Brutal. Fair, but brutal. Never rated their reviews, they've no idea what controls are, when they try and implement some they end up introducing more variables. All total bs. I was 1 guy in a bedroom and I had a robust system to check data for either errors or factors that would show something was wrong with a test and would need redoing or excluding from the overall results.
LTT have been rushing this labs expansion since day one. Go back and listen to the earlier vids about plans and staffing: The subtext for it is nobody takes LTT seriously when it comes to reviews, and they want a piece of the pie. That **** about the GPU block prototype is all kinds of bad - it reads like they wing a lot of what they do and, outside of videos and shoot scheduling, they have a poor or non-existent organisational structure.
That was so mortifying. Optimus has shown that there is a customer base for really expensive but highly engineered watercooling gear. I would pay $800 for that block just because I have a severe hard-on for copper, even if it never found it's way onto a 3090ti. To still show no remorse for what he did shows that he has no respect for anyone or anything.
Classic case of a business expanding too fast and losing its way. With new people and greater scale the potential for communication errors or loss of quality is massive. It can be recovered or improved but requires a period of consolidation where you forget about growth and focus on quality to ensure a strong foundation for future growth. I get the impression that Linus has very high standards and he certainly wont be happy about the current state of play but he is one guy and can't be on top of everything. They therefore need the appropriate processes to ensure that quality can be maintained. Good QA is boring, tedious, expensive and limits being agile and flexible but if quality is what you wish to trade on then you've not got much choice!
Saw a response from Sebastian in my rounds this morning, reproduced below: This rubs me up the wrong way on multiple levels. First, you can't play the "we're a widdle start-up, we're learning, please be gentle senpai" card when your company was founded a decade ago and you started your video series in 2008. You should have this stuff down pat by now. Especially when you rake in literal millions of dollars and could, therefore, afford to have training yourself and staff who know what they're doing. Rome may not have been built in a day, but the Empire State Building was built in a year. "We didn't sell the prototype, we auctioned it!" AUCTION, noun: a usually public sale of goods or property, where people make higher and higher bids (= offers of money) for each thing, until the thing is sold to the person who will pay most. Never mind tech, I'm not sure Sebastian has a firm grasp on the English language. Either way, the prototype was disposed of while being someone else's property. The Theft Act 1968 reads, in §1(1): "A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it." So, by English law, Sebastian's a thief. Nice. "Steve's not a real journalist!" Neither is Sebastian, as demonstrated by the fact that he complains about "proper journalistic practices" not being followed, while doing exactly the same himself. Where was Billet Labs' right of reply in his joke of a review? Do as I say, not as I do, eh? (I mean, he's right, but this is why you shouldn't be going to YouTube for journalism. Rule of thumb: if the biggest thing in the main image is the YouTuber's gurning fizzog, you'll learn nothing of value. They're not trying to be journalists, they're trying - and in cases like Sebastian, who makes 30 per cent of his revenue from merch sales, succeeding - to be a brand.) That goes further into my general hatred of the format, mind you. Let's say I screw up - hard to imagine, I know, but bear with me - and make a mistake in an article. My publishers have sub-editors and fact-checkers: it gets caught prior to publication. If it doesn't, it can be very quickly fixed in an update - the incorrect information removed, a correction inserted in its place. You can't do that with video. If a YouTuber screws up in a piece-to-camera, you have to record it again. Not a damn one of 'em will do that, so you get what Sebastian does: a little "oh, yeah, that was wrong" buried in the comments at best. Not a man Jack of 'em would last minutes in a newsroom. Leave 'em to the kiddies to enjoy, and find an outlet staffed by actual journalists. I have no idea why you would come to that opinion - that's not sarcasm, I'd genuinely be interested in examples of his high standards, because as someone on the sidelines I've never seen anything that would support that conclusion.
There appears to be ZERO QA though, not even basic fact checking of specs that would be provided by the manufacturer. When you're sent a product for review you're sent a massive press pack along with it, that they don't appear to be reading at all. Testing QA can take a while to set up, but once you've got it in place it requires minimal effort. When testing cases and cooler's I checked about a dozen factors to ensure the tests were consistent and accurate. Yes it was a pain in the ass to set up, but then all I needed to do was paste the new data into the template and check there were no anomalies. It's proper boggo-basic foundations of doing any kind of testing like this.
As soon as I read 'going through some growing pains' it got me riled up. Jeez, we could all say that all the time and just use it as an excuse for any feck up or shoddy behaviour. They're hardly new kidz on the block.
Right? In the time Sebastian's been doing the "Tech Tips" video series and, apparently, failing to learn even the basics, I've had a kid who's learnt, from first principles, to crawl, walk, talk, use the bog unaided, draw, count, read, write, do maths, dance, sing, operate a computer, kick my arse at Clayfighter on the Mega Drive...
It mostly comes from the more "blog" like videos where he is talking about house renovation details or developing merch, etc. I think he has an eye for details and wants "the best" (or thinks he wants the best) but he is also a bull in a china shop and, by his own omission, struggles to stay focused. Having watched a lot of his videos it's fairly clear he has high expectations of his staff and company and wants to be seen as trustworthy and honourable but it also apparent that at the pace he has set for himself and others that he isn't able to achieve it (at least consistently). For example, the LTT screwdriver was (mostly) well reviewed by others as being high quality but they took 3 years to develop it but there are numerous examples of where they've made sloppy mistakes and haven't always been willing to own it. As always, it's difficult to separate reality from the individual/ brand portrayed in videos but I do believe he personally cares about doing the "right thing" but often his idea of "right" is disjointed from reality. He is so laser focussed on protecting the LTT brand he often isn't realising that he is doing more harm to it by being defensive. No one is perfect and LTT could (and should) be doing better in consistency, ethics and accuracy but in general I put it down to genuine mistakes rather than malice
Over how many years is it permissible to make the same mistakes before it becomes indistinguishable from malice? Because Sebastian has been doing the same thing over and over for 15 years now...
It's a fair question to which I don't have an answer. I suspect I have a greater degree of sympathy/empathy with his situation because I work in a similar sized organisation and the amount of errors, rework, not using the latest and greatest approaches etc etc that I have witnessed from an organisation with 50 years of experience is sizeable. Lessons are learnt but its often much much slower to become engrained than anyone would like because getting 70-120 people all on the same page with the same ideals is bloody hard work - especially if there is staff turnover or new incoming staff. Doing things on your own or in small teams its much easier to set the bar of quality and ensure you clear it every time. It takes an excellent leader to get a whole organisation to be consistently excellent which is why so many companies lose quality as they grow
I will say though that they're not alone. I was shocked at the practices of some long standing journalists, one of whom told me that I should "tune the cpu to get the desired wattage" for each cooler, meaning individually and not using the same fixed voltages across the board. Another who's methods I was expected to follow was just to look at the temperature "after about 15 minutes" and that was it. Just one approximately 15 minute benchmark, that wasn't even particularly taxing, look at temperature, write it down, move on.
That is how he has made himself. He has treated it as a business from day one, and continues to do so. You can see the spite in his eyes when he has to acknowledge other YTers as it sticks in his throat so bad. You don't get to where he is by being nice and not trampling over people. However, whilst the video by GN is entirely accurate it just leads back to who can pee the highest. And I don't think GN have enough moral high ground to do this. Like we spoke about in another thread the other day they put their hand out, took $100k from their viewers to buy a machine that so far all they have done is boast about. Many of the things they cover technically are boring and simply don't need to be covered they are just doing it for the sake of it, and so on. There is a line between enough information and the results and boring things I couldn't care less about (like cold plate contact etc) because it is all brushed aside by the actual results. However, yes I agree totally that Linus is all about amount over accuracy because like I said in the first line it is a business. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/gamers-nexus-fan-testing-wont-come-was-it-all-talk/ I read that the other day, before this had happened. So like I say, he really doesn't have the ground to stand upon, IMO, to do this. He carries on about how he is all perfect when he is far from it. Glass houses, throwing stones etc. They are all as bad as one another and would trample on each and every one of the competition in a heart beat. I must, however, TOTALLY agree about what he done to billet labs. That was absolutely disgusting, and beyond despicable. Seems like he had nerd rage from the very outset with the title of that video, and then s**t on them from a great height for no reason. It's absolutely beyond words that HE SOLD their prototype. Un effing real.
I dunno, man - that article reads pretty bad, like HWCooling have an axe to grind. I think, I'll do a little more research before I'll take them at their word. I'll admit that I have a lot more trust in GN than the vast majority of tech-tubers, but I'm far from a fanboy and I'll be pretty disappointed if fan testing has been canned. Also, framing the story to read like it's was crowd funded is a bit ****ing disingenuous - they fund through their merch store.
Can I just ask, why have product reviews became a youtube thing? Problem is tech-tuber seems to be a personality/branding focused rather. Why have written format like Bit-tech been left behind? Written articles typically don't have as much focus on personality/branding, just pure useful data. When new graphics card launched, I'd much rather scan through results myself and make up my conclusions or read summary. Video from seems to be a time waster as the presenter take half of the video time going through the results, or skip through the results, due to I may have different interest than their focus. The only useful graph I have found is HUB's all game frame charts. I skip to that, see the rankings and listen to about 50% of the conclusion. In the same amount of time, I could have skimmed through a full multipage old Anandtech style review. The latter of which often has actually useful architecture analysis. Or am I just too old for this....?
Yes. Changes in the way younger people prefer to consume information. I won't be surprised to see the youtube model replaced by tiktok short form clips.
[Prepares for long rant] Oh. Well, that, basically. Attention spans have been falling, and literacy rates in the biggest English-speaking market are poor - about half the US population can't read a book written at the 8th-grade level, for 13-year-olds. What they can do is watch a video. And another video. And another. And another. And another, all fed to them by The Algorithm. People don't usually do that with textual content - they find what they're looking for, often very quickly 'cos you can skim or Ctrl-F and jump straight to it, then leave. Mix all that together, add in a little adblock magic, and voila: advertisers aren't interested in putting their stuff on textual content any more. It's harder to block YouTube ads, and harder still to block "and now a word from our sponsor" segments. Speaking as a journo who works exclusively in the medium of the written word, it's effin' dying on its arse out there. I used to write for half a dozen magazines: they've all gone. Micro Mart: gone. Linux User & Developer: gone. Computer Shopper: gone. PC Magazine: gone. Custom PC: gone. Look on the shelf next time you're in the supermarket: Linux Format and PC Pro are about all that's left in the UK. That's a combination of advertising spend drying up and print costs skyrocketing. Online outlets don't have the latter problem, of course, but the former's still a problem. My biggest outlet at the mo', accounting for the overwhelming majority of my revenue, is Hackster - which could run at a loss for a million years or so, 'cos it's backed by one of the biggest B2B electronics concerns in the universe: Avnet. Without that backing, it'd be struggling like the rest of 'em. Then there's the publishers who think they've got the answer: Large Language Models. Why pay humans, when you can throw a prompt at ChatGPT and get a a few hundred words for pennies? Well, we know why - but they're still trying...
