this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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This has been coming for a long time. I have had issues with Linus and his channel for a long time including making a complaint about breach of advertising standards in Canada (which resulted in a change forced by the ASA). They have become the model of how to make money on Youtube but they do so in such an unethical way where they make or invest in competing products that they also review. They have never had any appearance of journalistic standards or integrity, they don't publish errata or corrections and they make a lot of mistakes and the abusive reviews have been going on for a long time.
I am not surprised to find sexual harassment as well as undue pressure being applied in the workplace. It all centres and comes from the Narcissist at the centre of it who has built a media group off the back of civil law breaches repeatedly and continues to push the limits.
Labs was a terrible idea mostly because Linus and his media group will corrupt the results for his personal profit and he and Yvonne are the only ones making big bucks in all this. This has been building for a very long time, the lack of basic morality has been on display since the beginning.
They have been misleading millions of people for years and getting away with it. I hope this company is done. There have to be consequences for this kind of behavior.
What Gamers Nexus did should be the standard. Serious reviewers should check on each others work and point out errors on regular basis. It's the only way to get rid of corrupt channels like Linus Tech Tips and I suspect they were just one of many.
Except I watch for entertainment and gamers nexus is boring.
It is possible to be entertaining and ethical at the same time. Someone else will take their place.
Ah, colour me surprised that the spammiest channel on YouTube, which is practically unwatchable without Sponsorblock and has always been my go-to example use case for the addon (which Linus deems "Piracy"), turns out to have incredibly shady advertising practices. And incredibly shady practices in general.
You seem to be delusional. Do you know what fatigue is?
I believe some of his early videos were basically undisclosed advertisements. They were so over the top positive, it just didn't feel right. I've had his channels blocked on YouTube for a while now. I simply don't trust anything coming from him.
That was their early model. They took money for a product and produced a positive video on it. That was the channel its how it got started and grew. They always used weasel words (still do) like a company "hooked them up" which meant they received a free product and payment to produce this video. They were actually caught properly on this on a series of AMD sponsored videos which were so incredibly positive and glossing over the issues and AMD explained the videos had been paid for. It turned out that was how the channel worked, they got paid for positive reviews.
Nowadays sponsorship is better declared (because the ASA required that of them) but conflicts of interests aren't. There is also the appearance of a lot of fraud too where free products are being placed into their homes. The Intel extreme series is a prime example of something that looks super dodgy and maybe a tax dodge. Right now its hard to prove something criminal is happening, based on their history however its not unreasonable to suspect it is.
I think they are using workarounds, for instance they get paid for worthless advertisement, and then incidentally review your products nicely, which is the real advertisement.
They fooled me once, which is how I found out the review must have been fake. After that it became pretty easy to see other examples.
It's seems obvious to me that Linus reviews are according to what he is paid above all else.
Even if its not so direct there is a still a problem. Intel is giving each of the employees one after the other $5000 worth of whatever upgrade they want to their gaming gear. Almost everyone there is reaching the benefits of this Intel sponsorship personally. Sure looks like a bribe. If you start doing such a sponsorship deal the only way to remove the conflict of the interest and ethical problems is to never review anything involving Intel, because the entire staff is receiving significant bribes from that company.
It doesn't have to be as direct as getting paid for a sponsored video to bias a review more positively, they are so unethical in the deals they make they will happily maintain the appearance of taking bribes and review products from that company. Its by no means the only example of this given the amount of free tech that has gone into Linus' personal house that received a nice thumbs up only to be replaced 6 months later often on the quiet. Its everywhere in everything they are doing, companies are throwing goods and money at them and they are all taking it home and then the next week doing a review on products from that company.
Misleading? Have they been lying about their reviews?
Yes. When a review is in fact an advertisement and not a review, it's lie to call it a review without disclosing they are paid to make it, which makes it an advertisement.
They fooled me once about 8-9 years ago. After that it has been pretty obvious to me, that it was not just a 1 off.