this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
387 points (92.7% liked)

PC Master Race

14946 readers
1 users here now

A community for PC Master Race.

Rules:

  1. No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
  2. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No NSFW content.
  4. No Ads / Spamming.
  5. Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.

Notes:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cybervseas@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Do you think LTT can invest in one laptop company and still review theirs and others' laptops? I don't know the right answer - I'm interested in your perspective.

[–] AtomicPurple@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Hard to say. Linus has always made it sound like his investment in Framework is a personal one, not one made by LMG. If that's the case, then I think any potential issues could be largely sidestepped by just having someone else do all the laptop reviews.

If that's not the case and LMG is directly involved with Framework, then it gets a bit tricky. To their credit, they've done a good job of disclosing the Framework investment whenever the company is brought up, but I don't watch most of LTT's review content, so I'm not sure if it's being mentioned in the context of other laptop reviews. If not, it needs to be.
The whole point of having that kind of disclosure though is so people know that the information being presented is potentially biased. At a certain point, it's on the audience to take that bias into account and cross reference other sources before making any purchasing decisions. I'm not sure there's anything LMG can really do to alleviate the perceived conflict of interest, unless they just stop reviewing laptops altogether. Whether or not it's ethical to continue reviewing laptops in that context, even with a full disclosure, is a question I don't have a good answer to.

[–] cybervseas@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If Linus and his wife own 100% (or nearly 100%) of LMG, does it matter who invested in Framework? Especially when he has so much creative control?

As far as I remember, they do not disclose the Framework investment when reviewing other laptops.

Thank you, I appreciate your candor. You've given me some things to think about.

[–] CRT@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as I remember, they do not disclose the Framework investment when reviewing other laptops.

When Linus is hosting a laptop review he always has a disclaimer about being a Framework investor. I'm not sure about videos hosted by others because it's been a while since I've watched one but I don't think they do since it was a personal investment.

[–] KluEvo@wirebase.org 2 points 1 year ago

Every video about a laptop I've seen since he invested has had the framework disclaimer, including multiple shortcircuits by Alex.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)