Linus Gabriel Sebastian & Linus Media Group / Linus Tech Tips - Narcissistic corporate shill YouTuber driving his media empire into the ground. KILL COUNT: 2

[Kuritan Deplorable]

What is another possibility is that because of coworkers leaving people are starting to realize the job isn't that great and they're putting in passion amounts of effort for something they have no ownership or say in. So even when it comes to people who seem stuck there they could end up getting unstuck and leaving eventually.

This does feel pretty likely to me. While I have a very dim outlook for LTT's financials, I doubt they're in complete fiscal freefall yet, we'd see more flailing and projects if that was the case. Stagnancy seems more appropriate. And these talents are burning themselves out to keep stagnant afloat, while Linus fucks off on passion projects and investments one after another. While having his staff work on his home is incredibly meme worthy, it really is incredibly demoralizing that he's out there building extra businesses, buying mcmansions and sports cars, and doing all the things he wants. Meanwhile, he's forbidding his staff from starting their own side ventures and gigs, expecting them to crunch on deadlines for work items they probably don't even have much passion for, and demanding they do the modelling for his merch line and other such things rather than hiring actual models.

In of itself, this wouldn't be the worst - everyone understands that of course the boss gets richer, you make him happy as can be, and you just get paid "OK" enough. What probably rubs everyone the wrong way is his constant efforts to pitch this lower middle quality work environment as some amazing and golden opportunity for everyone that they should be happy to have. Whether he realizes it or not, he's replicating the worst of how big corporations try and use "Company Culture" as a way to increase buy-in from staff without actually providing meaningful ways to include them.

I think the whole "PC gamer" market reached its peak and is going to head into a decline (besides the LTT channel itself). People don't have that much money anymore and the desire/point of having cutting edge computers has largely dissolved

For the casual consumer? Certainly, which'll be Linus's death. Consumer gear has been in the marginal improvement space for years, at this point all you really need to do as a normal PC gamer is replace your GPU every 3-4 years just to keep up with general growth in VRAM and hardware level encode/decode features. The game performance gap these days is almost entirely down to developer competence, you'll either run amazingly on mid grade hardware with high settings, or it'll absolutely suck ass on a 5080 because the devs are incompetent. There's exceedingly few games now that run ok but visually poor on low end hardware, only to ramp up massively in looks and performance on top tier shit. If you just want to play videogames, you can honestly ignore most of the media out there, buy last years upper-mid powerhouse card twice a decade, and ride your CPU and Mobo straight into silicon death after eight years before building a new board.

I do think there's still space for people chasing the dragon and media catering to them, the actual prosumer space (Freelancers, artists, AI enthusiasts who actually run models etc) are still pushing the capabilities of hardware and want more, but they also can't just take number bigger for granted and actually have to plan competent builds. None of those kinds of people are gonna be using LTT as an information source, they're investing serious money into their builds and very likely have actual returns they expect out of it, so they're going to be looking for serious sources rather than reviews-as-entertainment. A freelance 3d artist who's building a new box to use as a renderfarm is going to be looking for hard performance metrics like blender render tests, not "Does this canadian faggot think he can see a difference in Anno 1800".

 

[neger psykolog]

This does feel pretty likely to me. While I have a very dim outlook for LTT's financials, I doubt they're in complete fiscal freefall yet, we'd see more flailing and projects if that was the case. Stagnancy seems more appropriate. And these talents are burning themselves out to keep stagnant afloat, while Linus fucks off on passion projects and investments one after another. While having his staff work on his home is incredibly meme worthy, it really is incredibly demoralizing that he's out there building extra businesses, buying mcmansions and sports cars, and doing all the things he wants. Meanwhile, he's forbidding his staff from starting their own side ventures and gigs, expecting them to crunch on deadlines for work items they probably don't even have much passion for, and demanding they do the modelling for his merch line and other such things rather than hiring actual models.

Stagnancy is the right word and he and the business simply have no real future prospects. If I were an investor LTT is the last thing I'd throw money into because there's a sea of competitors.

I do think his labs idea was fairly good but he really failed to compartmentalize it and execute it well, if he had it actually could've mattered or he could've partnered with Amazon or Newegg or a big player.

The YouTube/influencer and even "internet website/brand/company" space is infinitely crowded right now and although LTT had a good run the idea a channel like this can continue to exist or even grow off the back of increasingly reductive reviews of products they don't make simply doesn't exist.

I do think there's still space for people chasing the dragon and media catering to them, the actual prosumer space (Freelancers, artists, AI enthusiasts who actually run models etc) are still pushing the capabilities of hardware and want more, but they also can't just take number bigger for granted and actually have to plan competent builds. None of those kinds of people are gonna be using LTT as an information source, they're investing serious money into their builds and very likely have actual returns they expect out of it, so they're going to be looking for serious sources rather than reviews-as-entertainment. A freelance 3d artist who's building a new box to use as a renderfarm is going to be looking for hard performance metrics like blender render tests, not "Does this canadian faggot think he can see a difference in Anno 1800".

This is also true and anything that does cater to them will simply move so slow and be so outdated due to the size of his team that he will be outpaced and outmatched by a single person who is a boundary pusher in whatever space (whether it is cameras,, AI models or whatever) and those creators will just outsource the editing part and make their own footage.
If you compare that to LTT's business model which has 100 cameramen and 100 editors it moves glacially slow.

----

What I'm saying is just reality as harsh and as gay and depressing as it may be. I don't really want to grave dance on him because his channel made some alright videos for a while. The people leaving may seem like they're going to greener pastures but if they're creating YouTube channels or becoming solo influencers then they're entering the same extremely unstable realm of people like DarksydePhil - for sure LTT wasn't offering the best salaries but at the same time Linus was taking the brunt of the risk and (presumably) reliably paying people and paying for their equipment as well as staff to do various parts of the production line.

When it comes to people like that one bald review faggot who I hated and marques brownlee or whatever his name is or ijustine, none of those people feel relevant anymore in today's world (for better or worse). It's simply that its really hard to innovate when tech has already been pushed to the boundary and is so inescapable that people have become tired of it. The best example of that was the attempts at doing hardware AI devices that the market simply had no appetite for because it was basically just smartphones being repackaged.

I think even actually attractive ethots and aspiring pornstars are struggling for likes right now and anyone with any sense is probably trying to run back to the world of stable, decently paying jobs rather than chasing internet stardom dreams anymore.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

This is also true and anything that does cater to them will simply move so slow and be so outdated due to the size of his team that he will be outpaced and outmatched by a single person who is a boundary pusher in whatever space (whether it is cameras,, AI models or whatever)

Which we're already observing in practice, with Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, etc. Single-digit teams are already beating out the massive headcount businesses. The only thing LTT has that justifies a fragment of its headcount is creator warehouse, because that work is very much a "more hands better" space, up to a much higher limit anyway.

I think even actually attractive ethots and aspiring pornstars are struggling for likes right now

I think we're seeing the long tail of the same behavior train of investment fatigue that Gacha games are struggling with right now, applied to all the "creator" style spaces. We've spent the last ten years of the internet figuring out how to absolutely min/max a persons financial and emotional investment in the system. What we're discovering is that the harder they're invested at the peak, the farther away they go at the trough, and now people are rebounding out of these spaces so hard that they're just straight up not coming back. People who ended up scheduling their fucking meals around LTT slop videos end up bouncing out when he pulls a trust me bro, hard enough that they're not even interested in watching any computer creator when they eat, at all. Just leaves a bad taste in their mouth now.

Same thing applies to ethots playing on peoples hearts only to have a boyfriend, or porn turning into an unsatisfying sad wank in the corner, or any other thing. We've turned all these casual hobbies and vices into fucking lifestyles, and now when people fall out of them, they're not just picking up a new hobby, but basically are forced to restructure their entire world.

The addictions are deeper than ever, don't get me wrong, but now the bounce out for the ones who escape is more or less permanent.

 

[GosuGopher]

I think we're seeing the long tail of the same behavior train

Patreon/subscription numbers are my bellwether for this more broadly, the pool of money turned out to be more elastic than I'd initially conjectured and A LOT of grifters were able to get their bag, but the last 1-2 years have seen a pronounced bleed of passive donators across the entire Internet. And while I don't think there exists public/concrete trend data, anecdotally the observations shared with me have been it's the accounts backing 10+, 20+ different people that are cutting back most.

When you go to reduce your spending and weigh the benefits of any of these grifts individually, you realize that you might as well cut them all out completely, in-line with what you said regarding this investment 180°. Probably also doesn't help that Patreon has largely moved to a FOMO model and have even added ways for creators to DM you directly asking why you canceled to try to win you back. They've made the friction so much higher that you're honestly better off treating it as all-or-nothing.