I mean yeah I'm not arguing that point. Maybe calling that "half-assed" is an understatement when they were clearly showing their whole asses on that effort, but still:

Billet sent a unit to get reviewed, and the reviewers made a review. A grossly incompetent review, but a review. I don't see why that would be worthy of special notification. Losing/selling the prototype was just a further demonstration of that incompetence.

Whereas if you're going to do a long-form report on a group's involvement in an event, it's considered good form to reach out for comment.

Either way, imho the Billet story has kind of been eclipsed by the Xeets by their ex-employee about the toxic workplace.

Basically, Linus' company is a complete trainwreck and he has no credibility on fixing it since it seems like the disastrous culture is his own fault. Sitting and saying "this is fine, I'm taking care of it" to every disaster while pushing for more and more content to the point that quality slips to legally actionable levels is piss-poor leadership.

[–] Nibodhika 2 points 1 year ago

I understand that point but my counter is that if someone sends you a product/video in private to review you have more reson to contact them about what you will say before you do than if the product/video is publicly available.

Do you think LTT should contact the companies that they do secret shopping before releasing the video? Any comments that they might have won't change what happened on their experience, and any promises of improvement won't prevent them from publishing the video so it's kind of pointless.

Even if GN had contacted and they had explained what they already explained, the GN video would be the exact same with an added part for LTT's response, which LTT is perfectly capable of doing themselves, and would do regardless of GN's video.