You likely know about Linus Media Group, Linus Tech Tips, et al, being good sources of computer news and reviews. The company has expanded rapidly during the last year and underwent big changes:
- A new building to house the Labs, an independent and impartial laboratory for testing a lot of products, like keyboards, mice, cell phones, headphones, cooling solutions, etc.
- In April, LTT posted the “What’s It Like to Work For Linus? - YouTuber Employees Answer 2023” video. A common response to “What is the worst part of working at LMG?” was the number of videos released every week was really high (25), making it hard to keep up and do quality work.
- Linus realizes that the feelings he had a couple of years earlier when he was thinking of retiring hadn’t gone away, so he and Yvonne begin the process of hiring a CEO so Linus can focus on the parts of the company he’s best at. They bring in Terren Tong to run three parts of the company, whom Linus had worked with before, and Linus steps down to become the Chief Vision Officer. In it, Linus says this:
“And if I try to drag myself through another ten years of business administration, I know I’m going to destroy myself and probably end up killing the company and the community that I love so much in the process.”
Last week, the pressure of trying to do so much all the time revealed itself in a way that hasn’t killed the LTT community, but has hurt it a lot. It reminded me of what happened when Noah Katz had his infamous “and there’s the re-roll” moment that ended up killing Artesian Builds. You can read about it in the Mocking the scammers thread, starting here, with a few follow-ups over the next few months.
Linus weigh in on that situation during the WAN Show for that week, which was given the title of “Never Hate On Your Community”. The segment runs from 1:53 to 16:57. He talks about not bad-mouthing the people supporting you.
I started looking into what happened with LMG last week and stopped so I could work on other things, so I don’t know all that’s happened. I’ll put a list below of the videos you can watch to catch up.
The short answer (Hah! When I do ever give short answers.) to what I did learn so far is it’s similar in pattern to what happened with Artesian Builds. There wasn’t the arrogance, disdain and taking advantage of their community that AB (or, more correctly, Noah Katz, had), but the rapid growth of LMG allowed the problems listed above to become more public.
Steve at Gamers Nexus called into question some of the things LMG had done recently, especially their testing methods. There was also negative comments about Gamers Nexus in an LTT video that inferred or said that the testing other sites like GN and another wasn’t very good. (Can’t remember right now if it was inferred or directly said.) Steve’s made it clear previously that if he feels you’re impugning his integrity, he’s gonna call you out on it.
Also in here was some comments by Linus where he was speaking honestly but emotionally and it really didn’t help the situation. Steve calls that out in a follow-up video the next day.
On Wednesday the 16th, LTT posts the video “What do we do now?” where it’s announced LMG is pausing everything through the end of the week so they can do an internal review and fix what’s broken. When I heard that on the video, my immediate thought was that was too short a time to look at everything fully. As it turns out, it was a too short amount of time since two former employees posted that the working environment was bad enough they quit. Subscribers to their Floatplane service have also dropped.
I will probably give it a few more days before I come back to this to see what’s developed, but here’s the list with a TLDW summary video first.
