The fall of Linus Tech Tips: How the once favorite YouTube tech giants are now shrouded in controversy and public outrage

Linus Tech Tips has been on a downward spiral ever since Gamers Nexus published a YouTube video outlining the malpractices and widespread errors in the channel's content. The issues were reflected in almost every major Linus Media Group (LMG)-owned tech channel, including ShortCircuit and Techquickie. LTT, the main channel, has lost over 100,000 subscribers following these revelations.

To add more fuel to the fire, more incidents, including how a teenage kid MindChop was harassed to suicide by LTT fans, surfaced online. Moreover, ex-employee Madison Reeve opened up about rampant misconduct and s*xual harassment she had to face while working at LMG.

All of this has led to massive dips in viewer faith, and the company is now renouncing its once-perfect tech reviewer and online influencer.

Following the widespread controversy, the LTT team declared they would pause all video content for the next eight days. This is massive for a company that publishes 25 videos every week.

According to Linus and other higher-ups in the company, they will spend the next few days drafting a new roadmap for all YouTube content. The focus will be on reduced content upload frequency and more transparency in the review procedure.

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The Linus Tech Tips controversy explained: What went wrong with the tech reviews juggernaut?

Linus Tech Tips is one of the largest tech channels on YouTube, with over 15.5 million subscribers. However, LMG owns multiple other channels. Some of the biggest of them include ShortCircuit (2.2M subscribers), TechLinked (1.85M subscribers), and Techquickie (4.26M subscribers). Together, they form one of the most followed tech content creators on the planet.

Since LTT started back when the channel was under NCIX in the late 2000s, it has gone through multiple phases of development and changes. Their current standards were adopted in 2016, which included publishing one well-researched and high-quality tech video every week.

Since then, little changed in the channel's outlook. However, LMG grew as they continued adding more channels, and thus videos, to their weekly output. The company blew up to over 100 employees, which is unusual for a YouTube channel. However, this still wasn't enough since producing 25 high-quality, well-researched videos per week is a herculean task.

Thus, the issues brought forward by fellow tech reviewer Gamers Nexus started to pop up over the last few years. The list of problems included overworking employees, poor quality control due to lack of time, and erroneous content being published because of other issues.

However, Linus has made multiple investments to improve the quality of their content. Steps included moving to a larger office that could house multiple sets for shooting multiple videos simultaneously and LTT Labs for publishing in-depth hardware testing results.

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How did the Linus Tech Tips controversy start?

All of this came crashing down as Linus Tech Tips was exposed by Gamers Nexus on August 15 in a 44-minute video that broke down the malpractices and inaccuracies in multiple of their videos. This was also when the LTT-Billet Labs case emerged. The channel reportedly auctioned off a prototype after making a video on it despite having promised to return the cooling block to Billet.

The next events in Linus Tech Tips' journey are known. Linus posted a hurried forum post negating most of Steve's claims and faced more backlash than expected. In the meanwhile, ex-employee Madison opened up, which led to further controversies and complications.

A few hours ago, Linus Tech Tips posted a video detailing how they plan to rebound from the issues pointed out by GN. For now, they won't be creating new videos for the next eight days. Only time will tell what's the next chapter of Linus Tech Tips.