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You know, this is some shit that I expect when dealing with some shady asshole on ebay, but LMG?
Bro... Are you ok?
I always wondered if Linus was actually a slimy POS, but this Billet Labs situation has cemented it for me. If you haven't watched the Gamers Nexus followup video, definitely watch it.
I have seen a ton of LMG videos and it's very obvious that Linus doesn't handle conflict very well and will just immediately dig his heels in if he feels that he is in the right.
Here is the way I see it: Regardless of who is right or wrong, this is a series of unfortunate events that happened. Small mistakes or misjudgments don't always show themselves immediately. However, give it enough time and the floodgates will open and expose everything all at once, for better or for worse. When this happens to people who truly intended no malice, it's a fuck of a thing to deal with and usually gets worse before it gets better.
When all of your mistakes are gathered in one place for everyone to see all at once it can seem much worse than it actually is.
Am I justifying the actions of LMG? Hell no! They need to fix their issues immediately only because they have such a large fan base that listen to their every word.
Regardless, I have sympathy for them.
These are not "mistakes", these are willfully evil acts.
I'm just going to quote another comment here:
Combine that with the image in the OP, and there's just no excuse. These are not the actions of someone that "intends no malice". This is not an "accident". This is not a "learning opportunity". This is not a "mistake". This is a person doing everything in their power to selfishly extract every dime they can from both their viewers and this startup.
They intentionally lied to the viewers because trashing a product gets more views. They intentionally lied to the startup because they got more money from selling the prototype.
They do not deserve any sympathy.
And that is totally fair.
Except this "series of unfortunate events" appears to be entirely self-inflicted.
We're not talking about a couple of hobbyists making YT videos in their spare time; LTT/LMG are by this point a huge media content factory whose unrelenting drive to produce the next hot slice of monetized infotainment means they are making constant (and often quite large) errors and not giving these products the time and attention required to assess them properly.
If you have the time, Gamer Nexus' initial video critique where they matter-of-factly listed all the reasons why LTT need to seriously reevaluate how they do business is a very interesting watch.
https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc?t=99
Edit: wow, it seems to have finally sunk in - LTT posted this video not two hours after I posted my comment.
(Piped link because apparently the apology video is monetized 😑) :
https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY
If they are not willing to learn from their mistakes then no I have no sympathy for them. How hard is it to just double check your shit before putting it under public eyes?
They made a bunch of mistakes that were callous and might've smothered a couple guys starting out.
But then the lack of empathy - "it was a bad product, no one should ever buy it, and so my fundamentally flawed testing is actually valid", "yeah they asked for it back multiple times and we auctioned it, but it was for charity so it's fine", "we agreed to compensate them, but it's been months and we did that real quick after we got called out, but we're going to make it seem like we didn't need a scandal to do the bare minimum"
It's all excuses, it's all justification for why "this looks worse than it is, and actually we're still the good guys". It's narcissist mental gymnastics, he still just doesn't understand what he did wrong - besides being mostly excuses, every "apology" is totally off base on what they did wrong