00:00:00 - intro
00:00:39 - influencer culture is rotten
00:01:19 - my community post
00:03:20 - what is honey?
00:05:40 - Part 1: linus & honey, self-image perception vs. audience well being
00:06:41 - “would it have gone well for me?”
00:07:08 - it’s not about you
00:07:35 - your responsibility as an influencer
00:08:28 - thieves can’t be trusted
00:09:10 - browser extensions can monitor browser activity
00:09:36 - steve burke’s missing context
00:09:45 - reading Linus’ quote
00:10:28 - the part steve burke left out
00:11:05 - the “context” makes linus look worse
00:11:10 - Linus’ manipulation to escape accountability
00:12:00 - what pisses me off
00:12:45 - you took money for high visibility video, post retraction on the main channel
00:13:02 - so post it
00:13:35 - Accepting the premise of assholes: part 1
00:14:00 - responsibility to your audience is more important than your perception of your image
00:14:30 - our audience should make our own decisions
00:15:13 - linus’ manipulative nature
00:15:40 - louis loses it
00:16:02 - if linus cared about his audience, what he’d do
00:18:33 - why steve didn’t include the context
00:19:43 - accepting the premise of assholes: part 2
00:20:45 - real influencer vs. poser influencer
00:21:20 - how steve got gaslit by accepting the premise of assholes
00:22:05 - how steve allowed himself to change
00:22:43 - steve updated his website for right to reply
00:23:44 - ignore the tone police
00:24:17 - what right to reply means to linus
00:24:55 - none of you care about right to reply
00:25:03 - right to reply: exhibit 1
00:25:30 - right to reply: exhibit 2
00:26:23 - right to reply: exhibit 3
00:27:00 - what right to reply means to linus
00:27:22 - ranting about steve burke more
00:28:15 - how to properly handle that situation
00:30:17 - the iMac video - my personal experience with linus’ manipulation
00:30:40 - Linus’ skeevy email to me
00:31:24 - Linus’ broken iMac storyline
00:31:45 - i showed up while in canada
00:31:58 - i was honest about not needing travel money when offered since i was already there
00:32:39 - personality traits of a narcissist
00:33:05 - my email reply to linus I’m 99% certain either jessa or anna wrote after stealing my keyboard & deleting a page of curse words
00:33:30 - the cost ratio of the board to the video income makes this ridiculous
00:35:15 - imagine if I pulled this on steve burke
00:36:34 - imagine if I pulled this on paul daniels
00:36:41 - deference to the king, paul daniels
00:38:40 - Linus weaponized a joke 16 months later
00:39:29 - I am not a Linus Media Group shareholder
00:40:27 - businesses have loss leaders
00:40:55 - loss leaders are the responsibility of the business owner
00:42:10 - this is wrestling. it’s not real
00:43:05 - my back and forth
00:44:23 - I can’t behave like this to other content creators
00:45:03 - Linus trust me bro warranty thing
00:45:34 - A lost opportunity due to Linus’ narcissism
00:46:00 - warranties are being eroded every year
00:46:33 - business owners that know it’s not about them just make a warranty without throwing a fit
00:47:01 - linus made it about him
00:47:08 - linus monetized making fun of people who cared about consumer rights
00:47:14 - linus pits factions of his audience against each other, all to protect his fragile ego, at the expense of an opportunity to bring people together on consumer rights
00:47:50 - does linus run his business on trust me bro?
00:48:10 - does LMG trust you bro to have discussions on your pay with coworkers?
00:48:27 - does LMG trust you bro to not start their own youtube channels?
00:48:45 - The missed opportunity
00:50:08 - The right way to treat employees
00:50:30 - What my employees did for me
00:51:05 - Linus sends text message to the wrong phone
00:52:48 - Linus portrays steve as callous while sending msg to wrong phone
00:54:05 - we don’t want to be like you
00:54:47 - My question to Linus
00:55:26 - the problem w/ people like Louis & Linus
00:56:27 - Nobody checks us, at our level
00:57:12 - Addressing people with similar experience
00:59:18 - someone else has had your experience
00:59:40 - i realize i am privileged in not having anything to lose
01:00:00 - your products will continue to sell
01:01:48 - a greenie for clinton
There actually is a case that the scam affected the users. One of the selling points of Honey’s partnership programs with sellers (not content creators, but actual store fronts) was that you could top out the maximum savings honey could “find” so you might have a 20% coupon but honey can promise to find only 15%.
That’s a recent revelation.
LTT has publicly dropped sponsors before for consumer-facing issues, like with EUFY webcams. They also do secret shopping and other stuff with their sponsors, and are very willing to criticize them when they come up short on customer-facing issues.
TBut they dropped Honey for how they treated affiliates. That’s a business-to-business dispute having nothing to do with the product itself. If you publicly burn a former sponsor over a backend financial dispute while the customer-facing side is unchanged, you’re being unprofessional and will have trouble attracting future sponsors.
Yes and this is the new recent discovery nobody knew about that part previously. So LTT could not have warned people as they didn’t know.
Okay fine I retract my original statement.
No don‘t. That honey is also scamming users, not just creators wasn’t known until very recently. When LTT dropped honey as sponsor they did so only based on the information that honey was scamming creators.
This. And that’s if it finds a coipon at all.
When LTT dropped honey that wasn’t yet known though. They dropped honey only for scamming creators out of affiliate revenue. PayPal/honey colluding with companies to reduce the number and value of the coupons offered was only uncovered very recently.
Sorry but are you thick or something? Even if they didn’t have the resources to investigate how deep the rabbit hole went (and they do), they should’ve let other creators know using the same medium they used to promote it. Instead, they decided to cover their own asses.
I‘m not saying they shouldn’t have at least mentioned it on the WAN-Show since that might’ve kept other creators from being scammed. Would have been nice. But making LTT the bad guy for this is massively overblown. If you want to be mad at them, there are plenty of better reasons.
But hell, I‘m not gonna blame ltt for being transparent about which sponsors they drop and why, because most channels do not do that. I’m also not gonna blame them for investigating further because they had no more reason to suspect any more foul play from honey than anybody else, beyond their reason for dropping them and also that’s not something ltt does at all.
LTT aren’t the bad guys here. Honey are. LTT just wasn’t the hero they could’ve been.
Nobody is comparing them to Honey. There’s also no need for there to be a single “bad guy”. They also did not mention dropping Honey in the WAN show. They did it in a forum post.
They took Honey’s money, promoted it, found out about part of the scam and then finally dropped them pretty quietly. They have a very large audience and, imo, that gives you the responsibility to not promote crappy products or services. You should let that audience inow if you mistakenly did do that. The only possible reason not to make a video about this is being afraid of scaring other sponsors.
Talking about other sponsors, they went from Honey to Karma which does pretty much the same thing. Both in functionality and scamming practices. So yeah, there’s that too.