And when GN responded to all the sniping over the months… LMG came out ahead. Rossman is a manipulative libertarian prick, but he really nailed it with Linus exhibiting all the signs of being a gaslighting abuser. And… it works.

Because the general consensus, outside of their subreddits (although even in GN’s…) was that Steve was in the wrong for responding to all the “some people are out to get us” style sniping and should just let the “drama” drop. And then LMG immediately pivoted to “Dude, just let it go. We improved our practices and are better for it. Maybe you should too. Oh, and if anyone mentions Madison’s name we’ll sue the fuck out of them”. And it worked.

If only because LMG is an order of magnitude larger (17M versus 2.5M subscribers) and most people likely never even heard GN’s arguments on why not lying about your testing to support corporate sponsors/interests is bad. They instead just see some guy “whining” (and probably get fed a lot of sock puppets from the companies GN has burned bridges with…) and move on.

LMG is nowhere near as untouchable as they used to be. But they are still probably the single biggest influencer in the PC/“tech” space. And… just look at this thread for the people who, with a straight face, are talking about how Framework will be their saviour from some nebulous threat.