I think Linus' image would honestly look
better if he actually just owned up to what he did.
I stand by the fact that Linus' initial response was taken out of context, but that's about all I can really defend him on. His response was bad, yes, though I think it did get framed to be a little bit worse than it really was. Though I don't really believe it was malicious, and the full context doesn't really include too much to change the entire story, it was enough that it should have been included, even if to just make the viewer more aware of his stance. As others pointed out in this thread, he has made
multiple videos about dropping sponsors, and even if it's just on the WAN show or whatever, that still gets a lot of viewers, and it will get clipped and circulate at least to hundreds of thousands of people. He should have showed what they found with the Honey stuff when they did find it, and he shouldn't have made excuses when people called him out on it.
Seeing more and more of his private correspondence with people, especially Louis, one of the YouTubers, no, one of the people that I have the most respect for, honestly disheartened me about his character a lot. I think Linus was in the right place when he first made his channel, and looking at the content that he used to make when it was just him and a few friends working in a tiny office - you can tell it's a lot different. Now, he pushes out corporate slop with sponsors every video and he doesn't give a damn about what he pushes, he just cares about his kickback. He has mistakes in pretty much every video, is too lazy to redo minor parts of voice-overs, and hell, wasn't he considering using an AI voice-over of himself to read the Labs pages instead of just taking 5 minutes of his day getting paid millions a year? He has to do pinned comment edits and retractions on nearly every video - it's really sad to see. I actually did have a bit of hope for him when the original GN video initially came out and he did his response, and I figured that it truly would be a wake-up call for him to get his act together and stop acting like the slew of insults that many of you have thrown at him, but honestly, this is pretty indefensible.
I think that every single response he has made has been pretty bad and he's trying to take moral high-ground in this when really he has almost zero room to talk. I think there are some invalid criticisms of him from you guys, GN, and Louis - but it's so obvious that he's in the wrong on this one. This is honestly going to be more of a wake-up call for the casual fans that don't really have brand loyalty to him the way that a lot of the people on the Reddit do, as I think most people can reasonably look at this situation and see that Linus is kind of just taking L after L on this.
And also, the whole sending to the wrong phone thing, he did mention that he just switched phones and doesn't have his old contacts and texts so that could be a factor, however unlikely it is, I try to be charitable towards people I disagree with, and I think that genuinely could have just been a mistake he made. I think he would have mentioned it if so on the most recent WAN show, but it also seems like he has zero intentions on continuing this unless his hand is forced. Also, I do think it's kind of shitty on GN to try and pull out the lawyer shit, but that's just my personal opinion and you all can disagree on that. From what I've seen, Linus at least goes out of his way to settle things mano a mano, even if he goes about it in a retarded way.
This is the 2nd highest upvoted comment in the thread:
I think a lot of the Redditards are misunderstanding the point about reimbursing travel - perhaps intentionally, but I'm not sure due to the average IQ of a user on the LTT subreddit, or any Reddit user for that matter. It's not about not having the money to go, and they are 99% likely to be intentionally misrepresenting the situation (the 1% is because I know that sometimes Redditors will genuinely believe the shit that they spew). It's about the fact that the creators that they wanted to come were literally getting nothing out of it besides meeting a few fans, which could be good for audience engagement, but canceling your plans and traveling a huge distance to go to some random event is just not worth it to them, and him taking personal offense to this and then digging up quite menial and trivial things that happened in the past to guilt them was the nail in the coffin for me.