this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Linus Tech Tips

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[–] [email protected] 206 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I unsubscribed immediately. What a horribly toxic work environment and unpleasant company. Where I work, and I work for a place far bigger than LTT, no matter your seniority, you’re out the door the same day if you treat a member of staff the way Madison was treated. I’ve seen it happen. The fact she suffered such abuse for years from so many members of staff is indicative of a company so heavily poisonous, they shouldn’t exist. Hopefully other fans can see through their parasocial relationship and cut the cord.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At the risk of sounding pedantic, it wasn't for years. But yes, the Madison situation needs to be addressed. Can only hope that the culture is rectified, and whoever assaulted her is found, investigated, and fired if need be.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Having worked at quite a few startups that grew to LTT’s size, there are basically two kinds of CEO/COO; those who want to drive the culture, and those who don’t believe in corporate culture.

I feel Linus is of the second brand, and I’ve seen it enough to know that culture emerging in those conditions get out of control and becomes almost impossible to rectify.

Good luck to LMG, but the top is where culture starts.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. Their response made it worse. Watching the PR response today is why I’ve unsubscribed. No thanks.

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[–] JustNeedAUserAccount 174 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Maybe it's because I'm old and have worked at a number of different sized companies. But, Linus always struck me as very fake and inauthentic.

He gives off the vibe that he's one of the little guys, an independent journalist, just another employee - while completely ignoring the fact that he (and his wife) own the company and are YouTube millionaires and run a relatively large and influential company.

I can easily see Linus being an abusive, toxic person to work for.

I've worked for people like him before and their public and private personas are often complete opposites. In my opinion, this is Linus' mask slipping and we're getting to see the real him.

[–] Drewsteau 99 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The home improvement videos always rubbed me the wrong way, it didn’t feel right to watch him use his employees to do all these renovations to his home for them

[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The one that really bothered me was one where he went to one of his employees houses to work on a project and was super disrespectful the whole time. At the beginning of the video the guy was talking about how he's just bought the home and was so proud, then there were multiple parts in the video of Linus making fun of different parts of his house. And I recall a part where the guy specifically asked him not to put something on a table he was afraid would break and Linus was like "no, it's fine" and does it anyways. The whole video made me super uncomfortable, I think it was actually one of the last videos I watched from the channel

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I remember a few years back when Dennis almost fell through his roof while he had him running cables and there was no concern for his wellbeing, just shitting on him for being useless. Made me super uncomfortable to watch

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Remember how they all treated him in the beginning? Felt like bullying, but in front of a global audience.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

He gives off the vibe that he's one of the little guys, an independent journalist, just another employee

This is a behaviour Linus has simply failed to grow out of.

At one point, he was just one of the little guys; sharing that common ground with his audience. That dynamic has vastly changed, but Linus has not adapted to it.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I genuinely didn't see that. He seemed like a cool dude and wanting to do the best and figuring things out.

So for me, this news is disappointing. Although, it'd be more disappointing if I was still watching. The thumbnails really got to me over time. I know why people do them, but you know, still...

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[–] doggle 124 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I had fallen off a bit anyway; the amount of click baiting had gone through the roof, quality of videos plateaued. Now caught dead to rights on poor journalistic integrity and allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace?

All so that I can drool over graphics cards I can't afford? Easy choice to unsubscribe.

Be better, LTT

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[–] Arete 107 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I unsubscribed after reading Madison's thread. Anyone who's gotten stuck in a toxic work environment knows just how crushing it is mentally. Constant low-level anxiety, feelings of dread, and the inability to even decompress off the clock due to intruding thoughts, replayed arguments, feelings of being gaslit, and the knowledge that it's all going to happen again tomorrow. Combine that with the sexual assault allegations and it's not surprising at all that she'd self harm.

If even 10% of her story is true we're looking at systemic failures in the entire management chain both to recognize and triage toxic behavior, and to demonstrate professionalism and lead by example.

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[–] Zardoz 74 points 1 year ago

Unsubbed too. I knew Linus had some management practices I didn't agree with, and he comes across as a bit stubborn a lot of the time, and their click baity thumbnails and titles kinda bugged me, and it seemed like every time I refreshed YouTube there was a new LTT video posted...

Buut, most videos were entertaining and informative so my my rose tinted glasses kept me thinking that SURELY the employees were pretty happy there and were so productive because they enjoyed it that much.

NGL was kinda disappointed to hear all this.

[–] obinice 60 points 1 year ago (13 children)

I remember hearing about this guy enough that I was interested so I subscribed, and checked out a video of his once, I forget the topic but the title sounded pretty interesting. This was a few years ago.

Within 3 minutes I had unsubscribed. Why?

Well, he spent the first few minutes of the video being an annoyingly arrogant rich guy whilst also wasting time on things that had nothing at all to do with the topic of the video.

It was when he had his camera man follow him through his house or office or whatever it was, tacky "check out my millionaire crib" style, like a show for kids, and he went into a room, pointed at a big wall of NAS racks and said something like "I've got thousands and thousands of dollars worth of hard drives and I don't even use them! Hahaha", and I was like.... Yeah. Screw this guy.

Some people might like a guy who baits grown up tech viewers with an interesting topic only to then waste their time with childish, arrogant behaviour, but I clocked him as a tosser within 3 minutes and never bothered with him again.

That's just my personal experience, I can't imagine what having to be around someone like that every day would do to a person, my gosh :-(

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

It's really unfortunate because their early content was actually pretty entertaining. They'd document the fun projects they were doing, or showcase some wacky PC build they were doing, or they'd have PC build competitions where they'd have to build a themed PC within a certain budget, and they'd be judged at the end. I don't think those competitions had prizes, they just did it for fun. Most of their content was just for fun. They'd do sponsored stuff or reviews here and there, but for the most part it was just for fun.

Then Linus became a multi millionaire, and the whole thing went to shit.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I completely understand why others are unsubbing, but I enjoy the content and want to see how the new CEO ends up handling all of this. Threads like this seem to be inviting everyone to post about how they never liked LTT in the first place, but I wanted to write this down because I'm sure I'm not the only one who actually enjoyed the content and the cool technology and unique solutions they found when building PCs and cooling them.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

I mean I don't watch GPU reviews because they are mostly boring anyways. I only watch for the janky videos and pushing the boundaries and building wanly stuff.

The Madison claims need to be taken serious, but it's not like this couldn't be individuals that need to be singled out and kicked out.

So I really don't get the rage

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[–] DeskP1loti 38 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I mean, they are purveyors of clickbait. LTT doesn't need to exist based on that alone.

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[–] Winged_Hussar 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] TheSporkBomber 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oof. Losing 5% of your paid subscribers in a day is nothing to scoff at. I understand they weren't exactly trending upwards prior to this either.

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[–] _stoni 30 points 1 year ago
[–] Chainweasel 26 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I was one of those that unsubscribed. I feel like the show quality has been dropping for a while now and the excessive advertising always got under my skin a little bit. I almost unsubscribed about a year ago when Linus went on his Twitter rant about how "adblockers are technically piracy" because it's sickening how many ads we have to look at every day and we have to sit though a sponsor segment every video and his plug to his own merch store.
But now after seeing his half-assed apology (that is also monetized and sponsored) AND seeing how terrible of an environment it is to work for him and the treatment Madison had to endure working under him was enough to push me over the edge. My views won't be giving him another dime of revenue.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Spudwart 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well then you are lost.

Goodbye LTT, social media has proven to be a corrupted version of social networks.

Though Lemmy isn’t the supremely popular setup that Reddit was, it seems to have, on average, better company.

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[–] excitingburp 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Just being the messenger here. The problem is that it's 100k of 15.6 (previously) million. People don't care, which means nor will Linus. It's incredibly likely that the "resolution" will amount to nothing, and the channel will remain dead to me.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While youtube hasn't had much impact (I'm not sure that tracker updates subscriptions very fast either tbh); Floatplane probably will.

From ~42k subscribers down to ~36k. A 16% drop (~$30k/mo at $5 per sub)

Floatplane tracker

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

happy to contribute to the unsub count

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

These things are always temporary. They'll lose subs for a moment, but then it'll bounce back like nothing

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