A curious story has touched a very popular YouTube channel, Linus Tech Tips, in recent days.
We gave you news in an article, and we will summarize what happened here. For now, it is enough for us to know that the channel, which has ended up at the center of criticism of various kinds, has suspended itself for a few days.
And now the founder and former CEO, Linus Sebastian, has returned to posting a video, an apology but not only. In the abundant fourteen minutes, Sebastian also dictates the new lines of the famous channel, to regain the full credibility of his followers.
First of all, let’s find out who Linus Sebastian is and his Linus Tech Tips. Let’s see then in what storm the channel has ended up in, and how it is trying to recover.
Linus Tech Tips
Linus Sebastian was born in Canada in 1986 and at the age of twenty-seven he founded the company Linus Media Group in 2013.
That is a group of YouTube channels and podcasts about technology, whose primary channel is Linus Tech Tips. It is a YouTube channel that boasts over 15.4 subscribers, in which in-depth reviews of technology and information technology were published on a daily basis (the past is a must, and we will explain why shortly).
Linus Sebastian, although he resigned from the role of CEO of the company last May, has remained the main face of Linus Tech Tips.
The channel’s videos often exceed a million views, and Linus Tech Tips survived a hacker attack last March unscathed.
However, things got really complicated from the end of June.
The technical error
Linus Tech Tips, we said, has long been a qualitative reference point for millions of followers.
Until last June 24th he ran into a series of chain errors. Born with a misleading review: A liquid cooling system from Monoblock was rated (negatively). Too bad, however, that the test was carried out with a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU (graphics processing unit) and not with the more suitable GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, as the manufacturer had indicated.
Subsequent errors
Maybe an apology could have been enough, but from that moment on the situation only got worse.
First of all, Sebastian blatantly refused to retest using the eligible GPU. Furthermore, Linus Tech Tips sold the prototype at a charity auction, while it seems that the return to the manufacturer was agreed.
Moves that have not escaped a competitor, the channel Gamers Nexus, which in a video underlined the lack of professionalism of Linus Tech Tips.
A large part of the community therefore protested, and some pointed out that Linus Tech Tips, unlike Gamers Nexus, earns money from reviews.
The company immediately blocked the monetization. But meanwhile new scandals were on the way.
The allegations of the former social media manager
On August 16, former social media manager Madison Reeve published a post on X discussing toxic ways of workingwhich “were ruining my mental health”, and of unsustainable production rates.
Reeve also accused some colleagues of harassment: during her employment in the company she allegedly received insults and insults several times, and someone forced her to dance obscenely.
Self-suspension
Caught in this set of problems, the leaders of Linus Tech Tips have decided to suspend reviews for a week.
They announced this in a video posted on August 17. In which they have finally admitted their mistakes, derived from the desire – no longer necessary – to publish reviews on a daily basis.
The pause for thought would serve to sort things out, and improve quality control processes, to provide more accurate reviews.
The new video
Nine days after the apology video, here’s a new upload. I am fourteen minutes of video, published on Saturday 26 August, in which this time only Linus Sebastian speaks.
The company founder said there were several meetings to “analyze every misstep”. He reiterated that there will no longer be uploading one new video per day: each content must be approved by an internal control committee but also by an external one.
Furthermore, transparency will increase: The channel will publish its guidelines on product testing but also on sponsorship processes.
In the video however, no mention was made of the allegations of harassment made by Madison Reeve. Sebastian just let it be known that the matter will be investigated, and that “when we are ready, we will release a statement about it”.