He is one of the scummiest tech influencers around. He was great at the start, but as time went on, he became increasingly worse. As his channel grew, he started focusing far more on ‘entertainment’ while neglecting actual, useful information.
I’m sure everyone knows the controversies about him and his channel, but I’ll still talk about them.
He and other massive YouTube channels sponsored Honey, a malicious extension. He knew that the extension was suspicious but said nothing for so many years; he just stopped sponsoring it. Massive thanks to MegaLag for talking about this extension, here’s the link.
There are a lot of errors in their benchmarks. Gamers Nexus made an amazing video about this and other issues. They have so many errors because the testing is rushed. This is mainly Linus’s fault, as he forces his team to produce a massive amount of content just to make more money.
The reviews are biased. It’s clearly biased because the company that sent the product also sponsored them. Not only do they have to sign NDAs in order to review products before they hit the market, but they also have an incentive to speak positively so the company doesn’t blacklist them in the future. I know that almost every big YouTuber does this, but I don’t think they should, and it doesn’t result in a fair review.
He didn’t want to increase his old friends/employees pay or solve their complains, saying that’s how capitalism works.
He bought a private jet. A lot of his employees are poorly paid, and some of them barely get by. On top of that, he tries to justify it by saying that he got the plane for ‘$0’ and that it’s actually cheaper using his ‘girl math.’ In reality, that plane costs an average of $6.6M to purchase, plus $1.5 million to $2.5 million annually in operating costs.
He has many more problems and controversies. I don’t know how he has so many ‘fans’ and why people still watch and support him. He’s a scummy, narcissistic, and greedy person, creating videos where he forces his underpaid employees to work on his home.
LINKS:
MegaLag - Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam
Gamers Nexus - The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility
Head Pluck - A perfectly balanced mouse review. (Pwnage x Shortcircuit / LTT Edit)
Vex - Linus has a WEIRD Problem
Linnus Tech Tips - The Gamer Jet is Real! and it Cost $0*, The Highest PC Build EVER - World Record
I stopped watching after a while. His stuff just stopped being good as he grew and the weird drama that popped up around him wasn’t great at all.it was especially telling that people who had been there from the beginning were lesving. Who let’s talent like that go when you have the money to hold on to them.
he wierdly started to appear more and more involved, when that drama hit between his employees,.
Who let’s talent like that go when you have the money to hold on to them.
Some creative folks eventually want to do their own thing and no amount of money will change their mind. It is very authoritarian to try to use money as a form of control over others. Linus is many things but he is not a petty tyrant.
He refused to increase the salaries of employees. He would rather see his old friends go then give them more and actually listen to them.
jakkuh - Why I left Linus Tech Tips
I remember that video – seems like a nice and genuine dude. It’s sad that growing up with a small company like that doesn’t give you more growth you know? Especially when Linus is doing so well. I know there are complexities and all that but still.
Using a quote from ChicoSuave above correctly:
It is very authoritarian to try to use money as a form of control over others.
Because Linus did become a petty tyrant. If the workplace was democratic and not authoritarian, under Linus’s control, pretty sure all those people would’ve pushed for better compensation, and their peers probably would have too.
He would rather see his old friends go
And this is quite literal, since Linus famously has no friends outside of work, and pays his employees to come to his vacations with him so he isn’t lonely
You know that this is just a joke right?
Also: overpaying employees to keep them working for you == tyrant.
So what does underpaying employees while demanding massive output make you?
Sure, but some of them are leaving and just doing more tech stuff that they’ve always done.
How hard would it have been to just keep them on, give them a budget to make the videos they want to make, reduce the requirements on them to produce the modern LTT content and keep all that deep expertise in-house?
expect he is litterally a petty tyrant? The reason over half of them left was explictedly because he was a petty tyrant and he even tried to fuck a bunch of them over with legal threats
I didn’t like this guy for a long time but I didn’t know he owned a private jet. WTF I just watched the video about the plane he’s just so out of touch it’s insane.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned yet is how incompetent he was at trying Linux. Its been like three years since I watched one if his videos so I don’t remember the details but I do remember a general clumsiness when it came to interacting with the computer that was really off-putting. Like the command line would say “if you do this you’ll have a bad day” and he’d do it and act shocked he was having a bad day. I think with regard to installing Steam? It was embarrassing. Hard to take seriously after that. Then the Gamers Nexus video came out and I never watched another LTT again
In one of the rare cases I find myself defending anything Linus does, Linus was attempting to install Steam on PopOS and it bricked the OS. Yes, he should read the warnings, but also how the fuck does that even make sense?
A thread on r/linuxmasterrace about this event pegged the fault at approximately 1/3 PopOS, 1/3 the package maintainer, and 1/3 Linus, and frankly I think they gave Linus too much fault.
how incompetent he was at trying
LinuxanythingI went off him a long long time ago. When he was building “servers” in the bathroom, balancing machines and generally being a useless hack. He is a home user, humping stuff together and never took the time back then to learn how to do it right. The excuse was always “you can’t know everything at first” while never actually taking any time to learn, any time to explain what he was learning or any time to teach. So in the end, you get a poor uninformed opinion. It’s interesting to see nothing has changed.
As I’ve developed my opinion on social media, it is a regular pattern. People want to glamorise having a rack server, they don’t want to glamorise the time it takes to learn how to rack machines, wiring management, power management, heat dispersal, network interfaces, resource balancing and management. Planning skills, for power, storage, etc.
Hikers want to show amazing pictures of the top of mountains. Not the thousands of hours map reading, training, being exposed to weather.
Gym goers want to show the competition and the physique. Not the hours of sweat, eat, sweat, injury, recover, sweat.
Linus wants to show “wow LEDs dood” but not the time it actually takes to learn to build and use a computer to its best.
He is a home user, humping stuff together and never took the time back then to learn how to do it right.
He was the NCIX computer guy who started making videos for them, and it went from there. It’s not like he was a genius or worked in the industry in operations or ran a netops department. He just sold computer parts at a retail store.
He’s just the Dell dude
Holy shit. That’s it.
I worked at a shop with a rack of Dell machines all under their care plan. When something went wrong, we had to troubleshoot the issue, determine what actually died, then the Dell dude would show up a day later with a replacement part. He’d fumble around swapping the motherboard (or whatever), make sure it didn’t kick errors, then leave.
I remember one time the power supply and motherboard had died. I tried to explain this to Dell tech but they insisted it was just the board. Dell Dude arrived and only brought a board. Of course he couldn’t get it running and he was like a lost lamb.
I guess they’re like Geek Squad. They need people who know just enough to fumble though, but not enough to demand more pay.
He doesnt read anything. He dutifully follows the command that basically says “Brick my computer’s OS” and is surprised when it does that. Ngl that IS something linux should fix, and they need idiots to test it out so they can see things like this outside of their bubble… But why the fuck is the ceo and face of a tech youtube channel running into those problems and not catching it before release?
Its like your doctor getting sick from licking a public urinal.
I never really watched any of their videos before, but over the last year as anti-Windows sentiment was on the rise I was watching a variety of “person tries out Linux” videos as a guilty pleasure and this ended up including the most recent attempt of LLT to switch to Linux. I was aware of how poorly it went when he had tried Linux before from general online sentiment and comments like yours, but only actually watched some of the new attempt (which ended up dragged out into multiple videos that I didn’t care to try and keep up on).
The thing that had stuck out to me the most was Linus’ insistence on using an LLM to decide what distro to use and how to start. He said that searching this online got too many disagreeing answers and that the various listicles he found before steered him wrong before (though much of his poor experience seems to come from the attitude you mentioned) and that the everyman was just going to ask a LLM what to do anyway (despite likely being trained on exactly the same sources he was critical of).
And on this attempt at Linux, other members of his staff were participating - some even used Linux of their own volition before - but he remained obstinent about not asking anyone for advice and just taking this everyman approach he decided on in an attempt to offer multiple perspectives on the challenge, as he chose to put it after negative reaction. It was just so off-putting to me, you can still make your own decision after asking for an opinion online or in person or after spending a reasonable amount of time doing research online (let alone if it was your job). It gives the impression that, yes, he doesn’t really care to actually read into these things and that he had enough of an ego to not want to change his stance.
I had no idea about the rest of these controversies until today though, and it’s definitely making what I saw make more sense.
Oh no, this budget phone doesn’t have wireless charging, that’s a deal breaker! Completely out of touch.
You should have seen what he said about the Steam Machine, it’s a good workstation but it’s missing some things but good thing it’s a gaming device and gamers don’t care about it but it’s an amazing workstation and works perfectly for, chrome, vlc, obs and even the calculator app, truly an amazing workstation or gaming device, depending on the missing features. And that review was mostly on KDE Plasma.
Used car salesman vibes.
From the getgo. Never understood his popularity
I stopped watching LTT after they got the jet, the video tour of it was cringe as hell, not to mention Linus misunderstanding the economics of it.
“Girl math” is such a cringe expression…
I’ve stopped because I got tired of them rushing cool ideas leaving me hanging because try had to make dozens of videos per week.
But HE BOUGHT A JET!?
The same guy who was playing fake humble with a shit bucket car before getting a Porsche and now he gets a stupid private jet. I guess I should have seen it coming.
OMG, I didn’t know someone made a website about it. WOW, thanks for this gem.
Here is more info about it:
https://grndcntrl.net/articles/influence-air-linus-tech-tips-private-jet-acquisition
It’s so strange that he even tried to justify it and say it costed “$0*”.
It’s a ragebait expression.
I suspected that, but I don’t get it…
I stopped watching around all the controversies, after he got that Porsche car he changed, more narcissistic.
The WAN show went from tech news to fucking nonstop taking about his business, trying to push sales the entire show. He wouldn’t let Luke talk much. He became the face of EVERY video. Fuck Linus.
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I unsubscribed and stopped watching his stuff after one of the many instances of him/his company being unscrupulous, scummy, or evil and failing to actually learn their lesson and turn things around. I can’t even remember which one it was because there have been just enough of them to blur together. Truly a model case for living long enough to become the villain.
Sadly for humanity, for every Gamers Nexus or Valve, we get a hundred or a thousand Linus’ or Googles who lets the fame/money/power corrupt them to shit.
I thought Gamers Nexus was the guy who left people to die on the mountain
gamer nexus and steve its head are one of the few good ones. Steve went from tech youtuber to proper indie journalist. Instead of the normal tech youtuber to shitbag/pedo.
Steve/gamer nexus year after year has only ever given more reasons to trust him and become more and more ethical. Which is rare as fuck.
Watched a few of his videos a few years ago, but watching him install tech on his house was beyond frustrating.
It was like he’d do things like make everything communicate over Bluetooth, and then whoops the 2.4ghz is overloaded. I felt like I kept seeing stuff a mile away that he hadn’t considered. Gave me the impression he had no idea what he was talking about, or he was doing it on purpose. Either way, turned me right off.
I’ll be devil’s advocate and suggest that, if he fixed those problems later in the video, then he might have been doing it to be educational? Like “how do I rig my house with different types of tech from first principles” and teaching less tech savvy people (probably most of his audience) to identify those problems in the process
No these were problems that made a second video. Sure, hypothetically you could do that, but the format is asinine. I’m not looking for someone to tell me how to do a hundred things incorrectly.
His videos used to be entertaining and had some use for people learning about tech. Now it’s all branded, merchandised, and promoted junk. I often times question his overall competency with tech.
He was always a computer hardware guy and stumbled his way into other stuff without trying to master the knowledge.
His competency was always mid to low. It was the people around him that knew what they were doing.
Never watched the guy more than a few seconds. He always felt fake and non genuine.
Compare his content to Big Clive or Steve1984 and see what it feels like to watch someone who actually cares about what they talk about and not just there for sponsors.
He’s such a chud.
Youtube tried pushing linus into my feed but he looked to polished and without any detailed desciptions
The tech channels I watch
- Tecnology Connections
- CouriousMarc
- Techmoan
- LGR
Have some more (not all 100% tech but tech-adjacent):
- Tech Ingredients
- Joel Creates
- Integza
- Tom Stanton
- bigclivedotcom
- GreatScott!
ITS ALMOST XMAS THAT MEANS ITS ALMOST TIME FOR THE NEXT XMAS LIGHT VIDEO IM HYPED
I already watch 3 of those, so I will definitely check out CuriousMarc next. Thanks for the recommendation!
I love LGR. As a long-time fan of the Sims franchise, I’ve followed him for years. When I’ve been on the fence about a new expansion, I sought out his review first and foremost to see if it’d be worth my money. As a result, seeing Duke Nukem get up to Sims hijinks has driven my gaming decisions more than any of the propaganda EA puts out.
Never really followed him or other youtubers, but after the reddit api thing I tuned in to their “wan show” for a couple of shows because it seemed like they were discussing interesting topics/news. Until I realized that he spent an absolutely enormous amount of time either talking about running linus media group, merchandising, or just running ads. I swear half the 3h run time of those shows is talking and screeching about the business or just ads in one form or another. “So luke, what’s the next news?” “synology drm’d their nas-es” “oh man, that’s a bummer. We don’t ever drm our merch, not even the screwdrivers. How would we even sell them???” etc
I’ll admi that I did bite the bullet and buy the precision screwdriver, and it really is excellent. The full-size screwdriver doesn’t interest me, because I’ve never been happy with a full-size driver with interchangeable bits, but the precision driver is a really high-quality product.
He’s an ass, but at least that one bit of merch is quality.
XD, yea. Yea He keeps spamming his merch and floatplane.
Years ago I got tired of his videos. Apart from the quality clearly decreasing, something felt off. Like it was more and more about money, less about interesting topics and passion for hardware.
Needless to say, I wasn’t even a bit surprised to learn about all the drama surrounding him. It was pretty obvious for a long time he’s a fraud, but there just wasn’t evidence for it yet. Or none that I’ve seen at least.
I think he got too big ultimately and success usually generates rot.
kinda like rober started to imitate mr beast alot, and got on some PEDs, sniperwolf yea dint like being questions so she had to stalk someone.
Happy cake day!
