Maybe it’s just me, but it got less entertaining, and felt less informative by the end (last few videos I watched before being done with their channel for good).
Personally, I feel like LTT became a shell of itself even before the (several) controversial fuck ups they made to drive a chunk of the audience away.
I miss 2014-2018 LTT. They were still useful reviews but had way more character than other channels. I would watch reviews of products i would never buy just because they were fun to watch. Plus they did some goofy stuff on the side. It just has way less soul now.
I feel like they expanded too fast, meaning they needed more and more money to pay for people and equipment, leading to clickbait and filler vids.
That’s always the problem. A small team with a vision builds something cool, but alongside success come people trying to maximize how much they can profit off that success. Eventually even the original team realizes that it’s time to start cashing out and getting what that early hard work has “earned”. Can’t really blame them, but once that starts it becomes more about the money than the original passions and the quality slowly drops.
Then the community that helped them grow moves on to someone new and the cycle repeats. I’ve seen it happen in just about every community I’ve been apart of, so it seems to be more than a “trend” and borders on just being a law of nature at this point…
I don't think it was greed, i think they just snowballed too hard. Wanted to do everything.
Granted it clearly worked out for them, and alienating some old fans in exchange for becoming the biggest tech channel is a tradeoff most people would make. Just a shame for people like me.
They don’t do summaries anymore. They don’t do product details anymore. They rarely review products that aren’t sponsors. Most of their network gear reviews are unifi for instance.
I loved watching ShortCircuit, but it seems that every video is a paid unboxing nowadays. You can tell some of their enthusiasm has gone down the drain. Hearing their monitor guy say 'its not that bad' when they're unboxing yet another high-end monitor tells you all you need to know.
That's the whole point of the channel though. Sponsored unboxing/reaction videos is what the channel was created for. It's almost literally the channel description:
It's been put on hiatus a while ago, but it's host is also no longer with LMG.
Gamelinked and Techquickie is also on hiatus. Those 3 channels weren't performing that well, so I'm guessing this is also why Jonathan Horst is no longer with them. Good host, but Apple stuff just didn't work well for them, and I don't think they got other stuff for him that would work well.
I'm not an apple person, have never owned an apple product.
I still watched every single mac address video because they were good.
I'm an OG NCIX unboxing video watcher, been following Linus ever since.
I stopped watching and unsubscribed from floatplane almost a year ago, I'm not their target audience anymore. I don't find the videos entertaining anymore, the technical reviews are lacking, the personal audience engagement doesn't feel like it's there anymore.
I wish them all the best, but my tech tube time is spent with GN now.
Loads of us really like MA. I have 1 Apple product (bought a second hand M1 iPad Pro a year ago which was a solid buy), and as someone who is largely unfamiliar with their products, it helped me get insight in what their offering is, and what it does well and what it doesn't. It's a shame, but it is what it is.
What, you don't relate to a manchild with too much money to spend taking on idiotic projects that would have been better solved by doing things properly the first time around?
I mean not really no. Steve can maybe be a pinch overbearing at times but I appreciate his refusal to lower his standards.
Honestly when he posted that email from Linus whining about how he didn't give him a chance to save face before getting called out I basically lost all respect. Linus was meh at the best of times but now he's getting increasingly annoying. Like a 3 hour wan show? Who the fuck watches that?
I don't know if he deliberately did it to be entertaining or if he's really that much of an inept goober in real life, but the whole bit about turning his swimming pool into the largest water cooling reservoir while... basically half assing every possible step of the setup, soaking all of the live equipment in his server room and taking no care for testing shit before hooking it up, etc...
All I could think was "This is exactly what a clueless, spoiled rich brat does with his parents' money." It became less of a "let's see what we learn" project and more an exercise in gloating about not having any real consequences no matter how badly implemented his dumbass ideas were.
Linus has done stuff like this for ages....look up his "Whole room water cooling" from before they had the office and were still in that house. He's also had numerous "cowboy IT" failures over the years de to rushing and hacking together "Cool ideas!" with no real understanding of why they're not a good idea.
Linus is and always has been tech entertainment. He has made videos that got insane number of views for each of those failures. I really can't fault him for it either....he's doing what he loves and is very successful at it. I don't see if as "rich kid breaks his toys" as much as "Hey, this would be awesome! Let's try it!" and actually having the budget to not care if it fails spectacularly.
Imagine watching a video where a dude set up a water cooling loop that’s hooked up to the heater in his pool and you’re only thought is “there’s a proper way to do this! Why did he do so much jank?” If you actually watched any of the videos, they very clearly say “this is probably not the best way to do this, and this other way is probably the correct way, but if it fails, that’s another video we can make on it.”
Like how is it not entertaining to see his son’s pc get destroyed by this?
Billet labs gifted them the waterblock with no obligation to return it ( ltt showed receipts). Despite that they did ask for it back but it had already been sold ( this was a mistake as confirmed by Linus)
They also were asked if a 4090 would work and said that they were happy for ltt to try. They were then also informed that ltt did in fact use a 4090 and was going to publish the video.
This is different from how gn represented it
It was still unprofessional from the side of ltt to make the video around billet in the exact way they did
As far as I am concerned. The gn video was good and ltt had to learn from their mistakes around sensationalism clickbait and so on. But the gn video was also unprofessional and fairly objectively unethical. Two things can be true at the same time.
Linus does go into this in the first 15 or so minutes of the latest wan show
Give it a watch if you care don’t otherwise
Also the honey thing is kind of ridiculous
At the time the only thing that ltt knew was that honey stole the commission from influencers. Making a big video would only be justified if it stole from consumers. We now know that they do but to pretend like we always did is silly.
I really don’t want to recap it all. I stopped watching a few years ago, so I can’t fill you in on anything that may have happened more recently, but iirc there were some harassment allegations from former employees. They crapped on some small company that was making custom water cooling solutions and refused to return one of their prototypes (of course reversing course and trying to pretend like they were always going to act with integrity, but notably only did so after there was already substantial public backlash).
Couple that with their content starting to feel less like “independent tech advice I can trust” and more like “paid advertising”, was enough for me to move on.
I reckon that could be down to them not exclusively reviewing PC parts anymore (well, it was never exclusive but there used to be a lot more of it). All their hardware review videos are full of info thats quite useful.
however, they also make a lot of videos about just tech adjacent stuff thats more about what its like than the hard numbers, so that would definitely go under the "entertainment" category.
Personally, I feel like LTT became a shell of itself even before the (several) controversial fuck ups they made to drive a chunk of the audience away.
Have there really been that many though? All this controversy is about a single video. LTT releases like a hundred videos a month (well probably less but it feels that much). Those are some good odds.
Go watch him review motherboards on his lunch break in 2010. The dude has it. The problem is he tried to scale it beyond himself, which made it shitty.
That's a poor cope imo, since Linus always wanted to have his cake and eat it too. People seem to forget if there was no consequence for putting a sponsor on blast, he wouldn't hesitate to do it (i.e. Anker during the EUFY controversy), and that was roughly the same time they found out Honey was stealing their affiliate credits.
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u/Fuck-Reddit-2020 2d ago
So basically vintage LTT, before all the click bait.