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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/the_mashrur on 2023-08-18 06:36:47+00:00.
I keeps seeing near-unanimous praise for Steve and GN, as if he's some sort of benevolent saint that truly wants LTT to improve and move past this.
But that's just not true at all.
- Linus and Steve were meant to be friends. If a friend fucks up in a big big way, do you go to them in private and say "bro you fucked up. You need to fix this and take accountability" or do you immediately go and publicly shame them? So when people criticise linus for wanting notice, and they say "oh, but what about not notifying X company about criticising their product", that's completely different, as Linus is likely not friends with that company. You just don't treat friends like Steve treated Linus
- With the creation of the Labs, LMG is now a direct competitor of GN. It is in their best interests to make this exposé of LTT as damning as it can be. Which is fine on it's own, but don't then go and claim "this video was tough to make". It wasn't.
As for the rest of my points, I think a comment I saw sums them up best, so I'll paste it here
"That GN video really rubbed me the wrong way. I appreciate most of his criticisms, because they WERE mostly valid, but calling out LMG for having a conflict of interest is so startlingly hypocritical.
GN and LMG are competitors, and LMG are trying to move into his space of doing in-depth tech review/analysis. Want an example? Steve revealed a few weeks ago they invested 250k into building an anechoic chamber to perform testing. Labs is also building an anechoic chamber. So the fact that he has this massive conflict of interest, and was spending time putting together a critique of LMG and calling them out for conflicts of interest, yet decided to not reach out to Linus for comments/clarification makes it smell like he's trying to do maximum damage to a deep-pocketed competitor moving into his niche.
It was Steve, not Billet, that planted the seed that a competitor bought their block. Had he reached out to Linus, maybe he'd figure out who bought the block instead of throwing in guesses to spike the drama. Steve also conveniently left out the fact that Billet had originally told LMG that they could keep the block, before changing their minds afterwards, which would explain why LMG's inventory management system flagged it as LMG property, resulting it mistakenly being selected for the auction in the first place. Point is, the guy could have reached out to Linus and obtained much needed context to his video, yet decided to jump the gun. If I was as cynical as Steve, I'd almost think he did it on purpose."
I think Steve's integrity issues are just as bad as Linus, and is an even worse "friend". I don't think he should get to claim any high ground here.
This all is not to say that I'm trying to absolve linus and LMG of what they did. They fucked up big.