She picked the right moment to come out with this. I mean, keeping this in for 2 whole years while being under the impression that you’re under some NDA, you can only imagine how stressful she must’ve felt.
I feel really sorry for her and I wish her the best. She’s a really cool person.
That’s usually how these things work. People see others speaking out against someone, and that gives them the courage that they’ll be heard.
It also helps that the current news only does to back up her claims and increase the perceived validity.
It’s sad people have to wait for these opportunities to come, if at all. Otherwise people would dismiss them as a liar or disgruntled employee. There are too many sycophants even now that will back Linus no matter what.
I think the LMG stans are super weird. People who pay for their premium floatplane stuff and pay just to be able to chat with others who pay
It’s all very weird to me.
I assume most of those people will stay behind and create an echo chamber of Linus simping for him to view.
I was a floatplane subscriber for quite a while. All of this stuff over the past week has made me rethink it all and I just can’t support it. Unsubscribed.
You really had me in the first half there.
I feared you’d continue with “how convenient for her to get attention now”, like people (especially women) are treated when they come out about abuse.
Thank you for being empathetic
It’s best not to assume the worst of people right away, especially those that you do not know personally. This happens too often on the internet and by extension, in real life. It can be hard to do that, I know, but the more people that do it, the better it is for everyone.
It would have been, but she’s apparently been posting about this for a while, only for it to come to light relatively organically.
Madison has been talking about this for awhile now. Dig up old tweets and posts and she’s definitely mentioned sexual harassment since she left LTT. No one paid attention until now.
Yep, she even said as much in here. People kept asking her about this and only now she gets the attentions that she deserves. It absolutely sucks.
This is, quite frankly, atrocious.
Horrifying more like. I hope she is okay though. Linus fan boys will wreak havoc.
This is worse than the Gamer’s Nexus video. The biggest red flag initially wasn’t even the bad testing data, it was how overworked the staff were. Clearly employee wellness is not a priority.
The Gamer’s Nexus video was necessary for others to speak out. Steve was clear that speaking up was a move that could backfire due to the power imbalance involved. Had he not spoken up there would be no opportunity for Madison to weigh in her experiences without being attacked.
Linus didn’t notice because that’s status quo in modern capitalism.
Still makes Linus a shithead for going right along with horrible practices, but it should go to explain how a lot of it is not conscious malicious intent. Employers exploit people all the time.
After I came forward about being assaulted, Someone accused Linus of inappropriate conduct on twitter.
He came over to my corner and started BERATING HER. Calling her insane, mentally ill, an attention seeker, and just digging into this poor woman who had felt wronged by him.
Linus sounds pretty consciously malicious to me…
That’s interpersonally malicious. A selfish kind of malicious. Yes, quite bad, but it’s not the scheming necessary of villain businessman.
It does go to show how all it takes is a person being given more power than they’re accepting of responsibility for. Like most bad small business leaders or “entrepreneurs” especially, Linus became a boss before he internalized and processed his struggles as a worker. He quite directly fails to understand the power dynamics.
Remember: I still think he’s unqualified. I’m merely pointing out the details of how Hanlon’s razor applies here. He’s a bit of a selfish, lazy nerd, unqualified to control the very business he built. Ahh capitalism. It truly rewards the most
qualifiedcallously shrewd.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
—Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Creighton (1887)
I wish wisdom were a requirement of leaders.
At least the bare minimum of aknowledging reality would be nice…
expired
Nah, it’s easy to spot people who don’t actually have skill.
People just LOVE to give others the benefit of the doubt. To the detriment of all.
But guys, Linus swears there’s no need for a union. He’ll just wield the power responsibly and with care, unlike all those other people.
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This is not my thesis but someone else’s but as a counterpoint to this platitude, look at the difference between Lincoln versus Nixon. Both were leaders at pivotal times but they took very different ethical directions. Sometimes character and background DOES matter and we SHOULD expect more of our leaders. Just assuming they will all be corrupt makes up disengage from the process.
Wha what video?
None of this is surprising to me at all. I’ve been seeing hints of a toxic ‘hustle’ mindset in their videos for quite some time and have commented as much on the videos. I’ve worked in environments just like this and once you’ve lived it it’s easy af to spot.
Linus probably says ‘I don’t ask anything of anyone that I don’t expect of myself’ and then goes on to expect someone making 50k to put in as much time and effort as he did when first starting LTT/LMG.
That is seriously my biggest gripe about employers… They think our pittance motivates us as much as their fortune.
Yea, I’ll get it done by the end of the week! Let’s trade paychecks and I’ll f*cking get it done real fast…
My comment on the forums was very similar.
The key issue in all of this that they didn’t address is that they’re pushing too fast. There have been many red flags about Linus pushing people too hard to get stuff done too fast.
It doesn’t matter what kind of “new processes” you put in place if people just don’t have time. And you can’t expect every employee to work as though they have 20% equity in the company. If you put more than 30 hours of work per week onto a full time, salaried employee, you’re not going to get their best work, especially in creative or expertise-required jobs.
To do their best work, people need time to breathe. They need time to be able to talk to their coworkers about a problem without worry about pulling them away from their own work for 15 minutes. They need time to grab a drink or a sandwich while they step back from a problem and consider it from a distance. They need time to decide their previous work wasn’t good enough and to go back and redo it. They shouldn’t have to ask. Having to ask is a problem. Getting “no” back as an answer is an even bigger problem.
If you try to account for every 15 minutes, you’re going to get shit quality product pushed out the door.
Madison brought this up. Employees have brought this up in videos. And Linus has raised red flags more than once. The biggest was with his equating doing things right to hours worked and directly to cash. That speaks to exactly this. People don’t have time to do things right, and they don’t have time to fix things.
The only way to fix this is to either hire more people (which you clearly can’t afford), or allow your current people to put out less product.
If you put more than 30 hours of work per week onto a full time, salaried employee, you’re not going to get their best work, especially in creative or expertise-required jobs.
Facts. If you claim you can work more than ~30 maybe 40 hours (that’s really pushing it) a week in this type of work without output/quality falling off a cliff, you have lots of room for process automation from my experience. I don’t think I do more than ~15-20 hours of actual active programming per week. If I have hard deadlines, pushing that out to 60-80 hours does increase output but nowhere close to linear output.
And as other people said, she was expected to output that much social media posts, but now they post the bare minimum. Maybe she was being asked too much after all.
You don’t hire your partner as the head of HR unless you want to hide a bad work enviroment.
Right? How do you go to HR if he harasses you? Yeah so I know y’all live together but like it’s really bad?
Oh I thought she was head of accounting. I didn’t realize HR. Conflict of interest much?
You’re right actually. Point still stands somewhat, the whole thing is fucked
Didn’t Coulton mention HR was his purview?
U do that when u think its a stupit position that doesnt really mather when u got a company of 10 to 20 people. When u hire lets say 90 poeple it starts to breakdown.
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Stopped watching years ago because something about the videos were starting to put me off. Now I know.
She has also confirmed that this Glassdoor review was written by her, with continuing updates on her twitter
Quote from the twitter thread:
I was asked about my sexual history, my boyfriends sexual history, “how I liked to fuck”.
I was told that certain issues were “sexual tension” and I should just “take the co-worker out on a coffee date to ease it out”
I was asked to twerk for a co-worker at one point.
I was told I was chunky, fat, ugly, stupid. I was called “retarded” I was called a “removed”
Holy cow I thought the screenshots currently on this post were the whole thing and I was horrified??
No, the screenshots are like, half?? THE TAME HALF???
Same.
I was like, huh seems like she was overworked I guess I wonder why there’s so many comments… Oh fuck.
Holy shit wtf
I figured it was stressful there, and I always kind of dismissed the dickheads in the community as “the internet being the internet” but it seems it’s WAY worse.
Man what the fuck kind of attitude is that??
They sound like a bunch of immature misogynistic little pricks.
Honestly? Considering how some members of the team act on camera I’m willing to believe they are immature misogynistic little pricks
What the actual fuck. This is starting to sound like FTX
Someone share the glassdoor post here pretty please? They’ve got a login wall
1.0 Jul 27, 2022
Disappointed with treatment would not recommend
Social Media Coordinator
Former Employee, more than 1 year
X Recommend
O CEO Approval
X Business Outlook
Pros
a lot of talented people
employee bonding activities
Cons
No proper/or explained HR system.
Sexist remarks, coded language, and harassment were common place.
Inappropriate actions, comments, and discussions frequently occurred.
Including discussion about employees bodies, appearance, clothes, and wealth.
Upper/middle management frequently misuse power.
No way to report most incidents without issue, since the HR team was ALSO upper management.
Feedback was consistently harsh and not constructive.
Inappropriate language was commonly used while giving feedback.
Meetings with unbalanced power dynamics were common place.
Gaslighting situations frequently occurred.
Unbiased 3rd parties were never present, or easily able to be requested in these meetings.
Lack of proper communication between management and employees.
Outside ventures frequently frowned upon, or limited by the company.
Advice to Management
Stop dismissing complaints because “everyone is friends here” it’s a workplace, not a group hangout session.
Get a proper HR team and take reports of harassment and inappropriate conduct seriously.
Don’t dismiss employees complaints.
Thank youu!
Just an fyi, you can get past the wall using reader mode in Firefox and
glassdoor.com^*/gd-hardsellin ublock origin’s filters. Reader mode is necessary if you want to see full reviews, the ublock rule is to stop the “please login” popup
Imgur blocking VPNs again. Ugh.
What the actual fuck.
fucking absolute disgusting.
😧
Okay.
This is not your conventional toxic workplace. This is ADVANCED toxicity. She resorted to self harm for a day off. That’s a type of struggle that can make a company go terminal if the rank and file band together.
This needs to be spread.
Im sorry, but that is conventional toxic workplace. Or ive just heard a lot of horror stories from people.
This supports the notion that the issues with quality are due to overextended teams. It sounds like yet another workplace where upstairs decisions are made without consulting the people who will actually do the work, and so the rank and file have to constantly scramble to make up for that. I feel like LTT leadership decided a velocity of content to support certain goals rather than what their resources can actually do.
… And it also seems like they have not outgrown the “early joiners can do whatever they want to whomever they want” problem that plagues companies like this.
I mean we already knew their staff was overextended, and that upper management has been pushing for velocity at the expense of quality. This has been self evident by the myriad of issues pointed out in Steve’s video.
What wasn’t already apparent was how horrendously abusive of a workplace LMG appears to actually be. This is quite literally shocking and I honestly think most of the commenters are underreacting, lol.
This poor girl was sexually assaulted by coworkers/management on multiple occasions. Verbally abused regularly. And she had to self harm to a degree that she needed to go to the ER just to TAKE A DAY OFF FROM WORK.
I used to work in tech myself, and I’ve heard some horror stories, especially from women in tech. But this is among the worst. If all this is true, LMG is a horrific, toxic, abusive organization and I hope they get sued into the ground.
It’s been a while since I regularly watched LMG content, so I wasn’t really aware of how many videos they were churning out. Looking at it now, I would assume their staff was much larger than it is.
Ironically, the harassment/assault/retaliation stuff is the one area they’d benefit from being a bit more corporate. Obviously they aren’t capable of ending it for the purposes of basic human decency. Maybe a liability approach would get through…
Similar to the Amazon “disagree and commit” policy which, if you didn’t know, means you can/should disagree if you feel that way and then you should fall in line and shut up.
If the allegations about the sexual topics are true (like managing the OnlyFans account and having to see other people’s junk, being told to twerk for a coworker and getting asked about “how she liked to fuck”) LTT is in some serious trouble.
No sponsor in their right mind wants to be associated with a bunch of grown men sexually assaulting their female coworkers. If this isn’t cleared up totally and publically, LTT will lose a lot of sponsors and this can seriously hurt them.
When the employee handbook leaked a few months ago and this was mostly ignored by Linus except him making a rant about the company not needing unions because they’re so great, that was already very suspicious to me. It seemed like just another hustle culture company trying to sweep things under the rug. Well, looks like it was not just a feeling…
Hot damn. That’s not just toxic but straight up abusive and the more you hear about Linus as a person the worse it gets too.
Linus has admitted to bullying others when he was younger, guess that side of him never went away. Just good at hiding it or editing out of public view. I’m looking back now wondering if he even properly compensated his employees for doing what should have been CONTRACT work on his house or just what they would have made from the videos so he could profit off free labor.
Definitely unsubscribing from all their channels. All of that shit is absolutely disgusting.
I had wondered what happened to her and why she seemed to rarely be in any content despite having a good camera presence. It sucks that she had to put up with all that. Linus should have put in his big boy pants and fired the shit heads that helped create such a toxic work environment. He clearly does not know how to manage a company.
From the thread, Linus is part of the problem.
Linus is the problem. It’s a top down problem, and he’s the one at the top. Everything stems from time and lack of it to resolve issues correctly. When you don’t have time to deal with things and more things get requested of you, it’s human nature to try to downplay or discredit their importance.
You cannot excuse this with time. Taking this to a marginal extreme to demonstrate the point - you don’t dismiss a report that one of your employees shot another because you don’t have the time for it.
You’re right, I meant more that over worked people don’t clearly think things through like they should, but this really is of that level where it’s a bad excuse regardless.
Reading the full thread was stressful enough, I don’t even want to image what it was like to live it.
Now I understand why the company is so against unionizing, all this stuff would pretty quickly explode in their face. It’s straight up abuse that should be met by the full force of the legal system.
What the fuck is wrong with people that makes them think that if you have the smallest modicum of power over someone else it’s your god given right to be an asshole, a sexual predator or just generally toxic.
I don’t get it.
His Union comments are just tone deaf. He’s not wrong that it would be a failure on the company if people felt they needed to unionize. It doesn’t need to be said. Clearly he didn’t think he treated his employees badly, but here we are.
No; what, he’s exactly wrong in saying that! Regardless on your thoughts on unions, that’s never something that a CEO/Founder should say about their company, first because it’s just incredibly stupid like you noted, but also because it’s the biggest red flag that you DO need to unionize ASAP!
At the end of the day, Linus was trying to sell ‘we don’t need a union because we’re the cool workplace’, but it’s always been because unions, by definition, dilute the power of people in his position, which I’m sure he feels very threatened by, especially the longer he built this Jenga tower.
And if you think that companies that are unionized are a sign of failure… well, I don’t know how to address that without pulling out my own hair.
I have not agree in so far that workers who decide to unionize usually do it because their company has wronged them. I don’t recall hearing of a workplace trying to unionize that are completely happy.
I’m really glad I didn’t purchase that stupid screwdriver now.
Holy shit.
So much of what she says is not just horrifying (seriously, feeling the need to hospitalize yourself for a day off), but also straight up illegal.
Retribution, hostile work environment, straight up harassment, not to mention evidence of “constructive dismissal”. (I’m using US terms but I know these have equivalent laws in Canada)
I’ve had some pretty bad jobs that have destroyed my mental health, but none of them come close to what Madison is describing here and I am so happy that this is coming out. This is the sort of thing people need to know about LTT and LMG.
Everyone saying this isn’t malice, it fucking is. All of this is done out of malice. He is angry his employees don’t treat this like their day 1 dream and give their entire 45k/yr soul to the brand. He is upset that people would even dare question their products. He is furious that employees would have the gall to expect time off.
It is malice, it always has been. Capitalist hold everyone in contempt, especially employees. It is the easiest thing in the fucken world to take a little less profit from your pocket and add it to the people who actually make your company run. None of these fucks do it because they hate their own employees. They don’t want humans working for them, they want cheap drones that follow their every
wordintention. The people at the top of any company fucking hate they have to pay you at all. Accept that. That is reality.Honestly, that’s a much larger issue to me than the beef with GN. Forcing the image of a super cool liberal easy company while being as shitty as every other bigger greedy firm. So sad.
