NaturalViolence Wrote:I never understood how LTT were so popular in the first place.
I can explain that! So, originally, LTT was a tech-themed channel that had a very broad focus with a silly not-serious atmosphere. So like, they'd do "unboxings" which was basically just them talking about what a thing was and that's it (they deliberately did not judge the product, an important detail). They'd do beginner friendly tutorial videos and guides. They had a show that did a very shallow but wide overview of weekly tech topics with brisk pacing (wan show). They would do professional things in amusingly jank ways
because they had no budget so they had no choice but to push consumer hardware to the limit. And (my personal favourite) they'd do long-term, real world experience reviews of products where they'd give some tech to someone for a few months and then that someone would talk about their experience. And it was usually some bit of tech that the person in question was passionate about, so while they weren't an expert, they had a passion about it and combined with long term experience they could give a pretty decent review. LTT didn't have quality reporting from experts in their field, but that wasn't the point, it was a sillier, beginner-friendly tech channel. For what it was, LTT was pretty good, circa 2015-2018 anyway.
They even had good thumbnails and titles that were descriptive!
Unfortunately, everything I just talked about is not a part of LTT today.
What is the LTT of today? Well, they now do reviews of recently released products. In fact, reviews have become a core part of the channel. 5 years-ish ago when they started doing reviews of new products, they were mediocre at them. They never had the time or education to do them well, so they were just ok at best. Unfortunately as time went on, their quality only got worse. Errors have increased, methodological fallacies that invalidate their testing of entire products is basically the norm, and the presentation is just falling to pieces. It was an issue
two years ago, so LTT spent a frick ton of money on "Labs" in an attempt to improve. It not only didn't work, it has only gotten worse. Much worse in fact. LTT's reviews are TERRIBLE now, as Gamer's Nexus showed.
WAN Show, which used to be a 1 hour, high level coverage of tech news for the week, has lost all tech news. It became a 4-5 hour long conversation with LTT Fans, which would occasionally talk about tech topics. Sure that role has kind of been taken over by TechLinked, one of their other channels, but techlinked is very different, and it had its OWN quality issues. Either way, WAN show is just awful now. I stopped watching them like 3 years ago.
All long-term life experience reviews are gone. Entirely, for years now. Build guides are gone, tutorials are gone.
All of the jank building stuff is mostly gone, save for the stuff at linus's house. But it's different now. Before they were a scrappy small team with no budget, bodging solutions that were out of their price range with parts that weren't meant for the task. Now it's like... they have the resources, they can do it right if they wanted to, but Linus is impatient so yolo while everyone else in the video cringes as they realize all the work they are going to have to do off camera to fix this. It's a very different energy. It's less "wow look at how far they can take consumer parts!" and more "ugh why can't linus wait ten minutes for them to get the right part". It's not the same.
Honestly, that's kind of the entire vibe of the channel. No one has any time, so all of their videos are rushed. It doesn't matter what it is or what they are doing, it will have clear and obvious signs of being rushed. And if a VIEWER can spot it, you know it has to be ten times worse actually making it. So things go wrong, because they rushed so of course it did, and instead of trying again and doing it right, they just keep going, and the rest of the video just falls to pieces and they (for whatever reason) pass judgement on whatever they are doing based on their flawed execution.
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So, me and Sonicadvance used to watch all their videos, basically. Not as fans or anything, we just found them enjoyable. However, we've noticed their videos getting worse, and we watched way much fewer videos each month over time. So it went from basically every day viewing 5+ years ago, to a few per month before the end. When Gamer's Nexus posted the video, we already knew most of what it was going to contain. There were a few surprises in the past few days though. The Bilit labs prototype being outright stolen was news to me. As well as Madison revealing just how horrible the internal culture was. That last one was the final straw for us, btw. We unsubscribed after we read that. After the Gamer's Nexus video, we were going to watch at a distance and see what became of them and if they could turn it around, but after the Madison post? Just, no thanks. We're done. We're not supporting that.
Speaking of which... does anyone have a good water bottle that they'd recommend?