the amount of work they are expected to do within that time frame is unrealistic.

Upping the expections for quality, without lowering those for quality, will only make things worse for everyone working there.

Not to mention it didn't even touch on the note serious allegations of sexual harassment.

[–] papalonian@kbin.social 97 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wouldn't expect any company would address a potential ongoing sexual harassment case via a YouTube video. Especially one that Linus is in.

"First of all, we didn't harass female employees, we pestered them."

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[–] SilentSilhouette@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

SA wasn't mentioned because that is a sensitive investigation. It is messy, and sadly boils down to, he said she said, most of the time. I don't expect that to be resolved for a while.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't worry, they lowered the quotas (while adding a shitton of process).

Linus just can't seem to get over the fact that employees should have some free time at work, especially in creative or highly technical fields. It's all about time being money.

If someone wants to take longer on a project just because they want to, there should be time for that. Salaried employees shouldn't have to account for their time down to 15 minutes increments outside of contracting work. The fee for that kind of time accountability is about 4x what a salaried employee generally makes.

[–] ashok36@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

while adding a shitton of process

If you do it right, having processes that are well reasoned and adhered to is a net time saver. I've been on teams with many different levels of processes. I can say from 20+ years of experience that there is nothing worse than a pipeline with too few processes. When every writer has a different way of delivering information to the editors, that's a time waster. When every tester has a different way of putting together a spreadsheet to hand off to the graphics department, that's a time waster.

Also, processes are supposed to serve the needs of the staff. Not the other way around. If a process adds too much effort for little reward, you can always change it or scrap it. Ideally, you'd have someone on staff whose job it is to manage your process flow, facilitate handoffs, and make periodic changes to the processes to close up inefficiencies and pain points for the staff.

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[–] z3n0x@feddit.de 63 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Significantly less cringy than the last one. I'll give em that. (Although that bar was low)

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[–] GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A simple "we can't talk about the Madison situation right now, but we will later." would have made this video 10x better.

[–] Polar@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ever thought that maybe Madison doesn't want her drama forever a part of a video update? Or do you guys just think about yourself and what you want?

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[–] BabaDuda@lemmy.ml 40 points 1 year ago (5 children)

That bit at the start about addressing the people who want to see them fail... ehhh

I mean, people who actively want to see you fail just because shouldn't really be engaged with at all tbfh, and if he's referrring to who I think he's referring to, then bleah

Otherwise at least they're back, let's see how they improve

[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago

That's this community though. This place is still just actively hating. If you are unhappy with LMG and aren't willing to see how they improve moving forward, then just... move on to another channel.

I guess unsubing from this community wasn't enough, gotta actually block it.

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[–] unscholarly_source@lemmy.ca 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Reading the Reddit thread on this, I find it fascinating that, at the beginning of the incident, Lemmy had more balanced conversations vs the crazies on Reddit calling for LTT disbandment. Now after the latest video, it seems like Reddit seems more reasonable and recruiting with Linus' plans vs Lemmy being the LTT doomsayers.

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[–] CatTrickery@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Listening to it, there is a lot of focus on saying things alluding to "we were already in the process of fixing this" rather than "we fucked up and this will be fixed".

I'm also a little concerned to see that gender affirming healthcare isn't listed on their health plan when they have trans members of staff. I completely understand why Emily doesn't want to be in the public eye but she is by far my favourite host and I'd love to see her back and producing high quality, well thought out videos where she is given the creative time she needs. The people pressuring her (as well as others) to comment on everything were completely out of order though.

I think the culture of misogyny is demonstrated by the number of male hosts compared to women. Part of the reason people wanted Madison on board was because she would have fit the role perfectly and they just dumped her in the corner on socials. YouTube is a new industry and its disappointing that it is still as male dominated as the tech journo industry that came before it.

What I think is needed is for the staff to unionize and for the company to stop micromanaging and pushing performance because the "fun" doesn't feel like real fun, it feels like corporate forced fun. McDonalds does a christmas party for their staff and you don't hear people praise them for their workplace culture.

[–] Nikki@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

I am so pissed about what they did to Madison, she was my favorite host hefore she even was an employee. To see that get dumpstered and spat on really hurt their reputation permanently for me

[–] DrMango@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

We're a fun company! See the ping pong table? That's how you know you're going to love it here. Now get back to work, slut.

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[–] Chadarius@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I am still not very impressed with the response from Linus and company. It is quite clear that they decided to slave themselves to the YouTube algorithm without regard for the humans involved. So many of their videos devolve into an unintentional Abbott and Costello comedy routine because they clearly did not decide to spend the time preparing properly or realizing they missed something and starting again. They just plow through without regard for the quality of people involved.

Sometimes this is entertaining, but more often than not, it is just low quality and a waste of their time.

I want entertaining tech content, but not at the expense of the people involved. Honestly, it is fascinating to see the sausage being made. I would love for them to show the difficult process of making a high quality video and getting the process corrected. Then have the final produced video. Full transparency, warts and all.

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[–] LeylaaLovee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Tek Syndicate surprisingly came out with one of the best takes I've seen on this situation. This could be a real damaging moment for LTT, but getting an employee union could address the criticism perfectly.

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[–] toshex@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The plan is solid, but forgive me if I give it a few years of "wait and see" how well they keep their word and more importantly handle work place allegations and changes before I re-subscribe to the channel. Still a good plan and I hope it's a sincere one.

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[–] telepresence@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I am glad that they plan to improve and made steps towards it, but i still have a sour taste in my mouth:

  • I was expecting a formal apology for the monoblock and mouse skates film issue. Both of these were instances where LTT threw another smaller company under the bus. Them not addressing it further gives the assumption that they can, and will keep getting away with stuff like this.
  • Their new guidelines for correction policy are flawed; even the low-severity ones are thing that really shouldn't be tolerated with no corrective action, and all factual mistakes should be re-shot or voiced over instead of on-screen corrections.
  • They hardly touched upon the whole Madison situation, except for some boasting about employee benefits.
  • In the whole situation, I felt like they failed to really admit that they were sorry for what hapened, and were taking the role of the victims.
    • "We are people too" and a whole segment in this video of emails from fans hoping they will get better soon and "survive this difficult shitstorm". LMG was merely getting away with this stuff for a long time and just now have been called out. They don't deserve any harassment, however, they also don't deserve any "Get better soon" emails from fans.

TL;DR: I will most likely continue to watch Linus tech tips for entertainment purposes, but will no longer trust them on any technical details, and would go to other channels for tutorials on how to build a pc and such.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago

They hardly touched upon the whole Madison situation, except for some boasting about employee benefits.

My impression was that they were trying to keep that and the testing and workload issues mostly separate. They hired an independent firm to investigate them, and I doubt the results are in yet. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a separate update later on.

But they did mention their turn over rate might increase in the short term. I took that as meaning they would fire the people guilty in the allegations, but we don't know for sure yet.

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[–] revoopy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I didn't understand what the last point about letting go of people was about

[–] ThunderingJerboa@kbin.social 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean if you are talking about the last timestamp I think its implying if the findings of the investigation find out some pretty heavy misdeed by some staff members probably in relation to Madison comments and possibly or other things they found while going through fact finding may mean some people (maybe even very notable personalities) may get fired.

[–] atocci@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

That's the impression I was getting too. A way of saying that they're not afraid to dismiss anyone the investigation finds to be at fault.

[–] SloppyPuppy@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What happens if the investigation finds linus to be the problem?

[–] Radicalized@lemmy.one 14 points 1 year ago

Lmao he’s the owner, so he ain’t going anywhere. They would water down whatever negative impact he had in order to keep him clean. He’s not been implicated directly by the victim anyway, if that matters. In a way all of this is his fault because he pushed his workers to burnout because of the ridiculous release schedule.

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[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The idea is that he must be treating people well or they'd leave.

He doesn't seem to consider that there might be other factors that keep people at LMG compared to industry as a whole.

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[–] Nagairius@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago

He really needs to take a step back and let Teran do his what they hired him to do. He has stated multiple times that he is no a CEO. he has no actual training or education and it has been showing for years now. Every talking head episode he pushes out like this just seems to dig his legacy further into this hole.

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