[arrakeenrevived]

His spiel starting at 14 minutes in about how seemingly every tech product these days is a partially-baked, unfinished, barely even usable, yet full-priced product with a vague promise of "it'll receive updates and be better" rings very true, and is frustrating as hell.

Marques specifically mentions it happening in video games, cars (Tesla self-driving), smartphones, and these AI things as particular offenders. I've also seen it with SaaS. Even a lot of the things being released by the big cloud providers at their yearly conferences are mostly in some half-baked state.

We've taken the concept of a "minimum viable product" and turned it into "minimum hype-able product". It sucks.

[saltsaman]

It's his core philosophy:

"Never. Ever. Buy a tech product based on the promise of future software updates."

https://x.com/MKBHD/status/1383616274693951494

[miragecraft]

Similarly, promise of future plugins from “the community”.

[windexh8er]

It's unfortunate that the only reason this problem exists is because people buy into the marketing. But the amazingly ironic part about this is that MKBHD / Marques Brownlee has hocked this type of garbage (aka sponsorships) for years, propping up a lot of this bad behavior along the way. Personalities like him are "celebrities" from a lot of consumer's perspectives, and they trust what he says verbatim. From an objective stance his reviews are lackluster: they contain very little data and no fundamental framework that underscore his "reviews". He's a YouTuber with an opinion that is being influenced by sponsor marketing money. Yet his well crafted productions are pretty and easy to consume, which sells and Google puts it front and center. To say that he has a "core philosophy" is laughable. The entertainment I would watch is if people like him had to disclose all earned income along with these videos. I'd gather a lot of his loyal following would start putting those dollars to sense with respect to how his videos are positioned: call-out, hype generating, brand supremacy, etc...

[m463]

You're not the target market.

I've seen interesting products, and either been curious or ready to buy. Unfortunately, the only available information to me is the marketing.

Seriously, look on amazon. You can see pictures of the product, read the description, and read the reviews. this leads to 2/3 of the information being by the marketing team, and quite possibly much of the final 1/3, the reviews.

Being able to view a video of the product by someone (anyone!) on youtube gives you a chance of critical information you need for a decision.

Who cares if he's lackluster. If he even in passing gives you an idea of what the product might actually be like, you've been helped.

By the way, even consumer reports, formerly the gold standard in unbiased reviews is part of the gravy train. When they switched from the magazine to online, they acted like a funnel to purchases. sigh.

[imtringued]

If you actually watched his videos you would have seen the one where he actively calls out that a lot of his viewers aren't interested in the product at all and just want to see another high production value video from him just to kill time, with no intention of ever buying anything.

"The entertainment you would watch" would probably amount to nothing and you probably wouldn't even finish the video, because it would be too boring.

[windexh8er]

I'm not sure why I would want to watch his videos if he's basically telling people that he's an entertainer - and that he caters to that. I see why he would do that, but that seems to bolster my assertion that his focus is on production, not review.

[Apocryphon]

Most review videos are entertainment- and that includes accounts that focus on performance and include metrics, too. The medium makes the message. Been that way since Will it Blend?

[jinushaun]

Tell me you’ve never seen a MKBHD video without saying you’ve never seen a MKBHD video. He’s probably the best tech reviewer on YouTube. I definitely trust him more than other reviewers who do it for the clicks/lols.

[satvikpendem]

> He’s probably the best tech reviewer on YouTube

He doesn't hold a candle to people like Dave2D or Hardware Unboxed, the latter of which has extremely thorough testing for every single one of the products they review. MKBHD is often inaccurate about many things and certainly not exhaustive in his reviews like other reviewers are. His channel can be better classified as infotainment, much like Unbox Therapy and (for certain of their videos) Linus Tech Tips are.

[windexh8er]

He doesn't do it for the clicks? I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but I'm going to assume it's not - because if this is truly your perspective I'd implore you to install a few extensions that help weed out what YouTube knows you'll watch. Clearly the algorithms are working.

To sum this one up:

Tell me you can't tell the difference between an influencer and a reviewer without telling me you can't tell the difference between an influencer and a reviewer. The bar is really low with respect to quality (not production, but content) these days.

[Moomoomoo309]

You really should watch some of his videos if you think this. Marques has been doing this for years at this point, he's a reviewer, not an influencer. The clickbait titles is purely a YouTube thing, that is only indicative of the video being on YT, unfortunately.

[windexh8er]

I don't believe we share the same barrier to entry for objectivity, is really what it comes down to. He's sponsored, he's an influencer.

From a recent article [0]: "The 30-year-old YouTube kingpin makes money from sponsorship deals with brands, merchandise sales, and a whole lot of ad revenue from YouTube."

Where do you draw the line between his format and his sponsorships? And how do you know that he's "reviewing" without monetary bias? As an example he put out this [1] video with Buick a few years ago. Let's try to be honest for a second - he wouldn't be caught dead driving that car unless Buick paid him to. And that is my point. There's no boundary between his "reviews" and his "ads". They look, they feel and they are the same format. He's excited about this Buick, "reviewing" it on his channel, it does say that it's sponsored, but is it his actual opinion? Very doubtful. And that, right there, is the difference between a reviewer and an influencer. Is he a charlatan? Maybe not quite that far - but he is being dishonest by making the sponsor video in, basically, the same format as anything else he does. Does he have relevant points? Sure - but there are other reviewers that have much deeper knowledge of the reviewed product. Case in point is his car reviews - he's not a true car enthusiast. His car "review" videos clearly reflect that when you compare it to someone who knows the car market in-depth (there are a lot of great car reviewers on YouTube, MKBHD isn't one of them). Is it good enough? For most people, probably. But again - I don't trust anyone to do a full spot on a car that's not even close to being on his want-to-have list and then expect him to be unbiased when "reviewing" a competitor. He puts out ads for his own brand, and anyone willing to pay him. He's an influencer. And now, he's hocking wallets that are $125+ [2][3].

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/02/22/marques-brownlee-youtube-at-a... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfC8Y66tR6o [2] https://ridge.com/collections/mkbhd [3] https://ridge.com/pages/mkbhd-announcement

[praisewhitey]

Which sponsorships are you referring to? I'm only aware of his deal with d-brand, and those products work as advertised.

[__loam]

I think the mindset is like, we've done a bunch of development, let's sell it to deliver some value now rather than wait for it to be perfect. It makes sense from that agile manifesto perspective but I miss the days of buying something like a game boy advance cartridge that ships once and mostly just works.

[charlie0]

I'm seeing this play out at my workplace. Going down the wrong path just because we couldn't add an extra week to think things through and go down the right path from the beginning.

[__loam]

Time to think is unfortunately a luxury.

[charlie0]

The trap here is thinking that starting fast is also the way to reach the goal the fastest. That doesn't always work and is especially true the more complex a project is.

[shostack]

The problem is with the lack of transparency and expectation setting. If you sell something with lots of hype and then deliver half of it, you've failed.

[bane]

The product owner in a company should be defining success for the development goals in agile, not beta tested on the paying public.

[tazu]

I agree. I wonder if the AI-aspect muddled things, like engineers saying "we just need more data for <x feature>, let's push for a cheap product and iterate fast"...

[esafak]

That only works if you are doing something unique enough to ignore its imperfections, otherwise people will use a full-featured competitor. The alternative to the Rabbit is your phone, I suppose.

[cjk2]

I laughed at the big cloud providers comment because my job these days is filing support tickets with AWS when their ancillary services don’t work properly for some reason.

While I don’t think maturity has improved or got worse really, considering the general state of things 20 years ago, it should have by now.

As someone who likes to solve a problem rather than create two new ones, I will always go for a mature solution these days.

[hysan]

I love this rant of his. This trend towards selling unfinished products at full price is corporations exploiting yet another lever to squeeze more money out of people. And that lever is to treat customers not as customers but as investors. Whenever you purchase an unfinished product on the promise of a more complete product in the future, you are taking on the risk that that future product will not be delivered. You are being used as leverage and even worse, you receive no share of profit for any future success because you’ve already paid full price. You are an interest free loan that does not need to be paid back! I wish that more influential people would call this practice out for what it is and try to stop people from being exploited in this manner.

[Hock88sdx]

Solarcity, FSD and Cybertruck helped propelled Elon to world richest billionaire. Hype is good!