Sounds convincing, however businesses don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. For me to trust and support this content again, the investigation of the allegations needs to produce conclusive evidence. The whole quality drama passed to the background after Madison showed up what really went inside LMG
Either LMG admits wrongdoing and dishes out consequences to those involved, or they present verifiable and damning evidence showing no abuse occurred. Unlike bootlickers at reddit and ltt forums, I don't side with businesses against people. If you live in this world and not in your mom's basement you'd understand why.
If LMG comes out with "we found nothing," "no conclusions could be made," or something along those lines without evidence, then fuck them. Not good enough.
I vote with my wallet (and time), and I won't deal with more corpo BS while abusing emplpyees. Before any smartasses come here with the usual "you live in society" crap. Yeah I can't go live in the woods like a hermit to be morally right, but I can sure as hell drop a shit tech yt channel.
EDIT: taking another look, the second half of the video was more defensive nonsense. Basically claiming they aren't a twitter sweatshop, they are the victims, and some heavily edited parking loot footage as "proof"
And the turnover rate is at best a shaky argument, One can argue since it's mostly guys, they're not gonna be at the same situation to be bullied, insulted and sexually harassed until leaving. It doesn't seem the culture will be fixed anytime soon, so I'm just gonna stop wasting more time with it.
They did an okay job of addressing the accuracy issue, but failed to even mention the issues of workplace culture and absurd quotas.
It does not matter if workers start and stop their shifts at particular time - as strictly required by law - when the amount of work they are expected to do within that time frame is unrealistic.
Upping the expections for quality, without lowering those for quality, will only make things worse for everyone working there.
Not to mention it didn't even touch on the note serious allegations of sexual harassment.
A lot better of a response, but I think Linus missed the point on toxic workplace/culture comments.
I'm sure they're not able to comment on Madison (for good legal reason and they still need the third party firm to investigate), but Linus' response just felt more "look at all the nice things LMG does" rather than a commitment about the long-term cultural issues. Anonymous employee surveys are really difficult to trust because a) they have a reputation of not being anonymous and b) if the culture has someone already scared to be open, it's doubtful that there will be honest answers. It sounds like LMG did take their one-on-one meetings seriously, but time will only tell.
(Personal ancedote: I have had managers watch me fill out those anonymous surveys to make sure it was "filled out properly.")
Yeah, it's nice LMG gives decent Christmas bonuses and hold have all those off-hours events, but I can't help but feel it's designed more to keep employees trapped in the LMG bubble and when you feel trapped, it's harder to push back and up for yourself.
I don't want Linus/LTT to fail. Mistakes are bound to happen and I enjoy watching a tiny Canadian man put things down really fast. I honestly just don't want to support a complete jerk that purposefully hurts other people and refuses to take accountability. If it comes out that everything with Madison is true and LMG takes no corrective action, I will have no issue hard blocking LMG content.
EDIT: Further thoughts after reading the responses:
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It's really none of our business what happened between Madison and LMG. The only thing that matters is hoping Madison has a good support system in place and LMG makes the necessary internal changes in response to the third-party investigation.
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I don't think it's wrong that they shared their turnover numbers, but I don't think it's representative of the big picture. LMG's roles feel more specialist in nature. I don't imagine there's a high amount of jobs in some areas that LMG offers, which means people are less likely to leave. It's also possible that some parts of the company are shielded from what happens elsewhere. (It appears both Creator Warehouse and Floatplane weren't as impacted)
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It's good to at least some companies take anonymous surveys / one-on-one feedback seriously. Rewatching the video, it appears they are taking one-on-one feedback seriously, which I hope is the case.
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Addressing/preventing future review errors were clearly addressed in this video. I feel like if that was the only thing that came up in the last week then this wouldn't really have blown up the way it has.
Unclear what has really changed with the workplace culture and employees being overworked. They've implemented a bunch of extra processes that is just going to take more time and work, not less. A couple of things Linus has brought to light in this video:
- Most people "only" worked 9-10 hour days and that's not including commute
- Over time does happen and it's when employees work more than that 9-10
- WFH will be even rarer since people will be required to be at more in person meetings
- They have plenty of money to keep going so the previous stinginess in video quality was really just greed?
- "Less" videos will be posted but how many? Only time will tell
- The intent was to become of a source of accurate data and reviews - they're not just entertainment
The whole "our fans are the boss" attitude could really go sideways too given some of the fans track records of harassment... They really can not cultivate some in-house ethics with the 100+ people they have?
That bit at the start about addressing the people who want to see them fail... ehhh
I mean, people who actively want to see you fail just because shouldn't really be engaged with at all tbfh, and if he's referrring to who I think he's referring to, then bleah
Otherwise at least they're back, let's see how they improve
Listening to it, there is a lot of focus on saying things alluding to "we were already in the process of fixing this" rather than "we fucked up and this will be fixed".
I'm also a little concerned to see that gender affirming healthcare isn't listed on their health plan when they have trans members of staff. I completely understand why Emily doesn't want to be in the public eye but she is by far my favourite host and I'd love to see her back and producing high quality, well thought out videos where she is given the creative time she needs. The people pressuring her (as well as others) to comment on everything were completely out of order though.
I think the culture of misogyny is demonstrated by the number of male hosts compared to women. Part of the reason people wanted Madison on board was because she would have fit the role perfectly and they just dumped her in the corner on socials. YouTube is a new industry and its disappointing that it is still as male dominated as the tech journo industry that came before it.
What I think is needed is for the staff to unionize and for the company to stop micromanaging and pushing performance because the "fun" doesn't feel like real fun, it feels like corporate forced fun. McDonalds does a christmas party for their staff and you don't hear people praise them for their workplace culture.
Reading the Reddit thread on this, I find it fascinating that, at the beginning of the incident, Lemmy had more balanced conversations vs the crazies on Reddit calling for LTT disbandment. Now after the latest video, it seems like Reddit seems more reasonable and receptive with Linus' plans vs Lemmy being the LTT doomsayers.
I am still not very impressed with the response from Linus and company. It is quite clear that they decided to slave themselves to the YouTube algorithm without regard for the humans involved. So many of their videos devolve into an unintentional Abbott and Costello comedy routine because they clearly did not decide to spend the time preparing properly or realizing they missed something and starting again. They just plow through without regard for the quality of people involved.
Sometimes this is entertaining, but more often than not, it is just low quality and a waste of their time.
I want entertaining tech content, but not at the expense of the people involved. Honestly, it is fascinating to see the sausage being made. I would love for them to show the difficult process of making a high quality video and getting the process corrected. Then have the final produced video. Full transparency, warts and all.
I am glad that they plan to improve and made steps towards it, but i still have a sour taste in my mouth:
- I was expecting a formal apology for the monoblock and mouse skates film issue. Both of these were instances where LTT threw another smaller company under the bus. Them not addressing it further gives the assumption that they can, and will keep getting away with stuff like this.
- Their new guidelines for correction policy are flawed; even the low-severity ones are thing that really shouldn't be tolerated with no corrective action, and all factual mistakes should be re-shot or voiced over instead of on-screen corrections.
- They hardly touched upon the whole Madison situation, except for some boasting about employee benefits.
- In the whole situation, I felt like they failed to really admit that they were sorry for what hapened, and were taking the role of the victims.
- "We are people too" and a whole segment in this video of emails from fans hoping they will get better soon and "survive this difficult shitstorm". LMG was merely getting away with this stuff for a long time and just now have been called out. They don't deserve any harassment, however, they also don't deserve any "Get better soon" emails from fans.
TL;DR: I will most likely continue to watch Linus tech tips for entertainment purposes, but will no longer trust them on any technical details, and would go to other channels for tutorials on how to build a pc and such.
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He really needs to take a step back and let Teran do his what they hired him to do. He has stated multiple times that he is no a CEO. he has no actual training or education and it has been showing for years now. Every talking head episode he pushes out like this just seems to dig his legacy further into this hole.
Haven't watched it yet, but it'll be a while before I'll be willing to give LTT my views again
LTT did not even have the decency to speak GamersNexus' name, and give them respect and apology. This is all I need to know about LMG.
The stuff Madison spoke of regarding workplace abuse is something I can believe and trust blindly, but I still have my reservations on the whole "I cut myself" part, because the internet has taught me that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. GrapheneOS scum dev also claimed early May 2023 that he was attempted to be "swatted", never giving evidence of it and silencing everyone asking for evidence.
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...so, in terms of plan, we have no plan.
This is satisfying change. If they go with it and no new shit floats up then I'm willing to re-subscribe. Otherwise there would be no point putting pressure if we, as the community, are not willing to reward them listening to us.
I was always more of a Lon.TV kind of guy anyway.
Don't give a flying fuck about the drama. Just want to see more content.
I was thrilled to see there was a a new TechLinked with Riley. I love how he even alluded to the controversy without actually talking about it by mentioning the nonsense on r/LTT. I wonder if it is any more or less annoying than the endless complaining and badmouthing on Lemmy.
He's a slimly mother fucker. Good well worded reaction to be fair. If it did feel like ChatGPT did the ground work for him. Looks like he's spent the past 12 hours crying, prob due to the YouTube earnings taking a nosedive. Like most managers who can't manage, but have read the book of what to say, didn't feel at all sincere... We hear you.. loud and clear but.... We have doubled our virtually non existent budget ... We want to provide... But....
Someone else is welcome to the top spot. Oh how they fall...
Wow. Looks like my comments last week about waiting for both sides to speak (which were heavily downvoted) was the correct move.
You guys are embarrassing. You're no better than toxic ass Reddit. Even the comments posted here now are ridiculous, like those refusing to watch this video lmao.
So one sided.
