Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups.
1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.
2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
3. Building value > making money
4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.
The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.
I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.
I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy.
That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture.
And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience.
How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.
What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.
That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not).
And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
I read the entire PDF and I felt he was pretty spot on about works and what doesn't in running a business.
This is Hacker News, ostensibly created as a website for hackers and founders.
If you are a hacker and a founder then a ton of this advice is spot on.
For example it's a simple concept but he absolutely nails a key factor by distinguishing between A, B and C employees. A high performing team really can't have more than one or two C's. It moves them out even if they're nice, cool, good people. If the team is run by good humans it does what Mr. Beast does and gives them severance.
I can smell a couple C employees fuming on here and in the Twitter thread. I've had C employees work for me and they were always the ones who lobbied me hardest for being more tolerant of mediocrity. Sorry but you just have to hold the line against the average if you want to succeed, this is dictionary definition level of obvious. To be above average, you have to be above freaking average. Half the world is C's and to win your team needs to not be in that half.
Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.
Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.
And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.
--
[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial.
See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.
I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:
> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.
My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.
The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane
Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.
To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home.
To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.
Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work.
That’s one of the most interesting parts of this document. Many people will read it and think “I would never work at a place like that,” and many others would think “that’s exactly the environment I want to work in!”
More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
Lots of people make youtube videos for fun. Work can be fun to the point where it's what you want to do. Not what you have to do.
If you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. If I wasn't employed as a software dev then I would still be writing code on a daily basis.
Lol. Hustle shops pay less and there are more hours. It is not exploitation, but usually there are better gigs. Finance is probably an exception where you know those long hours will be rewarded one day either in the current gig or another future one.
The important thing (not mentioned in the document) is how much he pays them. That determines whether "wanting them to get rich" is real or not.
Once I worked in a small software company, and the boss kept telling us "if the company grows, we will get more money, and we will all get rich". Young and naive, we worked hard. When the company grew, he... hired more developers. Well, of course. That is obviously much more profitable than increasing the salary of the existing developers. At the end, he was the only person who got rich. Why did we ever think it would end up differently? I guess, because we were young and naive, and also because he told us so.
Being older and more cynical, if you want me to get rich, pay me. (Or make me a partner in business.) Otherwise, five or ten years later, when the company gets big and I will probably be burned out, you will have no incentive to waste money on the burned out guy, when the alternative is to hire someone fresh.
> Why did we ever think it would end up differently?
Because it has worked, countless times. Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc were all small software companies once, the current hotness is NVIDIA (ok hardware, not software). Obviously it doesn't happen often, or to a high percentage of startups, but hey, he wasn't lying to you, you took the job knowing the deal.
I appreciate it for being honest tbh, 99% of job hunting in the IT field is filtering out the bullshit, or the greenwashing that what a company does is Good, Actually.
Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer? Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi? Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.
But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and external) is about reducing energy usage, their green energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the price is lowest.
You don’t understand the model. Residential customers pay most of the fees upfront as hook up fees monthly. You could use 0 energy in many areas and you would still pay almost the same amount.
> How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market?
You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.
How does that align with Dan Luu’s article “95th percentile isn’t that good”[1] and the general observation so many of us have that the companies we work for and interact with and buy from are executing so badly on so many fronts?
That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.
If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc.
Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).
> "Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc."
and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?
If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?
You might be stretching Dan Luu's essay a bit far. It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection of it was him saying the 95th percentile in an arbitrary hobby, say amateurs playing competitive esports (e.g. Overwatch), and that if you put even a small amount of time into deliberate practice, you would be better than 95th percentile player in Overwatch. I didn't get the sense Dan Luu was extrapolating to multi-billion dollar companies, what it would take to take the fight to them, and taking their market share.
Yep, 1,000,000%, yep, can't +1 this enough, saw it at another big tech myself, had friends who saw it happen at Google. The companies that were going from nothing to dominance were so different from the companies that rest today on their monopoly laurels. To go from not successful to successful there were all these insanely smart people pulling 80 hour weeks and all the work life balance stuff came later. Unreasonably hard work doesn't guarantee success but it's always a component of massive success. Mr. Beast is not making this shit up and if you're not down for this you are one of his C employees which is fine, you can be a nice and valuable human in other ways, but those companies who want to go big are not for you. Starting a company, certainly a VC fueled one probably is not either.
The goal is achieved. The founders are rich and fulfilled (and probably exhausted), early star employees have mostly cashed out. This is not at all surprising or hard to figure out. Larry Page tried to establish a corporate structure that would sustain innovation (Google -> Alphabet) but they were never able to recreate what they had in search.
It makes sense because regulatory capture has become such a large part of how dominant American firms maintain their position. They don't maintain it through talent. They maintain it by breaking the law. Google's now been found guilty of antitrust violations in two markets and a case about a third just kicked off. And of course this is not just in tech, take a look at the cases against the Kroger/Albertson's merger or Ticketmaster.
The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.
It aligns, because 95th percentile isn't that good. It's right there in the title.
Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.
The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.
Because of switching costs. If you start a new thing this is definitely the case. It’s often said that a new product (startup), can’t be a marginal improvement; it needs to be 10x better. 95 percentile is not 10x
At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?
If you're hiring junior people then sure. In Mr Beast's interview with Lex Fridman, he says he actually prefers hiring people from outside the entertainment industry because those folks really want to do what they did before, how they did it before, and not the Mr Beast way. Reading between the lines, I think he ends up hiring a lot of junior people because they're not set in their ways. Also probably they'll work long hours because they're just getting their start.
Makes sense. Training juniors is a thing and maybe this document is also speaking to how at least it's working there.
Past film and tv folks I know have a hard time just diving in and doing it because they're so used to the processes they've had before. Not all are like this, and the ones that aren't, have a huge advantage over juniors with the open mind and experience to boot.
Even the digital side of shooting with a high end phone and editing well enough with tools still seems to not convince them.
On the other side, the OBS crowd, and youtubers are year by year improving their production skills and some of it's kind of starting to look pretty high quality.
Youtube will have no problem if it wants becoming the universal cable network with an obscure channel for pretty much everything that is very decent quality.
I've also heard this exact same thing from my employer who hired ke straight out or college. Most of the company was comprised of young people. My boss, who was C level told me young people are easier to mold and now that I'm older I 100% agree with that. It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.
>It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.
How do you know they are 'good habits'. I have seen countless years of bad practices lauded internally as amazing/the etalon weight when it comes to code quality. In reality most of them were textbook examples of what should not be done. When you get folks without any previous experience, there's no one to question the status or the authority. If they learn/wisen up, they are likely to leave.
Recent grads tend to be more evidence-oriented than people with experience, IME. They'll e.g. benchmark something to see whether it's faster rather than going by reputation alone.
Hmm - that's quite nice/reassuring, although not my experience. Benchmarking, OTOH, is notoriously hard, esp. the microbenchmark type. The old: lies, damn lies, statistics, (micro)benchmarks.
It's the best company I've ever worked at so far. The fact that mostly everyone was in their 20s to early 30s meant we had an awesome cohesive culture.
Note I said mostly. Of course there were older people, but they were in their 40s and early 50s. They were few and far between, and they were the "adults" in the room when needed. It worked really well.
In our 20s we might not know better, follow others and end up letting the current take us where it may.
Sometimes when I meet an 18 year old I wonder how they are having experiences where they are growing or the rate of growing is slowing much quicker than someone who was on the early internet.
If you can stay young and build discipline in all ages it works as you are saying.
It’s less about being the adult in the room as much as supporting people to grow and become those people they are seeking.
Sure, at an individual level age might not matter much. But taken in aggregate, age means a lot in the context of company culture building. Take any average 24 year old and see how much they have in common with a 34 year old or 40 year old. Let's not pretend life doesn't change over time and hand wave it with a nice platitude.
But how do you know what's good, and what's bad without a diversity of experience under one's belt? You could be working at a cult, or the greatest company ever. What Mr Beast does works for Mr. Beast. Same for your employer.
A lot of people here (and in tech in general) are conflating "being efficient" with "having success"...
that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency
but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"
I don't think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal.
Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success.
So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".
No it can't, economic success is completely linked with morality when your success is linked to producing tons of CO2, which is going to put our planet, and in particular poorer people, in the shitters
Not entirely true - bad things can be measured. Harm exists and has a value. The value, in this case if you wanted to derive, would be the amount of money consumers spent on random advertised things.
Sure it would be hard to measure - but you could argue that money is money consumers lost as a result of Mr Beast (or maybe YouTube as a whole).
For example, looking to the tobacco industry: they were incredibly economically successful because they leveraged the weaknesses of the human brain to sell their product, namely nicotine addiction. This is now largely considered immoral, but let's look past that.
We can still measure the badness, or harm, of the tobacco industry objectively. We see how much money was/is spent on cancer treatment, COPD treatment, etc. These analysis have been done before and it's pretty damning, billions of dollars. In some cases, the cost of tobacco straight up exceeds the profit. Meaning, from a communal economic standpoint, they are a net-negative. Yes, it's true, tobacco, while wildly popular, is economically in the red.
Of course, we live in a staunchly capitalistic, individualistic society. Communal economic cost/benefit is almost never looked at. Which is why we had the problems with the tobacco industry, and why the obesity epidemic grows. Mr Beast videos are not of this scale, but I would argue they are of this nature.
> but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"
That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.
Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.
If people were actively paying for the content, and thus "accepting to be endoctrinated" why not, although I think that all kind of entreprise with such a handbook of "how to make people basically addicted to the shit we build" is bad
People are losing communities, people are losing attention span, and this is because we make people addict to shit like this
And then idiot like Trump manage to take power
We need a society with longer pauses, reflexion, empathy
It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in.
Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.
Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.
It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good.
The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.
Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.
Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.
Of course now you have a function which isn't non-optimally performed, it's now not being performed at all. Because you're probably "running lean" so actually you have no redundancy for that function.
And then there's the sociological effect of course: are you even any good at identifying poor performers, does the team view it that way? You can be one employee departure away from an exodus since someone being laid off is usually a good sign for everyone else to reconsider how they feel about their position. Bad management is pretty good at generating a never-ending stream of "underperforming employees".
Like let's state the obvious here: you're looking back the 7 prior companies you worked for. Are the people you thought should be fired still there? Are they still turning up every day and doing something? Because in that context, whatever their fault, they are a more reliable resource to the company then you were (this isn't judgment: my resume is long too).
The major problem I see is: focusing on an individual, when it's the team that needs to be A-level. You can't just throw a bunch of A-players together and expect an A-team.
Expecting your workers to never make the same mistake twice is extremely harsh and only works if you are comfortable with a lot of volatility in team structure & in an employer's market.
I’ve seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having a choice. Usually it is because either:
- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)
- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability
- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.
Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.
It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said "A players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players". That was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will hire C players - and so on.
That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.
Absolutely. A part of that would have been Steve's legendary ability to convince folks to make the move to Apple even when they had options that looked better at the time. Another part was seeing the potential of those already in the company, another part was just dumb luck.
I believe Job's was providing this perspective more in the late 2000's after he had been through the whole Apple exile/Next thing.
Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A compensation.
And a lot of A players are unique snowflakes so they have to be compatible with other unique snowflakes so it can be hard to fill the gaps. You need a few Bs who are moldable to fill gaps
>I always love the "just hire A-players" line.
As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.
If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.
If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.
>And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.
He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.
It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.
Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.
Yeah most places can’t comp 2 Std deviation candidates. Either in pay or experience. Beast could because he’s got the top company in the market that makes it cheap to hire talent.
> I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business
I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.
So if he doesn't micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do?
It's not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no "Here's my past experience". None of that matters at his level of success.
There’s a difference between writing down that you hire A-players in a document, and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles
I read the entire document and I don't understand where you saw bad culture or micromanaging.
Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that's a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.
> Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.
This is a deeply naive understanding of employment.
Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture.
Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can't choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn't.
This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and productive Youtube production company. People here work incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job, seeking it out specifically.
> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all
We know this isn't true because of the necessity of unions. Mining coal and many other trades are a lot worse than cleaning toilets, and people still had to do them nearly for free.
While I do see the value in unions in some settings, this is not a job of necessity. This is a job for people that wish to self actualize and not settle for anything less than their dream job. Wouldn't creating a union for Mr. Beast employees is akin to saying something like "I want to have my dream job but I want it to be easy"? I don't think that the analogy to mining coal holds.
That's not a value judgement on my part, just a conclusion from decades of declining union membership, with no correlating uptick in starvation or massive reduction in wages.
(You may argue for wage stagnation, and you may attribute that to declining unionism, but that is not a collapse in wages!)
The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.
> micromanaging
He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.
I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).
Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.
I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.
I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.
> Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.
I personally think (and I think the prevailing sentiment is) that giving early employees equity is crucial. There is no way I would do any work for an early stage startup (or, in general, if I can help it) with no stake in the company.
In bigger companies, it's a zero sum game. They don't really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.
> 4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)
Just like you can't argue about a lion eating a gazelle keeping the lion alive. Some people think it's gross but the lion is alive and ready to hunt again.
> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.
Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering.
EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there's little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.
And as all the past 2 months show, you don't get to this level of success without exploiting, if not outright abusing, your labor.
>I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders.
Id bet so too. Becuase he's definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data.
> Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
It really depends on your stage of scale. You don't need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.
I mean, there is also just hardcore survivorship bias at work here.
How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic / network capture?
You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content.
I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.
>2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
I love coming on here and seeing the world's wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as "only hire good workers; don't hire bad workers"
I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions.
I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.
He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles.
Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)
> I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.
He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.
Probably by more common definitions held by people OP respects...
For example, millions of people would not call him a success because he doesn't have a family with children (although Mr beast has definitely implied he wants one in the future).
Many millions more would say that he's not a success because he doesn't do anything that's a net positive for society, instead he's mostly a drain on people's time and mental capacity.
People DO make up their definitions, and put together they create a communities standards of success and then eventually a societies.
Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value? Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old? Then dies suddenly alone, only for everyone that met him to chuckle and move on with their day?
Would that be a success by most people's standards? Does it even matter if it's a success by one person's standards? Are the school shooters a success because they accomplish their goals before death?
> Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value?
If you accept a job that’s your market value. If you think you’re worth more, get a higher paying job. Or don’t and pretend that you were squeezed into working for under market value.
The guy employed people for 40 years. Not the worst thing in the world.
Not everybody values the same stuff. Some people like what other people call work. Some people don’t need friends.
> Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old?
If at 20 years old he said his goal was to accumulate 3x the capital before he dies, then I couldn’t argue that by his definition of success, he succeeded.
Hopefully he doesn’t care if I think he’s a success.
> Then dies suddenly alone
We all die suddenly and alone. We’re alive and then we’re dead. Nobody comes with us.
> Would that be a success by most people's standards?
> If no one cared what other people thought, why are we even talking on here.
We hate ourselves and have nothing better to do?
> Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?
I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back quite so hard for finding this attempt at a clever gotcha. I thought by ignoring it you’d get the message that it wasn’t as good as you thought it was.
But nevertheless, I would say that they were successful in reaching their goals but that I find their goals and actions abhorrent. I don’t feel the need to add that final qualification to MrBeast’s goals and actions.
It wasn't a clever gotcha, and I wasn't patting myself on the back.
I just found it odd that you went through and systematically addressed every section of my post, but that one.
It was taking what in my opinion is a lame point of view, to an extreme, in hopes of helping someone see that it fails at the extremes... Thus maybe you'll think about it and agree with me that in reality someone's own goals and views of themselves don't matter that much because as a whole we as a society have views on what makes a life worth living and what adds value to society.
And yes I think MrBeast systemizing making mindless brain numbing stupid videos for teenagers and kids to be pretty bad for society. I don't care that be produces revenue doing so.
Just don't be naive and think that societal standards don't exist. And also, possibly give some thought as to why they exist so that you don't go down insane spirals and waste your life only to later understand that the collective had a point.
You're really dense. I'm not saying you should live your life how others want you to live it.
I'm saying you should examine why people set the standards they do and check if you agree with those values.
If you want to say "hell be with it, I'll be scum til I die because it makes me feel good" then more power to you. But don't go around saying you're successful. You're a rebel and a loser by most people's standards. Not by all. Even school shooters are respected by SOME for their bravery and determination.
There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.
By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.
You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.
There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast.
They got beat out by Salesforce...
We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.
A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.
But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.
For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.
> We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things.
Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room. However, it's very well known (empirically) that they won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.
Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled. People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.
Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically want.
I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few reasons.
One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it. This is the same game that consumer packaged goods companies play with apparent package size. Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I booked a flight, about half the plane was first class, business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't, it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive airlines have gotten.
I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.
Google Flights shows the leg room in inches, and there's several sites that you can research it on.
However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.
> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.
Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.
So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.
> jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point it's caused strain in my personal life.
I agree with your overall assessment that people will (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means, like 6' is not that tall.
I'm 6'5". To be clear I do always try for an extra legroom seat unless it's like 1 or maybe 2 hours tops. I don't go out of my way to pick jetBlue, so the "everyone gets legroom" thing isn't a real competitive advantage. I just consolidate my flying with a carrier and with even the lowest status tiers you generally get free extra legroom seating. Not giving everyone extra legroom seats means they can lower the sticker price and reward frequent fliers. The short people don't get nearly as much benefit from the extra leg room and don't value the seat as much so higher density means lower prices for everyone.
When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough to move the needle for me.
IMO it's very costly to compare legroom and is often obscured and switched up. Also people might use 'legroom' to also mean more expansive things like shoulder width of their seat, and that is definately not something you can buy with economy plus. Seat width has shrunk several inches and is universally reduced on all airline by now. To get back to 18/19" seat width, you have to pay double or triple, which seems absurd for a 12% to 20% increase in width.
i think the Jetblue thing is historically true but not anymore.
The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required ratio of persons per flight attendant.
You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.
Well the other thing is paying for luggage. No-one wants to pay for luggage. But if luggage is free, it means that everyone with no/small luggage is just subsidizing those with luggage.
Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).
But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work.
As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM?
They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole.
It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)
>why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM
well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument.
the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input.
the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM
Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce?
Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?
You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same.
And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners).
>And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me?
I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion."
So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.
The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough.
Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)
The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.
> [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.
1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out).
2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.
I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact.
We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.
Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.
This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics
Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
> The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them.
low quality consumption doesn't have an age range. Sometimes you just want to watch a cozy cat video, so I get it.
>We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
that sounds horrible for multiple reasons that could be a post in and of itself. I'll just point out the obvious one from the post itself:
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
If the algorithm shifts, they will shift and I'm sure something goodhearted like "make the best educational videos" will find some loophole to slip in clickbait or any other engagement metric.
Ultimately, let me curate my own filters. I can't save everyone else but let me make sure I never see that stuff if I don' want to.
Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.
Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
Real estate agencies? Most middleman in general have a shakey premise for if they "benefit" their customers.
On a less subjectve level, I feel the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality runs counter to this ideal. the FAANGs did indeed render benefit to its customers early on. You can argue by now almost all of them 20 years later have long shifted towards being gatekeepers that employ dark patterns or outright rent seek these days, rather than acting like a customer-focused company.
Are you suggesting casino and bookmakers' clients derive no utility at all from gambling? In the absence of any enjoyment or other benefit, who forces the clients to participate?
Same argument can be made for tobacco salesmen, drug dealers etc. If people pay money for something then they MUST derive some benefit from it... I find that assumption questionable.
Other things I could mention: multi-level marketing, snake oil sellers e.g. homeopathy astrology etc.
I find the assumption that every casino and gambling company in existence provides no benefit, of any kind, to any of their customers....extremely questionable.
In MrBeast's case, his revenue is directly correlated with customer engagement via YouTube's algorithm. I'm sure that were it legal, gladiatorial combat would be very popular and profitable on YouTube. I suppose one could make an argument that it would therefore "beneficial".
In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.
> No one prospers without rendering benefit to others
Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians, grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...
Our lives are made up of and guided by narratives that sound good and just on paper, but are empirically proven wrong time and time again. Yet they persist.
Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal, biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor, who did not take the time to look at the percentage of researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.
Almost all of his examples are/were failures, by all metrics.
Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.
None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.
edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.
nit: you can indeed know a pinto would blow up before it blows up. But you go to your city square and get laughed at because they trust Ford over some car mechanic who looked deeply into the car.
Of course, I'm describing a literal forum here (physical forums! good times). I wonder how many whistleblowers out there highlighted some dark pattern in the past 20 years and were cast off as a conspiracy nut. Both publicly and in internal company channels.
nit2: it's so strange how times have changed. 40-50 years ago his Pinto recall was company ending. Nowadays the Cybertruck has had what? 5 recalls now? And it still has this bizarre cult behind it. What happened to people? what happened to wanting a driveable car (nevermind those truck minded audiences the cybertruck targets who claims to do more than just drive)?
Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.
> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.
That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.
You're right about 4 and maybe 2. But #3 is pretty much by biggest one of my top 3 fears in a car. Stuck accelerator or non-working breaks. I was already cast off before hand but I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.
Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?
> not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc?
The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.
The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).
You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
I think something that companies often miss is that improving the experience in an area where you have a monopoly can still increase profits by encouraging increased usage of that area.
The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.
After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.
U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.
Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.
U-haul is one of the shittiest experiences possible. Right there with calling comcast and going to the dmv. Compare that to truck rental from Lowe’s or Home Depot that’s actually probably more expensive but way more pleasant.
Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.
Not copiers, but the ice cream machines in mcdonalds resturants were kept unreliable because mcdonalds made money on the constant repairs. It didn't matter to them that the franchisee was losing money. When 3rd party companies jumped in to fix the machines the manufacturer and mcdonalds acted to stop that happening. There was a court case brought by the third party companies, which they recently lost.
Hey, as long as it's readable, I don't care. I just wanted to note that I quoted you verbatim, not judge you because you pressed letter "e" twice instead of once in an internet forum. :)
In my experience, people very rarely use [sic] when quoting on internet forums - readers will assume any quote was copied and pasted; and the quoted text is directly above yours.
Sometimes people edit their comments after they realize their mistakes; grammar, spelling or otherwise. I use [sic] to denote that "it was like that when I copied it". It's probably from my "old internet" days (/., local forums, etc.).
>- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.
Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.
While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.
You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.
A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
> - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
Mine doesn't seem to have any problem with batteries. Just "airways blocked" error no matter what I do and the warranty/support service isn't very helpful. So I'm looking for a similar-or-better quality clone (cordless vacuum with the laser thing) but with better service.
Not to stan for Dyson, but they're not a vacuum-cleaner company, they're a fire-prevention company. Every decisionmaking process they undertake is going to have that at the top of the list. They don't want a lot of batteries in the field that are being stretched to the limits of their operating lives.
Of course, the company's best response to that concern would be to make the batteries easily replaceable, including by third-party products. But that's where job #2 comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson sooner rather than later.
Riccar, Miele, SEBO. Brands you may not have heard of (I know I hadn't). Highly recommend a visit to your local vacuum repair store. Talk to the guy who's job is fixing all the shitty stick vacs.
I swapped to Shark and haven't looked back. Current one takes an absolute beating (masses of dog hair, kids mess, countryside dirt walked into the house etc. etc.) and still performs perfectly after 3+ years of almost daily (ab-)use
I went down the vacuum rabbit hole a few years ago. I decided on Sebo. These are more or less big ugly machines with a cord, but you can buy every part online no matter how small (screws, gaskets,etc) or big (motors, control boards, etc).
Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things, MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.
What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.
I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.
The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing things to happen.
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it.
Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
The most secure company is, of course, the company that doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most effective way to keep it secure.
Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly".
Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.
There is a natural tension between these equally important roles, especially when folks choose to view competing objectives as a zero sum game. I think your point of view is one-sided.
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
>For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce.
I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to potentially psychologically torment himself for his channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.
(I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants as well. But either way, I think this particular criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)
IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of the game shows. That's definitely unethical.
Maybe those sure, but I guess I'm more talking about the corporate IT or legal department setting who are just worried about some micro service having some weird vulnerability or something.
> locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).
there is nuance to all things and that nuance is what GP is getting at.
What you say is also valid but in between, is a lot of grey. For example, should the federal government in your country issue standardised IDs to citizens? A lawyer may point to privacy regulations and say no but there are lots of benefits. If a workaround exists, should we simply ignore those benefits?
Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.
His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic, useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is about on the same level as any number of classic novels (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister). Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the people involved, as they're thrown into complex social situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.
I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.
Notably, many of them are similar formats that you'd find in regular TV, except the MrBeast version puts 10 minutes of content into a 12 minute video, while the TV show would put 5 minutes of content into a 45 minute episode.
What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it.
If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content
2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates.
That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something?
3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon.
What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money?
I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently.
At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.
> I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.
Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying to publish self help books for profit. By that logic, you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because you don't actually understand the causal relationship between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-faith discussion.
Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, if you're willing to look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day, he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his reputation as a healthy net positive on society. Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to his employees to prevent them from presenting serious competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart, assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his popularity for profit.
By sincerely believing the image he presents, you yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert. Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.
Not disclosing that the beneficiaries are friends and family under the guise of charity to get more views seems pretty scummy to me. In general I'm sick of the fake charity we see with influencers, including the classic "show up to a volunteer event, take pictures, and promptly leave" bit that influencers occasionally get caught doing.
>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.
Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing.
I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything:
"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster."
Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.
This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.
> The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.
In this particular example, often this isn't remotely feasible, either from a business logic standpoint (I can think of plenty of fintech examples), lack of qualified DBA/sysadmins, network admins, cloud cost constraints, methods and controls to ensure to auditors that devs cannot access production data - none of this is trivial, and often to the dev it seems "silly" they may need to wait a few hours for something they could technically access in a few minutes, but acting like these solutions have no tradeoffs or are always worth doing suggests a lack of knowledge as to how these things actually work in a business and on a development team. It certainly isn't always laziness, and I'd even say it's not laziness that often at all.
In your example, I am not saying you need to give the dev access to prod. But you should be working with the dev to figure out why he needs access to prod and figuring out what needs to happen to make the end goal happen. Getting read/write access to prod isn't the end goal, the dev is trying to accomplish something and they see direct access to prod as the solution.
My point wasn't that lawyers/security/IT/whatever shouldn't do their job. It's that their perspective should be focused on helping the company achieve whatever it's trying to do.
I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.
This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.
Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life.
This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.
It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible"
Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.
>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.
Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
> Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content.
> Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on?
> Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.
Because "lowest common denominator slop" is a culturally contextual judgement of media, and varies from place to place, time to time and culture to culture. Fine French Dining fans would call a pizza parlor "lowest common denominator slop", but no one would be offended if the employee handbook for a pizza place said "You're here to make the BEST TASTING PIZZA. Not the best looking pizza. Not a pizza made from the most expensive artesian ingredients. Not the fanciest pizza. Not a pizza lovingly hand crafted with dough that was hand massaged by virgins under the light of a full moon. If it's not making the BEST TASTING PIZZA, it's not your job."
>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.
So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.
Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles—there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other parts.
I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.
An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.
One thing I find interesting over the last few weeks since this was released (and other MrBeast drama) is how there is now a separation between MrBeast the person and MrBeast the company.
Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.
While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
Honestly I never met Jimmy even though I was in his studio for two weeks working on the video. I did meet a ton of his employees, many of whom I'd gladly work with again, just not on a MrBeast production.
I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).
The bigger the company gets, the more separate it becomes from its founder/face/whatever.
Inevitable.
(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)
> While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.
MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other people willing to give up theirs for his channel
Some things leave a permanent mark on you. Try being a workaholic a few years and tell me later how easy is to disconnect, and rejoin with familiy and friends.
Yeah, working constantly for a few years leaves permanent marks. You know what makes it better in ways we'll never have? Millions of dollars, luxury yachts, and fame. Mr. Beast isn't a doctor. He isn't a teacher. He doesn't fight our wars. He makes entertainment for children. He'll be fine.
I think parent comment was referring to employees who are willing to dig in and sacrifice a few years of their lives for MrBeast productions, not to Jimmy Donaldson (though I could be interpreting it wrong).
Giving up your life for many millions of dollar is a choice.
His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...
the audacity to ask other people to give up their life for helping you fulfil your dream and even sell it to them as them fulfilling their dream.
is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?
if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
THIS. I would like to tell you a bit of a personal story and this may shed some light on your question. Disclaimer* I am American.
I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or something, then you were expected to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday.
I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never be Elon, working for Elon".
So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started having some conversations with potential clients to launch my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed] the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."
At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton, designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was just calling on all my old associates and references of references... life was great!
Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this person, generating "Work" for different people, and i freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers, only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within the company, scaling different verticles as different companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70 hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i hated "Consulting".
but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX, Tesla update ever...
And suddenly i realised,
i deeply missed working at Tesla...
i don't want to be Elon...
But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.
So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money but i could have chilled for a bit...
but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla, fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again, i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of people.
I agree that doing meaningless work is soul crushing even if well-compensated.
It seems like it ought to be possible to do meaningful work without working 80 hour weeks, but maybe not!
And owning your own business isn't necessarily an easy 40 hours a week and don't think about it when you're not working, but sounds like you did have a lighter schedule? Or actually you didn't mention that! If you traded a 70-hour week as a well-compensated employee doing meaningful work for a 70-hour week being your own boss with possibility of making more money doing meaningless work -- yeah, I would make the same choice between those two! But I'd rather not have a 70 hour week, be reasonably compensated, and do meaningful work, if that were an option...
But we kind of forgot what we're talking about here... pretty sure nobody working for Mr Beast thinks it's meaningful work, and if they do, I'm worried about them.
How could anyone not think that entertaining literal millions of people is meaningful work? For some people, video production is their calling and having an audience is their life's dream.
I (ggp) actually don't agree, contributing proper mic boom holding to a project you find important and valuable and meaningful can be meaningful. Every contribution is meaningful.
I guess to me the crass eyeball-harvesting of MrBeast seems like exploitation of everyone involved with the only meaningfulness involved being profit. But I realize based on stickfigure's response that different people find different things meaningful, fair enough. Which is different than saying "just getting lots of money is meaningful for me" -- that is a different axis than meaning, and I'm unlikely to be swayed otherwise, although some people don't need meaning they just need money. It was hard for to imagine anyone is doing it for anything but the money at MrBeast, but different people are different and some of them are hard for me to imagine, fair!
Ever watch the Jackass movies? I know plenty of MFA-toting snobs that think it's high performance art. And I don't disagree.
I read the PDF; profit wasn't on the list of KPIs. In fact there was quite a lot of invective against it; he'll kill expensive projects just because he didn't think the quality was good enough. Of course $$ is related, but the focus really is on the eyeballs.
I worked in porn for a while. I found the work fun and meaningful. Not every mission involves saving the world.
Isn't what makes something meaningful in the eyes of the beholder? It might not be sending rockets to mars or curing cancer, but if you perceive it as meaningful, then it is.
Everyone seems to think that they have the answers to this question... Family, friends, community, god, volunteering at the local soup kitchen..
All over your own wants? If you are a video creator/ creative and that's what gives you energy and all the feel good chems, why not work your ASS off for THE CREATOR of our generation?
Cause from the way i see it, success and the confidence* it brings, solves all other issues.
*As long as you can avoid the pitfall of arrogance.
Because, in my opinion, this is a worse thing to do with your life than the many better options.
I don't have some One Right Answer to what the best thing to do with your life is, but I'm comfortable having a personal - but strong - opinion on a rough ordering that, for instance, puts family and friends much higher than a life dedicated to "THE CREATOR of our generation". Maybe you think that sounds impressive? I think it just sounds very sad.
Or, you can go work there for 1-2 years, learn a lot and move on. Maybe to some more relaxed work, or start your own venture. It actually sounds like a place where you might learn something.
Yep, to the extent that this is a sensible thing to do, this is the sensible way to do it. This is clearly analogous to working in high-pressure finance shops or in startups for a fairly short period of time in order to drink from a firehose.
The problem is that the kind of people who are ambitious enough to think this sounds like a good idea often (maybe usually) get sucked deeply into it.
But yep, I do think it's a reasonable model if you can avoid that outcome and get in and out early in your career.
Then those aren't people Jimmy wants to hire for his company. There are hundreds of millions of teenagers on this planet that want to stake everything they own to make a YouTube channel and reap the rewards - ownership of their work, being their own boss, potentially lucrative amounts of money, microcelebrity if not greater levels of fame, etc. Some will do it, and some won't. Jimmy is very clearly talking to those people.
I know because I was one of them, making my first few hundred dollars ever from adsense at the age of 14 (till I was demonetized a year later and my channel got taken down for copyright, but hey, you learn). I've since grown a bit a taken that energy and it's helped guide me as I learn to make my own startup right now - it's the same adrenaline rush and pursuit of the American dream.
It's interesting to me that you did this with YouTube, as I did the same when I was 16 (almost 20 years ago now) but with AdSense. I earned about $70 (mostly off my buddies anime site) which I never collected. Seven years later Google sends the money to my state's unclaimed fund. Even more years later I finally collect that $70 check.
Yep, I get it. This is all true. What I'm saying is that, in my opinion, it's also bad and those people (and perhaps you) ought to choose a better path. I recognize that many of them won't. There are lots of things I think people (including myself!) ought not do, which we still do anyway.
Not who you are responding to but I think it is more a case of, long term it might not work out as intended for them. They are more than free to pursue this goal with all their might, but don't be surprised if in a few years they are burnt out and scrambling for the exit.
That said, it might work out, who knows? But at some point it looks like gambling with your time and energy trying to seek fulfillment. Again, they are free to do this, just try not to harm others in the process.
even if it doesnt work, an employee was compensated for labor on mutually agreed terms & one comes out with valuable experience (and arguably a stronger ability to build something better than MrBeast if there is misalignment with MrBeast principles/values)
That's like me saying I've given up my life to have the job that I have currently and live where I do. Or you've given up your life for however you spend it.
It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
My biggest critizism of A/B/C is it is always either a delusion, lie, or manipulation. People that talk frequently about "A players/employees" are almost certainly not the ones hiring them. Why? "A players" don't work someplace where they are not respected and ground to dust as a non-owner. That means at best the best employees are "B-players" and probably most of their staff is actually "C-players"
"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.
The no doesn't mean no section was about contractors and dealing with other people. It was a way of conveying that if you ask for something and get an outright refusal, then it's ok to ask again and pivot on details to try and find a fit. MrBeasts company drove a train into a big pit (one of the few videos I watched). That call, would have started with, I'd like to buy a train and a big pit. It probably started as a flat out refusal before he turned up with money.
I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rather" conversations I had in middle school.
Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).
For as much slop as gets produced on YouTube, I think the high quality educational content more than makes up for it. You can literally look up any subject and find a full blown series on the topic.
His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.
This is why those who can appropriately select good information will flourish in this age. I still suck at it (get pulled into mindnumbing shorts for 30 minutes), but then I learned a new musical instrument for _free_ using YouTube.
Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking project.
This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
It does make it net-bad because the educational content should exist without the trash, which is far more prevalent. It forces the positive stuff to comply with the trash algorithms that make them worse and also forces them to comply with the monopoly of one of the largest, most monolithic corporations in the world that can do whatever the fuck they want with the content. Of course it's not surprising! It's just shitty and needs to be different.
But the educational content DOESNT exist without the trash and you cannot make a case that it just would, that’s unlikely and impossible to prove.
“Net bad” means the world would be absolutely and inarguably better without YouTube. This is so outlandish, honestly; YouTube at its core is an information sharing platform and a lot of useful things have come out of it. Immense amounts even.
> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.
> Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
Off the top of my head, Gamers Nexus is a counterpoint. Obviously not Mr Beast-scale, but we're also looking at a huge difference in target demographic breadth.
Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube. For as long as cheap printing and mail services have been around, artists have had strong incentive to go design ads rather than pursue their art independently.
YouTube definitely has a race to the bottom going on, but it's not all-consuming and well-researched, high-quality material is still profitable for creators as long as you know how to play the thumbnail game.
> Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube.
I extend the same criticisms towards traditional television as well.
They're both just symptoms of the advertising problem. Advertisers are the enablers of this stuff. They'll back any content that draws attention, and the ones which draw the most are memes, controversy, generally negative value slop. People endlessly scrolling apps with infinite content being fed instant gratification with product offerings in between. Algorithms that actively push them towards controversy and hate because it maximizes "engagement".
> If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?
I think it matters a lot. It creates massive distortions in society's perception of value.
Because of YouTube's advertising, you have people becoming multimillionaires by making total nonsense videos where they do things like react to other videos. Literally a YouTube video of a guy watching other YouTube videos, pausing and saying whatever pops into his head. Like this comment section. And he gets millions of dollars for it.
There's something deeply wrong with a society where you are rewarded for nothing. The people who actually do something tend to feel cheated when they see it happen. Imagine being a professional, a trades person and seeing a random dude get 1000x richer than you because he said stupid shit on the internet. And if you point it out, some startup founder accuses you of sour grapes.
Society should think deeply about the incentives it offers to people. Because people will respond to them.
This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is only watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn't exist.
> This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is.
No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.
That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.
Are you arguing that the public fascination with it makes it morally acceptable? If so would you consider gladiatorial fights to the death and gruesome public executions, both of which have been massive crowd-pleasers in the past and no doubt would be again if they became socially accepted, justified by the same argument? If not, what do you think is different here that makes condemning Mr. Beast for feeding unwholesome public appetites wrong, but condemning Roman emperors for it right? Just a question of the degree of nastiness?
Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.
Just a question of degree of nastiness? Yes, competitions involving life and death are qualitatively different from competitions involving money. Something interesting to think about is that we do have ultra graphic action movies and horror movies. Are those also net negative?
> Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture.
There is no human culture that I know of that was not fascinated by things like money and fame.
> I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral
I don't think Mr Beast is immoral and not for the reasons you state. I think you have in your mind some very judgemental ideas of what is right and wrong.
I think shows like Mr Beast and all celebrity culture is dumb. I think sports are dumb too. I don't think they are evil and I know that humanity will find a way to create variants of these things no matter what kind of insane rules society tried to put in place.
Human nature is full of self-conflict and contradiction. There are more base aspects of it and higher ones as well. This has been known up and down the ages. Vices and virtues. "You're against vice, hence you're against humans because vice is what humans like to choose!" Well, no. You can be against catering to the base urges. You wouldn't feed your dog 10 cakes even if it continues eating it. And that's not hatred of dog-ity.
I would disagree on the net bad for the world, or at least be skeptical about it. Personally, Youtube was my life changing tool which I used to learn almost everything essential to my career and personal development, and I would assume lots of others would be the same. The type of content it recommends goes with the type of content you interacted with in the past. It just a tool and it matters how you use it
youtube still has a net positive value. the amount of knowledge & learning (and ok, entertainment) i get out of it on a daily basis is immense and i can't imagine the amount of wisdom i'd have sucked up as a kid if i had access to all this.
if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.
What the algorithm seems to favour is a better indicator of what people use Youtube for overall.
I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.
I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads. Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is blocked at home and kids don’t have smartphones.
Youtube is the single most important and valuable learning tool that exists on the planet. There are lectures on literally everything, i have been recently learning my way into geometric algebra and lie theory for my physics phd. Sure, there's a lot of crap and youtube is just as happy to waste your time but if you search out and only watch educational content, your Frontpage will become educational content. It's hard to keep that way because there's tons of fun but uneducational things to watch, but there's browser extensions and things to help with that. Extensions that block the homepage and video recommendations, extensions that let you group your subscriptions and create your own feed. It can be amazing if you use it right, it's hard to use right sometimes
More and more it's crystallizing that people with high agency can elevate themselves as never before, while the average person is dragged down into a mud as never before. The divide is crazy and it's starting already in early childhood.
Yes, you and people like you can seek out the best browser extensions, install them, understand how to use them, and can curate a nicely tended online garden for yourself, and this is genuinely great. But "we live in a society", even you are subject to wider trends of how people around you live their lives and spend their time. And average people's front page is filled with slop and AI generated chum and Youtube-face thumbnails etc. While you can configure ublock origin to remove irrelevant recommendations from the middle of search results, the average person browses the internet without adblock and sinks hours into mindlessly scrolling social media.
Our parents worried about us staring at the TV all day, and today we have that on super steroids.
It's super hard to avoid rabbit holes. Once the recommender engine picks up on something you find interesting it will exploit that with no end.
The mind numbing stuff can be highly specific that no human TV program manager would ever think up. For example, I clicked a few videos about cow and horse hoof trimming and horseshoe applications. Kinda interesting, geeking out on skilled crafts like this, never seen it done in real life, maybe I learn something interesting! And a few days later I find myself regularly clicking these because I get so many of these now on my frontpage and I kind of take a step back and think, is this really time well spent? Watching hoof after hoof being trimmed? (By the way, these videos have millions of views each, and have entire channels dedicated to producing them over and over again. It's an entire genre, not just a few videos.)
I see this stuff with family members too. Zoning out and watching repetitive crap, like the hydraulic press channel, red hot ball, a guy who cleans up backyards, powerwashing objects, dashcam crashes, arrest bodycam footage, pimple popping, mukbang. (And I'm not even getting into political outrage stuff, that's a topic to itself.) Once Youtube figures out which type of repetitive brain-numbing genre you respond to, it will push it. It takes more self-awareness to get back in control than a lot of people have. Some of these "genres" are shockingly weird, like jigger removal (a kind of larva) from dog paws. I don't know if this has been studied properly. It's kind of like a non-sexual version of fetishes. Highly specific and somehow repetitively able to "tickle" one's brain, and while it's soothing and satisfying to some, it's disgusting and weird to others, pretty much like sexual fetishes.
They’re there. Hidden somewhere. I watched some of them. But you need to search for them. Like there is quality food I prepared for my workday today. But I must actively work on that and not take offered junk food.
I see it differently. I don't think YouTube fundamentally changes people; it might serve up low-quality content to those seeking it, but they'd likely find it elsewhere if not on YouTube.
On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.
It's infinitely better than television because you can remove ads and choose what you want to see! I know you never compared it to TV but that was the main mode of entertainment before streaming.
I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.
It's not YouTube per se that's bad. YouTube is just a symptom. The underlying pathology is advertising. The attention economy, surveillance capitalism. Those are the real problems. Those are the reasons behind this distortion of the world. They enable people who make moronic meme videos to make orders of magnitude more money than people who actually try to contribute something to society.
There are plenty of terrible books and trash novels. Easily 99% of books are junk (often junk dressed up as non-junk). I think it's very possible that in 2024, YouTube is net more educational than reading. (Speaking in terms of total amount of knowledge acquisition.)
Does youtube have a lot of trash? He s certainly a (very big) outlier but the other trashy content is mostly about expensive cars and shit which is harmless by comparison.
Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.
Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.
Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.
In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.
>is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.
Weird how things that seem to make sense in one context seem to make no sense in another context. If you told me a factory runs their widget making machine at 70% capacity in case someone comes along with an order for a different widget or twice as many widgets, at first glance think that's a bad idea. If your customers can keep your widget machine 100% full, using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful. And through cultural osmosis the idea of not letting your hardware sit idle is exactly the sort of thing that feels right.
And yet, we do this all the time in IT. If you instead of a widget machine told me that you run your web server at 100% capacity all the time, I'd tell you that's also a terrible idea. If you're running at 100% capacity and have no spare headroom, you can't serve more users if one of them sends more requests than normal. Even though intuitively we know that a machine sitting idle is a "waste" of compute power, we also know that we need capacity in reserve because demand isn't constant. No one sizes (or should size) their servers for 100% utilization. Even when you have something like a container cluster, you don't target your containers to 100% utilization, if for no other reason than you need headroom while the extra containers spin up. Odd that without thinking that through, I wouldn't have applied the same idea to manufacturing machinery.
This is a very key insight many need to be aware of. The thing that can be sacrificed in order to obtain efficiency is resilience.
To master the bend not break model.
You can make a bridge that can handle a 10 ton load for half the material of one that can take 20 tons. 99% of the time this isn't an issue but that outlier case of a 18 ton truck can be disastrous. This is why power cables have sag in them, in case there is an extreme cold snap. Why trees sway and bend with the wind so that anything but the most extreme evens do not break them; with that analogy, grass is much weaker but could handle even higher winds. The ridged are brittle.
I'm not saying to not strive for efficiency but you also have to allow those efficiency gains to provide some slack in the system. Where I work, there is a definite busy season. So for most of the year, we operate at about 70% utilization and it works out great. Most people are not stressed at all. It means that when those 2 months of the year when it is all hands on deck, everyone is in peak condition to face it head on.
In my previous job in manufacturing, efficiency was praised over everything else, it was 100% utilization all of the time. So when the COVID rush came, it practically broke the business. After a year of those unrelenting pace, we started to bleed out talent. Over the next 6 months, they lost all the highest talent. A year later from those I still spoke with, they said they lost about two thirds of their business over the next 12 months, they are now on the edge of collapse.
Slack allows a bend, pure efficiency can lead to a break. There is a fine line between those two that is very difficult to achieve.
I see the parallel you're drawing but even the core idea is I think different enough to be worse dissecting.
In manufacturing, you keep spare capacity to allow for more lucrative orders to come in. If you don't expect any, you run at 100%. For instance when Apple pays TSMC all the money in the world to produce the next iPhone chip, they won't be running that line at 70%, the full capacity is reserved.
Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.
We run our servers at 70% or even 50% capacity because we don't have control on what that capacity will be used for, as external events happen all the time. A manufacturers receiving a spike of extra orders can just refuse them and go on with their day. Our servers getting hit with 10x the demand requires efforts and measures to protect the servers and current traffic.
Factories want to optimize for efficiency, server farms want to pay for more reactivity, that's the nature of the business.
I think even for a company like TSMC these ideas are important to understand.
To give you an example TSMC might have a factory with 10 expensive EUV lithography tools, each capable of processing 100 wafers per hour.
Then they have 4 ovens, each able to bake batches of 500 wafers per hour.
TSMC could improve efficiency by reducing the number of ovens, because they are running only at 50% capacity. But compared to the cost of the EUV tools, the ovens are very cheap. They need to be able to produce at full capacity, even when some ovens breakdown, because stopping the EUV tools because you don't have enough ovens would be much more expensive then operating with spare capacity.
> Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.
I think it's always worth thinking about what you can leave slack / idle space in. For example, you might not keep multiple stations free, but you might invest in a larger oven than you need to make the cakes you currently make. Or you might invest in more bakery space than you need, including extra workspace than you can utilize at 100%. Not because you necessarily anticipate higher demand, but because you might get a customer that's asking for a cake bigger than your standard. Or because you might have a customer placing a large order and need some extra room to spread out more, or to have a temporary helper be able to do some small part of the job even if they can't use the space as a full station.
But also idleness might look like "you don't spend all of your time baking orders for customers". If you never build in slack for creating, experimenting and learning, you'll fall behind your competition, or stagnate if your design and art is a selling point.
> using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful.
Because it is. My brother works in industrial manufacturing machinery supplies. I can assure you the overwhelming majority of manufacturing machines on the planet are not only run constantly but as near to 99.999% as possible. So much that they are even loath to turn them off for critical maintenance rather preferring to let the machine break down so they don't get blamed for being the person to "ruin productivity"
This book sounds like one of those flights of fancy armchair generals are so found of going on.
Perhaps it works in small boutique shops making specialized orders but that is a slim minority of the overall manufacturing base. I could see why the advice would appeal to HN readers.
It really depends on whether the capacity is fixed or not. If capacity is fixed and demand is unlimited (eg. because you just can't get more EUV light sources this year) then you should probably run as close to 100% utilisation as possible.
But if you can easily scale production capacity, you should not strive for 100% utilisation. You should expand capacity before you reach 100%, because if you are running at 100% you will not be able to take any more orders and lose the opportunity to grow your business.
One of the most insightful things I heard someone say at Toyota (in an interview) was that they replace their tools (drill bits and the like) at 80% wear instead of letting them get to 100% and break.
Why waste that 20%?
Because if the tool breaks and scratches a $200K Lexus, then that might be a $20K fix, or possibly even starting from scratch with a new body! Is that worth risking for a $5 drill bit they buy in boxes of 1,000 at a time? No.
Then the interview switched to some guy in America looking miserable complaining how his bosses made him use every tool until breaking point. He listed a litany of faults this caused, like off-centre holes, distorted panels, etc...
And you wonder why Tesla panels have misaligned gaps. Or why rain water leaks into a "luxury" American vehicle!
Toyota uses price premium and reputation to achieve this. Its not something every company can do, and I don't mean in theory. I mean that economics don't support it. Most buyers cannot and will not pay extra premium for reliablity. The reality is letting them break/damage/fix/replace actually is cheaper overall otherwise it would not be the popular choice.
If tomorrow Ford decided to start this process it would be a decade before the market believed that hey had changed their ways. Would they survive this gap? IDK the new ford Mach-E is not selling so I doubt it but I"m not an economist. People don't buy fords because of the reliability. They buy it because it's cheaper and the risk of downtime is less important to them than the price premium. Don't forget that in order to achieve that lost resource return you must be disciplined all the time and most people/corps cannot achieve that.
Toyota’s strategy is cheaper, and their cars are very cost competitive.
PS: “It’s too expensive to save money with your methods!” Is the most common response I get from customers to this kind of efficiency improvement advice. Invariably they then proceed to set several million dollars on fire instead of spending ten thousand to avoid that error. It’s so predictable, it is getting boring.
I would really recommend coming into these conversations with more curiosity!
Toyota makes some of the cheapest and some of the most expensive cars on the market. They don't "use" their reputation to do this, their reputation is the result of excellent production.
You're missing the point with Ford, which is an example of another very successful manufacturer who uses similar techniques/philosophy as Toyota, which are not similar to what your brother's machine shop does.
Edit: Sry, missed your Poe's law. People buy fords because they are cheaper for the most part. People that have more money buy Toyota. This is just market segmentation of a couple of the biggest brands.
Companies that have hammered out an effective cost/production/time ratio are not something you can compete with without becoming the same thing as them. Which is why factory managers are literally afraid to turn them off for any reason.
My brother constantly tells me about how when they do repairs they will see something within 1-3 months of failing and tell the factory manager. He said almost without exception they always ask will it increase the repair time "TODAY" and of course the answer is yes. They always decline and deal with it when it breaks at a greater time/cost. I think this is more an effect of the toxic work relationship that has become forced on everyone by MBA's.
What are you arguing here exactly? Most production systems work the same way as your brothers', which is to say they suck. We're pointing to a methodology that has a very strong track record of making production systems that don't suck, such as Toyota's and Ford's (empirical disproofs of your claim that such an approach is only applicable to boutique shops).
>Toyota's and Ford's (empirical disproofs of your claim that such an approach is only applicable to boutique shops).
Where was this provided? I didn't see you or any poster provide claim or evidence that Toyota or Ford intentionally leave unused production capacity. I had a busy day so I may have missed it somewhere.
Far as I'm aware they also run their assembly as close to 99.999% of the time as possible.
My brother is not a mft. He works for an engineering company that makes and maintains manufacturing equipment. He has worked in nearly every major company you can name's manufacturing plants fixing their stuff or installing new stuff. Its a whole world I did not know about until he started. I'm just forwarding some stories he tells. Not sure why you think you know more than all the people involved.
One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to optimize every part of his content for years before he really blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to success, given enough time and resources.
As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.
Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.
Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.
I didn’t know that YouTube supports multiple audio tracks for the same video. Can alternate tracks be uploaded at a later point in time? Can the feature be used to replace the original audio in a video?
It might be interesting to contrast MrBeast’s management approach with that of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). He is also a successful YouTuber who leads a team that puts out videos on several channels. While his videos don’t have the huge production scale of MrBeast’s, they seem to be produced on short deadlines and must require close coordination among his team.
If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.
Brownlee is such a mystery to me. The #1 rule of Youtube is show energy, show enthusiasm. Brownlee is like if Urkel were given a sedative and told to review the latest iPhone
You mean he talks more like a normal person talking about a product rather than a Youtuber going over the top with everything? The fact that he is genuine is a big part of his appeal.
He’s been doing it a long time, has an excellent understanding of the tech industry, and is a master at producing content that is easy for everyone to digest. I’ve been watching him for years and have always thought he had a knack for his craft. Just because he has a calm demeanor shouldn’t take away from what he does, but in my opinion should add to it even more.
The #1 rule is clearly not show energy, show enthusiasm. It's the #1 rule for a subset of content, like MrBeast. The content world is a big place, and the silent majority has no interest in loud and obnoxious.
Right. Take Asianometry-- a channel dedicated to economics, politics, and tech in Asia. Very high quality stuff. He goes into deep detail about a lot of technical stuff.. and as you can imagine his delivery isn't anything like a showman. He can be monotonous but if anything that is likely preferred by his audience, given his niche.
Is product fetishism really better than light entertainment? The MKBHD slop is just branded with that same vibe of the products he likes to cover, namely the self-satisfactions of luxury goods that people mistake for high quality. That gives the false signal it provides more value than Mr. Beast. Yes, MKBHD technically covers products, but so did Top Gear. The content is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an informed purchase decision.
MKBHD intentionally has a small team that makes relatively low budget videos. I think MKBHD mainly has a relatively large audience because he was very early to the high quality videos game on YouTube. I wouldn't be surprised if his edge is lost now and his viewership does not grow faster than would be expected of an active channel of his size.
Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.
MKBHD is not even in Top 500 of the most subscribed Youtube channels, first give me the details of what those other 500 channels are doing then maybe MKBHD... (and I'm saying this as a long time subscriber)
Would you say the same about companies, that the only interesting ones worth talking about are the ones in the Fortune 500? If anything, I would say many of them are rather boring examples, we all know roughly how they're managed and run.
> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page.
I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."
Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.
I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.
I feel the same, but I realized I don't want to be the blunt person; I just want some other blunt person to do my dirty work. This is not really a fair expectation for me to have.
That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.
It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.
The pdf is fine nothing really sensational. Some good advise for video creators and how to commit to succeed at their company. Written in what you need to invest not what you need to sacrifice. The bar is high which is fine tho. For example he wants one to work on 3 different projects on a workday instead of 1 project for 3 workdays.
I watched one video of MrBeast in the past and the pdf explains well why I actually watched it to the end. I do dislike these kind of videos and don’t watch them but success is success and he does things right. One of his rules which is kind of neat is that the clickbait title and thumbnail needs to deliver on the promise - which is a great concept considering over 97% clickbait isn’t.
Just wanted to add, completely unrelated to the line of business and the moral judgement on what Mr Beast Production does, that I really cherish seeing such a well written onboarding material.
The sharpness in articulation, the consistency in the leadership vision, and the cultural undertone is of very high level.
For comparison, any tech company I've worked for, doesn't get even closer, drawing in acronyms, micro-cultures and personal interest.
This point caught my attention, as my experience has been quite different, though in completely different industries. How does one go about finding genuinely good consultants, in any industry?
> "Use Consultants
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake lol. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head "I will always check for consultants when I'm assigned a task""
Disclaimer: I'm a software consultant, so obviously biased.
MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way more important to him than to a software business.
He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.
Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend people they worked with.
I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.
Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people in very different technical fields by their thinking and communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're good technical people.
I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".
In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.
That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.
If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a team that will stick together to build value over the long term.
If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever) then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're making.
If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of customization is pretty critical to consistently making those deadlines.
> How do you find them?
Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.
Both of the examples in the quote give you the answer: talk to someone that’s actually done it.
It’s always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the next person. Instead, too many people act like they’re the first person to ever attempt whatever they’re working on.
Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in almost anything other than powerpoint and credential attainment.
Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.
This, like a lot of the advice is "Things that worked for me that likely won't work for you". A lot of people are going to talk to Mr Beast that won't talk to you, Mr Beast is doing a variety of one off projects that he'll never need to revisit. Mr Beast has a shit tonne of money and a shit tonne of resources. For all those reasons, it's something that he can do that you probably can't.
I can't be the only person disturbed by the penetration of terms like "obsession" into nominally professional culture. You should not be asking your employees to qualify for DSM symptoms just to not get fired (with severance, lol, that is genuinely a step up from nothing even if it's clearly meant to soften the psychological shock of reading about A- B- and C- employees).
You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession. It’s not a balanced or psychologically sound way to live—no one claims it is. If you believe great achievements come from people working regular hours, taking it slow, and maintaining a comfortable pace, you are mistaken.
Newton, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie...the list goes on. These people's success wasn't a product of balance or moderation
> You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession.
Great, don't force it on your employees. I am not working for you for anything other than a paycheck and flexible working conditions and stimulating work.
No, being unemployed is the coercive factor here. It's not fair to treat at-will employment as non-coercive unless non-employment is actually zero. Non-employment currently stands at about 7.7%: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em...
Why would anyone turn down a chance to make a living if a job is offered? Why do you think the fed ensures that there are never enough jobs for everyone? Why do you think the fed and the business world talks about the economy in terms of "jobs" and "unemployment" when these are metrics largely unrelated to stuff like "am I actually getting a fair wage" and "is housing priced anywhere near rationally"? etc—the non-coercive labor market is a complete illusion.
You'll find that most undesirable human behavior and perception does. This is just "product obsession" marketing bullshit forced onto real-life relationships. If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with. Don't force it on others.
Nobody is forcing anything on anybody here so there's no need to end your thought with a defiant coda.
> If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with.
You misunderstand the objection I hinted at. Which is fine. I'm not pro-"marketing bullshit" because it's not an either/or choice. What I object to is taking a perfectly normal word someone uses and then choosing a narrow, fraught, medical interpretation of the word to ascribe to them a viewpoint of, essentially, "they want you to be mentally ill!"
I wouldn't wish "obsession" on anyone. It is extremely unpleasant and harmful to experience. Willingly giving your life to a company is not obsession, it's a choice.
i would argue the communication registry of influencer/youtuber culture skews superlative.
meaning i would translate obsession -> dedication in common language.
The only information about this obsession in the document is about learning, and there is a specific mention that people are judged based on results and not hours, so I am willing to say that this language is much less alarming than what I heard in my experience in startups.
Yes, this is a large part of the concept of liberation. Why are you trying to sell people shit nobody asked for? We could be making technology that enables expression of the individual and of society rather than commodification of it.
I'll leave it to you all to debate the ethics of MrBeast's videos, YouTube, and the questionable value of these videos.
Meanwhile, the most fascinating part of this is a glimpse into a new kind of media company, where he instituted a particular process and approach and scaled it up outside of the initial set of producers.
You get the sense he's flying by the seat of his pants into a whole new world, and he's creating the org and the processes on the fly based on what's been successful so far.
The energy, drive and enthusiasm required to create a new model of not only "product" (even one that solely exists to please the algorithm) and company is fascinating.
There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.
> There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.
It is a startup and he is a founder. There are no parallels, he is simply an example. His video production company is very similar to other entertainment companies catering to the same audience like roblox (studios) or mobile gaming startups in general.
This is actually a really good document for someone who is a junior or assistant. I've worked a variety of jobs and didn't get much documents on training like this, mostly compliance stuff. You could take a lot of it out and get good points on managing people and taking ownership for tasks. It seems redundant or basic, but a lot of these things aren't explicitly mentioned, usually informally only.
You are correct. There are way too many assistant roles in the creative industry that come with little to none real job training, just “watch what I do, or do as I tell, and never make a mistake twice or you’re toast”.
I think it’s due to the sheer amount of candidates, and the total power some superiors have over you.
It’s a sink or swim strategy, but you’re also swimming with sharks.
That’s there, but the parts about taking responsibility for your work, keeping people you delegate work to accountable and negotiating with vendors and being persistent is stuff you usually get informally.
I also find those signs that it’s a more honest document. Most things publicly available are so neutered there’s not much useful grey info
It's hypocritical, those closest to Jimmy have get-out-of-jail-free cards and others get fired. And the "no doesn't mean no" stuff reeks of toxic hustle culture.
Most handbooks are boring and legalese because they can be evidence in court.
I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
I don't know what subculture you're living in, but in several of mine there absolutely is pushback against this, with people avoiding consuming this kind of content and trying to prevent their children from consuming it, too.
Now, the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same is much more interesting, but there's no known reason for this and most of the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to talking about why your theory is more plausible.
IMHO it's quite divisive; there's a significant percentage of the population that's addicted to this sort of content, and there's another which actually finds it boring.
I've watched a few MrBeast videos and similar content, out of curiosity. It just does not appeal to me, in the same way that "influencer" content and celebrities don't.
Your acute observation that a large number of people find MrBeast content boring suggests part of the reason why there isn't more cultural pushback to it - because lots of people simply don't care about it.
Not only boring, I am stressed out by it. I feel like I'm losing valuable seconds of my life watching it, and it makes me feel depressed and disconnected from society to think about how popular it is.
It’s boring in part because it’s so blatantly formulated and packed up to be something that, for lack of better explanation, shouldn’t be formulated or packaged.
It’s like going to the store to buy fun. It doesn’t work that way. Excitement and wonder occur organically and typically in real life, and at the very least as the product of something truly awesome. In the case of Mr Beast, it seems like the ostensible happiness and excitement of the crew and contestants is combined with money to convince viewers something really great is happening. But it’s simply not. It’s vapid and fluffy, and really loud and obnoxious.
But I also feel a bit like Mr Skinner wondering if I’m out of touch. Yet… This stuff probably would have weirded me out as a teenager, too.
It's not English-speaking community specific. In every language I can speak, I can think of an equivalent of MrBeast for that area. Maybe a majority portion of the entire world's population actually enjoys that kind of content. Nobody in my friend group enjoys that, but looking at my nephews, they're all going crazy about it. There are going to be people who grew up with him for almost a decade, and that's a crazy amount of time to build parasocial relationship with your favourite celebrity.
Ah, sorry, when I said "the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same" I meant "why there isn't greater pushback" not "why aren't there other MrBeasts" (although that was my assumption).
It's very interesting that the phenomenon itself is multi-cultural, though. Or maybe it's internet-cultural? It's probably tied into the nature of human beings and people exploiting that.
Most people are dumb because they are lazy and gave up long time ago. Their parents the same way, so the kids never had a chance. Like I had a house mate in my 20s. His parents just gave him everything. He busted his car, parents got him a new one. He lost his job and he just played call of duty all day and drank or smoke weed.
One day he asked me about programming and this dude just couldn’t sit still without needing a distraction.
He consumed all these meme videos and used to bug me by sending me brain rot.
Unfortunately this is the majority of people. I used to be poor so I lived like this in a house where 4-5 people shared the space.
They just cannot think because they gave up and it’s impossible to do anything for them.
On one hand I’m glad gig economy exists so it can keep people like him busy. I believe people like him would be dangerous if not provided a distraction.
I don’t understand how people don’t have curiousity to learn more. Instead they will waste time since kids just throwing all potential to waste playing games like COD or watching YT all day. It’s not even sad anymore just pathetic.
I like the idea that entertainment made for broad appeal is an existential threat to society worthy of comparison to drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. People have been appealing to the lowest common denominator for forever and yet the world soldiers on.
Your larger question of “why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet?” is worthy of exploration, though I don’t think many posters here are in a position to dig into it deeply for you
Comparison to drugs is a bit extreme, but I think that some level of concern about MrBeast-style operations and the content they produce is warranted.
It’s not just broad appeal, but the mass reach of YouTube, the audience targeting and tight feedback loop it enables, and the resulting race to the bottom for who can make the most stupid and/or shocking videos, which in turn informs the tastes of the masses. Where does it end? Will it eventually get to the point that the only profitable YouTube channels are MrBeast-style because nothing else can bring in views?
IMO, spending 24 hours in ketchup doesn't sound any "lower" than jackass sitting in a circle and throwing stuff at each others' balls. So I would say that raced ended 20 years ago.
It's not just "broad appeal". Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal. I see nothing wrong with the broad appeal. It's what this appeal is made to and how. Humans have a lot of ways to appeal to them, and this particular way of appealing targets very base very addictive psychological mechanisms that ultimately hurt the person - just like addictive substances do. They don't make the users better or smarter or calmer or anything like that - if anything, they make them dumber and more attention-deficient. That's my problem with it.
> why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet
You are not good at reading, are you? I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me. But I guess the joke is on me since you didn't even bother to read that part.
>Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal.
This statement is misleading because the broad appeal of both Shakespeare and Mozart today is the culmination of centuries of attempts to understand (and misunderstand) them. Calculus can be taught to high schoolers nowadays, but how many scientists in Newton's days could understand the Principia in its entirety?
Not to mention that Shakespeare and Mozart were both able to produce works of the highest sophistication that leaves most of their contemporaries (and many today) baffled. Harold Bloom wrote that the sophisticated word play in Love's Labour's Lost was not surpassed until Joyce, and Mozart's contemporaries complained endlessly about the complex textures in his opera finales. When Mozart wrote piano trios for the public, his publisher cancelled the series after two pieces because they were judged far too difficult for the masses, and when Mozart intended to write some easy piano sonatas at the end of his life, the first (the only one he completed) turned out to be the most difficult he ever wrote.
Invoking the popularity of Shakespeare or Mozart as analogues to Mr Beast reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the longevity of both Shakespeare or Mozart, and leaves unmentioned the extensive body of difficult works on which their reputation rests today.
> I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me.
What does this mean? You introduced the idea of government intervention unprompted because you wanted to be misunderstood by me?
Generally speaking if I do not want to introduce a topic to a conversation I just don’t do that. The laying of rhetorical traps is too complex for me when conveying something simple like “I don’t like this guy on youtube”
How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos? How many potentially otherwise productive hours were wasted watching someone in ketchup? Obviously it’s not a 1:1 ratio, but it’s a valid question to ask.
Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks
> How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos?
This is a good question. I would say that I don’t know how to quantify “societal progress” aside from arbitrary wishes that I can imagine, so I guess since we still have war, hunger, illness, poverty, crime and indignity in our society… all of it? All societal progress has possibly been killed by mrbeats.
I haven’t had a lot of time to reflect on this. What in particular do you envision society could have accomplished without this man on youtube?
Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Since this reply is to something a day old and identical to another one on an adjacent post, is this an automated post in response to the inclusion of the words “good/bad faith”?
If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?
Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.
Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).
Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018>, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.
If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at hn@ycombinator.com. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.
The ratio probably goes the other way. You'd be counting the amount of productive hours that were enabled by letting people relax their brains watching novel and enjoyable content. MrBeast videos likely add to GDP.
Personally I think that’s a stretch, but I’ll admit it’s a possibility. I’m not claiming to have the answers on this subject, just trying to objectify the premise put forth by the OP.
You make a good point though! There are definitely a non-zero amount of productive hours resulting from his videos, just as there are a non-zero amount replaced with his videos. It would be fascinating if there was a way to quantify this, but it’ll likely forever be a philosophical argument
Meh, we don't know what the counterfactual of a different media environment would be. For example, it seems not-even-crazy to believe that media's addictiveness has played a major role in sedentary lifestyles which in turn is a major contributor to several of the top causes-of-death in the developed world (far greater than drugs).
Most hobbies are just as dumb when you think about it.
Sports = watching grown men play with balls,
Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve,
TV/Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information
watching sports is entertaining as you're watching highly skilled individuals perform at the highest level + gives you a sense of belonging; games - entertainment and skill development, whether those are multiplayer games that teach you cooperation and competition, or single-player games that is fun and in a lot of cases learning (through lore), developing motor skills, strategic thinking and so on; tv/reading - learning (nothing is useless information, it helps create more connections in your brain);
yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value
I get the feeling, but at the same time, this feels like normal culture gaps. I don't get "sponge bob square pants" but there are people out that that insist it was if not a pinnacle of animation entertainment, then a hugely creative and entertaining show that deserves its place in the pantheons of animation. And all those huge 80's era properties that so many have years of nostalgic memories of, like transformers, he-man or voltron were all "cynical cash grabs" and 30 minute commercials for toys. So much so the concerned parents of the time demanded the government step in. Now the jury might be out on whether that generation is worse than previous generations, but if they are I don't think it's going to be because transformers was a toy marketing gimmick instead of high art with a strong moral message.
Kids I know find all sorts of things ridiculously amusing and entertaining and it all seems stupid, brainless and mind rotting to me. But then again, the stuff I found ridiculously amusing and entertaining at that age was (I can attest, having gone back and watched some of it) was just as stupid, brainless and mind rotting. Some of it is not having a "sufficiently developed palette" for humor and entertainment. Some of it is because that humor and entertainment was genuinely new to me at the time, where as now I've seen it before so when it shows up in the kids stuff, it's not entertaining anymore. It's sort of the reverse of the "Seinfeld isn't funny" issue. We're not looking at something in the past and wondering why it was so great because it's been out shadowed by what it inspired. Instead we're looking at something from today and wondering why it's entertaining because we've been entertained in the same way in the past.
Can't agree more. 10 years ago I looked up transformers uploaded to YouTube, and they couldn't stand the nostalgia test. Plots are primitive, characters are flat. It made me actually recall that by 13 years, I started feeling little embarrassment watching them because of thqe plot itself.
Apart from that, what surprised me was that it had vibes of 1950s: watercolor still images, and the music score not with analog synths (that we'd expect from the '80-s), but a (small) orchestra with TRUMPETS leading. (This was the biggest '50s factor for me.)
> They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts
Looking at this phrase in isolation is such a fun. There are whole industries which work exactly like this (food, news, games, politics). These particular people aren't the cause, they are one of many many symptoms of the causes.
Causes are in rules, norms and incentives of the social and economical systems. We can't solve the problem at the leve at which it was created. These videomakers aren't even close to that level.
> but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
And they are getting it. Which is not enough for a change, as "benefits" they are getting are way greater. Main driving forces behind the phenomena is rooted somwhere else, not in space of scope this type of conversations (moral, value, human-centric or achievement-centric aspects).
On another hand it's a point of turning for all those that dismiss it like yourselves. Maybe culture needs this so all "bad curiosities" are catered for, so it can serve as a base for more ambitious next steps.
Maybe more "old man yells at cloud" but I am kinda with you in thinking it's trash. The thing is that every generation has had its own equivalent swill for kids, this one is no different. His channel won't last, there's too much baggage around it, but it'll get replaced with something equally trashy.
I have a lot of memories in my childhood, but I can't remember anything on this level. Sure, I grew up in a very different environment than the US, but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing? All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons? I surely wasn't.
I would say it depends a lot on environment the children are raised in, I grew up in the 90's my family had one television set in the house (in our families living room) and it was only turned on if someone was watching a program. There was a tv guide which you would consult, if there was nothing you were interested in then tv would never get turned on. My Dad in particular would get annoyed at what he saw as "needlessly flicking between channels".
I can remember visiting friends houses where there would be multiple television sets (including tv sets in bedrooms) and television would always be turned on, even if no one was watching it. It was like a constant low level background noise. I found it strange but it was normal to them, they were used to eating dinner or playing with legos etc with tv constantly on in the background.
> All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons?
In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.
Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.
For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)
These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider
Don't afterschool cartoons every weekday and several hours of Saturday morning cartoons qualify? IIRC that was the usual habit of children a few decades ago.
> but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing?
Depends on your era. The 90's gave us Beavis and Butthead, Southpark, Ren & Stimpy and the Power Rangers. It gave us XTREME!!! everything. It gave us Mortal Kombat and AOL. There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming.
The 80's gave us Transformers or Voltron. It gave us MTV and the rise of Nickelodeon. It gave us GI Joe cartoons, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an endless supply of toys imported from japan and accompanied by 30 minute commercials for those toys (see also Transformers, Voltron, He-Man etc). There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming, heck they got the federal government involved they were so concerned.
Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes had people concerned for its mindless violence and effect on kids. Remember that Mr. Rogers started his show (and pitched continued funding for PBS to congress) on the concerns that TV was just mindless dreck rotting children's brains.
Start going much earlier than that and the ability of entertainment to be just broadcast into your life and home reduces considerably, but I imagine parents in the 1800's also had plenty of concerns about various mindless entertainment drivel that was luring their children off the godly paths.
Having been a young kid in the 80s, what I recently discovered was the primary concern with parents at the time (because, I genuinely don’t remember) was using those afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons as a vehicle to sell products to kids - a barrage of advertisements. Seems pale in comparison to extreme behavior that potentially endangers others, e.g. deliberately crashing your airplane for views/hits.
I'm only 26 and I'm also perhaps falling into the "old man yells at clouds" thing, but this feels different to me. Not Mr Beast by himself perhaps (never watched anything he's made), but just in general the kind of content that is being pushed to kids algorithmically is insane to me.
Watching my nephews grow up, I'm sort of gobsmacked about what my sisters are allowing them to watch. It's quite literally brainrot, I genuinely think what they watch is actively detrimental to their mental health and intelligence, especially since they're all below 10. It's just constant stimulation every single millisecond with no room to breathe, filled with random sound effects and noises constantly, while the "plot" is always some nonsensical crap.
The minecraft ones are the absolute worst for this, and to me the saddest thing is they'd rather watch some brainrotting machinima-style thing rather than play the damn game themselves.
As a side note, reading this comment back I'd like to formally apologize to my parents, because it seems I've turned into them and saying the exact same things they said about my hobbies :)
But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-star gourmet meal, and that's fine too (and I can't stand people who malign what other people enjoy because it's "not pure enough").
Sometimes? Sure. All the time? You'd likely to hurt yourself pretty badly doing that, eventually (and maybe sooner than you'd realize). Nutrition-wise, I think, people starting to understand that. Information-wise, not so much.
I think there are many options between pink slime and Michelin three stars. I have never been in Michelin restaurant, and I don't eat in pink slime ones, but I never felt I am lacking options for food service. The middle road is extremely wide, you don't have to go to the sides.
The couple I've been to were pretty rich; I don't think you'd actually want to go there every day. Example: a dish at Chez Panisse which had an inordinate amount of duck fat. Delicious, but...
I am that get of my lawn guy, no shame. You are 100% correct and I do call for bs like government intervention, as the lesser evil, ofc. See what happened with tobacco. IMO it's the same.
> I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS
Why is this BS? It wouldn't be unheard of to pass stricter age restriction laws so that at least the kids are not so easily exposed to brain damage. Same thing with the drugs you mentioned.
Also, would govt stepping in even help? We all know where that led to with the "war on drugs" in the US. I think there is no simple/easy fix.
My view is, you need to educate parents (backed by solid peer reviewed etc studies), and give them the tools (and free time) to help their kids.
Most parents I know are too busy working to put food on the table to spend time encouraging their kids not to watch trash tv/youtube.
Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both parties don't have my best interest in mind, but only one party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And we're so far beyond that point that any addition at this point is extremely suspect.
Interesting, I only learned about this Youtuber recently, maybe 2 months ago or so despite him having so many views. Youtube seems to be good at not showing you what you don't search for.
What his videos are lacking in my opinion is the quality of scenario and planning. They build an expensive set, give away a large prize but the challenges are either too simple or not very creative. Too little challenges, too little competition, too little motivation, too little expressing of personality like mutual help, sacrificing or betrayal, too little unexpected scenario twists. In this aspect they are not as good as TV shows. As an extreme example, take "give away money to random people" series. What fun is in getting money for nothing? And watching that is probably 100x more boring.
I find his stuff sloppy and uninteresting, too, and he has no charisma. This just goes to show that he really does know what he's doing. He identified the statistically meaningful things to focus on and perfect. Imagine if he was just the producer for someone who actually gave a crap about making quality content.
No, they're not exclusive at all. As the guide itself says:
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
You can get billions of views and total YouTube dominance without making particularly engaging content, and I think that's the interesting point here.
> The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP).
> How to measure the success of content
> Like I said at the start of this the metrics you care about in regards to virality are CTR, AVD, and AVP. If you want to know if the contents of a video are good, just look at the AVD and AVP of a video after we upload it.
MrBeast's videos are total slop that I would put serious effort towards preventing my children watching if I had some but reading this it's immediately obvious why he's successful.
I think the authors intention was to pull any positives from this document that they could, but it seems almost negligent to not even mention the "no doesn't mean no" section of this document. As well as the context of the current ongoing gigantic mess, where Mr Beast tortured a guy while doing a "I spent X Hours in Solitary Confinement" video, and had to scrap it after the contestant was harmed.
They refused to shut the lights off for days on end and then coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up without directly making some kind of distinction or acknowledgement here.
I didn’t try to extract positives, I extracted what I personally found most interesting.
I skipped the “no doesn’t mean no” section because it felt like pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which wouldn’t work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so heavily on their brand - “find an employee who has a kid who is a fan” etc.
I didn’t actually spot the relationship between the “no means no” section and the sexual abuse scandals (I’m apparently not completely up to date on MrBeast scandals) - I caught the bit about squid game and though that would be a useful thing to highlight to remind people that MrBeast’s history isn’t without its nasty incidents.
you empower your employees with a mindset of "no doesn't mean no" and have them get results with pushback on no's. they are young kids mostly, don't you think that they will apply the same learned mindset the next time a girl tells them no?
Honestly I think the biggest problem with that section is the choice of title. I don’t think we would be having this conversation if that part of the document was titled “If someone says something is impossible, always try to explore and see if there are alternatives ways we can get it to happen instead”.
When a big chunk of your business is about filming ludicrous stunts that nobody else on YouTube has been able to film it’s understandable that this idea would end up in your employee handbook.
> You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it.
No, it was because I had not read the news about MrBeast having a sexual predator on his team. My interpretation of the earlier comment here was that this should have been a flag that the heading “no doesn’t mean no” should have been called out.
Without that knowledge of the current predator scandal, I don’t think I was wrong to skip that section when writing up my summary. I read that section and it didn’t make my “highlights” list for when I wrote about the document.
I’m being defensive here because it sounds like you are calling me out for something, but I’m not sure what that something is.
Fair, it wasn’t clear to me that you meant “skipped writing about it” - I thought you were just some rando that was commenting on something that they skipped over reading in the article (which I now understand you wrote). Sorry for the misunderstanding!
At least your two examples try to tell a story. They have some artistic integrity.
Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.
I barely know who Mr. Beast is but isn't his whole channel about, like, the joy of doing nice things for people? Like yes, it's for profit, and yes, it's schlocky and distasteful to us wise adults or whatever, but there's seriously nothing you find redeeming about kids enjoying seeing people getting their vision restored?
I'm not sure I agree. I don't watch his content but from reading the document it's quite clear his goal is to make stuff that's "fucken funny" - he's not creating any content for the sake of it, he wants to entertain himself.
that's a ridiculous take and blinded by your own preferences... It's all content... and it's all trying to get "Eyes on content. For a long as possible."
By his own admission in this onboarding document he admits his only goal is to make viral youtube video by any means necessary. It's all about "hacking" the algorithm and peoples' attention faculties.
Contrast that with very traditional Hollywood media - yes, of course they want to get people to watch their shows, but for the most part they try do that via a story and art. Not hacking peoples brains.
His content is like "Reality TV" on steroids. I don't watch or believe in traditional "Reality TV" either. Both are trash content - amongst the lowest forms of "entertainment" available.
Indeed. At least when it comes to your regular type of broadcast tv we must not have any romantic illusions. One of the most glaring tricks is having multiple items within a program and round-robining them in short chunks. And even the supposedly higher art of netflix shows uses inane stuff like cliffhangers and needless sex scenes.
yeah i thought that was interesting, as if to say, if we made a pet torture video that has the most views ever, that's what's important. Also how wedded it is to youtube. understanding how youtube works is more important that making funny or engaging content. it's a reverse of 'if you build it they will come' when it comes to excellence.
One thing I find interesting is that y combinator content (like Michael and Dalton videos) don’t talk much about team intensity and culture aside from cliche terms, but successful teams obsess over it. I mean he’s literally saying he’ll give you $1000 to study the handbook, and the handbook says average employees should be fired immediately (in all caps). I’ve never heard something like that come from y combinatory, but I’ve seen other successful teams do similar things
Reads like a "How to PM" and "Extreme Ownership" rolled into 1 doc.
The one area that I'm wondering a bit on is the statement that you need to be working on multiple 'videos' aka projects at 1 time and if your not then your a FAILURE... so whose priority list is "prio" when, lets say, you are working on 5-10 projects? And they all have prios/emergencies etc.... Interesting expectation setting here. And concludes with a rather harsh statement too with the "failed as a MrBeast employee that day"...
For reference:
Work on multiple videos EVERYDAY
Please do not come in and only work on one video during a workday.
That’s how you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle that i’m
trying to stop. If you drop everything and go all in on a video for 3 days then that’s
3 days your other videos will fall behind and eventually you’ll have to drop other
videos to focus on those videos and it will snowball into you can’t do anything but
focus on what’s right in front of you because you murdered any lead time you
had. If you ever only work on one video during a day, you failed as a MrBeast
employee that day
Any ideas what is being referenced with this quote?
> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
"was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues"
"extreme weather"
"communications issues"
Are you doing this on purpose? I'm not even a fan of the guy but this type of out-of-context taking just hurts discourse. It's the type of thing I came to HN to avoid.
I appreciate this is how a startup must run, but must every small tech company be a startup? Where do you find jobs for small companies which are just happy to exist and grow sustainably. Where you can come in at 9:00am, have an uninterrupted hour long lunch break at 12:00pm and stop working at 5:30pm? While also not being paid pennies? I can care about your company and be passionate about my work without having to sacrifice all semblance of any aspect of the rest of my life. If that makes me a "B" or "C" player then that's fine.
They exist, but they are rare. Large tech companies have the benefit of economies of scale. For what you're looking for, you really need to find a niche player, and those folks don't hire very often. OpenDental, Rogue Amoeba, Impexium, and Cronometer are a few.
I think it's a good example of understanding how people think is good for the success at the top. Out of 1000 people asking "Wtf is CTR now?" maybe one needs a precise definition usable for immediate conversion to the programming code. That's the person for whom CTR and 1/CTR difference is important. The other 999 need to understand what's this term is used to measure and where it comes from - and for them this explanation is just fine. They are not people who make decisions or calculations based on it - those already know what CTR is. They are random people that need to fit a new thing into their mental model - and they won't even notice the difference, especially given the followup explanation.
whether you're looking for CTR on one end of the continuum or 1/CTR on the other end of the spectrum, you're looking at the same thing, just without understanding what one word means
> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.
This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.
A close friend of mine was an associate of Mr Beast, even living in his house in Greenville for several months. He confirmed a lot of the negative press about him in the media, and was himself ultimately screwed over by Jimmy and has been trying to get recompense for years.
MrBeast has always been clear that his goal is to make the best videos in the world. Not to be the most nurturing place to work, or the most philanthropically minded. This document makes that clear. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that in becoming the best in the world at youtube, he's had to become an extremely toxic individual.
He is sick. This is the work of a sick person. He even knows that he is sick but does not care, because of the sickness.
I pray for his audience, really.
What's this about the Squid Game video and the half a mil lost because of the "waiting in the sun" ? Did someone die ???
Huge +1. If I'd understood this mantra earlier in my career it would have saved me a large amount of hassle.
For juniors: any time you send something important to your manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific question that would require them to read the contents of the document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting, changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in writing.
And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have either acknowledged understanding of the required information, or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front of their manager.
Mr.Beast is in some big controversies right now, and it's honestly much more interesting than this PDF, I expected to see the "no does not mean no" section in this PDF.
If you read the content of the PDF instead of focusing on the problematic wording of the section title, you'll see that he doesn't mean it in a personal boundary context, but in a problem solving / sales context. Most people's default answer to ideas that are totally new to them is "no" and accepting that first no on its face means you don't get to achieve your goal.
(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)
I hate the actual content he produces - the first time I watched it, I kept thinking it's a trailer because of all the cuts and I wondered, where is the actual video, when I realized no, I am watching the actual video - but I have to commend the grind.
He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!
I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super optimized.
Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I respect the grind.
(I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever, and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name. It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I guess.)
> He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!
That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release.
"The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."
Arguably neither does fast food - it gives you energy, but it's also quite bad for your health and your wallet. So, it feeds you, sure, but the negatives likely far outweigh the positives.
If you've ever cooked meals for multiple days with just some ground beef, cabbage and some lettuce and friends for ~10 bucks per day, you'll see how crazy expensive a $20 fast food ""meal"" is.
So this is fast food content, because it does entertain, but you could do many things to get good entertainment and also not consume absolute slop.
The unwavering fixation on metrics like Click Thru Rate, Average View Duration and Average View Percentage explains why so many of my previous channels get formulaic over time. It sounds like a small thing, but for some reason the thumbnails/titles with the Youtube face enrage me the most.
Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.
But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.
There are various browser extensions that you might like. Clickbait Remover for Youtube, DeArrow, etc. They remove the thumbnail images and replace them with a frame from a random time within the video, and replace or modify the video title to make it less sensational. I also recommend Sponsorblock.
I'm using an even more nerdier variant: Subscribing via RSS feeds, then downloading as MP4s.
Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and/or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.
There's a disincentive for YouTube to change because it'd make both creators (to a greater extent) and users (to a lesser extent) unhappy.
It's almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it's disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream/downstream fixes theirs.
I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that's not owned by an ad company.
As far as I can tell this was leaked to a person who’s been having a high profile disagreement with MrBeast, by either a current or former staff member.
Maybe it’s a fake or a deliberate release, but it doesn’t read like the at to me. There is a ton of commercially sensitive information in here. Not to mention that note about the expensive squid game incident which I doubt they would have included in a document for public consumption.
I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.
Mr Beast’s company has been getting a ton of negative attention for how it works and how it treats employees and contestants. It seems plausible it was leaked as another example of toxic culture.
Let's work hard to make the rich man rich. It is poisonous to only do your work. You need to sacrifice everything for the well being of the man
This mentality should be banned from everyone's lives
The informal tone of the document is powerful. Makes you feel like Mr Beast is being real with you, that he really does care about this, and that he wants you to be in this thing together with him.
I Googled a bit (I'm not a consumer of these types of YouTube videos) and apparently this guy is pretty rich by now. He identified a path to wealth that clearly works and exploited it well, so he is definitely smart. Well deserved from that point of view.
However, it makes me sad that we as a society even let what he does (a zero-net as many pointed out) be a path to wealth on the first place. The fact that we reward so much something that is so void of value is our fault and IMHO what needs to be corrected somehow. It's sad to think we throw so much money at people covered by ketchup, but many PhD's barely make any money and we cannot figure out how to make open-source sustainable.
If our reward schemes were more aligned with actually providing value to society, this guy might have applied his intelligence and amassed his wealth doing something more worthwhile for everybody.
> Here’s a darker note from the section “Random things you should know”:
>> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
Can someone explain this to me? I don't quite get what the original quote means.
I personally deeply disliked the semi-cult like explanation that anyone moving out was basically not good enough to be there in the first place.
Apart from that, it's the good old Netflix playbook: empower managers to remove adequate team members with good severance to give space to good team members. The danger is letting it deteriorate into stack ranking if you are not careful with the deleterious effect on team work associated.
I don’t see much similarity here, other than the use of those three letters and the idea that Cs should be removed from the company.
The MrBeast As are rated on their ability to learn - which is surprisingly a characteristic that’s not mentioned in the Welch model.
MrBeast Bs are As who haven’t got there yet - Welch Bs are not expected to get there.
MrBeast Cs are reasonably capable but are missing out on that crucial learning instinct - again, not mentioned by Welch, who has Cs who are incompetent procrastinators.
I agree that they're not perfectly similar, but I strongly suspect that MrBeast's idea stemmed from the Welch model. They are suspisciously similar haha
I think it’s likely that the idea of A, B and C players is pretty widespread to the point that MrBeast was exposed to it, and that Jack Welch was the person who first popularized using the first three letters of the alphabet to categorize employees.
Continuing like this is eventually going to get your account banned. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, that would be good.
This is a great "leaked" pdf and honestly, shows the evolution (or degradtion) in media. Typical phrases, e.g. sign of the times, if it makes money of course it exists, etc etc but really it's great insight.
I personally don't/wouldn't do this, but I can't ignore the money making machine youtube has become / the producers of said videos.
While I don't like his content (obviously as a 37 year old man), he's a really interesting person and has certainly built something people want (people being children for the most part).
For anyone who isn't aware of the problematic issues currently surrounding MrBeast (see sweeeter's comment here for some context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649#41551656), I encourage you to read the linked Rolling Stone document and actually find a working link of the original leaked document and read it (link in post doesn't work).
The blog post happens to miss a few of the points in the original document that would raise a lot of eyebrows and I'm not sure that it's a fair take on "what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation" if it lands you in all sorts of management trouble and potentially criminal allegations.
This has one of the best sections I've read on why communication lines are important:
>It’s very important as a company we maintain proper communication lines.
... If you skip and just go below you prizemust then call and let the people in charge know. Let’s say you’re a production coordinator and you call a writer and tell him you need some bits about a sandwich being cooked with lava, seems harmless... and then tyler askes her why she is making lava and she has no idea and everyone is confused. This is what happens when you don’t follow proper communication lines.
Skipping over all the typos, it's just such a great visual of the communication breakdowns that can happen when a lot of things are going on.
Also this section on tracking contractors:
> [Y]ou can’t just dump and forget your projects... Ask him to send videos everyday to spot problems early, hell maybe talk to him twice a day. I don’t care just don’t leave room for error. No excuses, stop leaving room for error. Check in daily, receive videos, and know weeks in advance if you’re fucked. Not days.
This is more extreme than I encounter in my day to day, very on brand to MrBeast, but it's interesting to see this constant accountability and ownership are so critical in their production. I see similar behavior in some of the more effective people I've worked with.
On one side, an army of HN commenters: “Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”
On the other side, Mr Beast:
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here.
I read that as less about "building on someone else's platform" (though that's still a risk they're taking) and more a youtube / media content producer version of "perfect software doesn't pay the bills, shipping software does". I've known plenty of good developers that if they didn't have hard deadlines and people reminding them about what the real goal of the company is, would spend 6 months developing a perfect, provably correct PDF to JSON converter for reading any possible design of tables in all PDFs. Missing the fact that they only need to parse the tables in the CSV files that the vendors are sending us so we can invoice the customers.
That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.
For every MrBeast there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands (millions?) you've never heard of. And for some of them, it's because the platform pulled the plug on them.
If someday YT decides to pull the plug on MrBeast, he might start singing a different tune. Or not, I mean, his millions and millions of dollars will probably make him feel better.
Maybe it will pay off for you, or maybe you will get banned before you make enough to retire or create another company. This is prime example of survivorship bias.
There's a difference, video is probably transferrable to an extent (with their capital they could probably buy/launch beast-tube quickly and kids would follow).
Building your software to depend on Google API's and then be banned from Google would put you in deep trouble, building on Google systems but not relying on their API would still allow for an migration.
YouTube is fine as a distribution channel for now. Though there is some risk of being extorted or losing access, the bigger threat will come some years down the road when video is a legacy distribution format.
Diffusion at the edge is going to change a lot of things. Especially since it won't have to encode to linear formats.
Many people are so uncomfortable with risk that they publicly advocate (and personally live by) a policy of taking zero risk. Of course they also throw away the very real benefits that come packaged with many risks.
“Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”
Initial growth on someone else's platform is a good idea. However, once you see some small success, it's best to think about diversifying. Mr. Beast has already done this. He's essentially his own brand now.
Mr Beast videos do single digit millions in revenue per video, and he operates on razor thin margins re-investing everything. Youtube does $8.5Bn a quarter in revenue. For startups the target is the Youtube exit, not the Mr Beast exit. In fact, whilst Mr Beast is obviously doing a great job and making tonnes of money it's not clear if he even ever could exit. What Mr Beast is doing is incredibly successful, but it's not the silicon valley start up model.
You actually believe he makes razor thin profit? And you believes he reinvests everything? Sorry but none of us have verified his company’s books. Just saying
Some people have alluded to this, but I find it sad that so much energy in our modern society goes towards trying to exploit arbitrary particularities of arbitrary platforms. Even if we set aside the stuff like "you're taking a risk building on YouTube because they could ban you", there's the more practical stuff about how the plan is all about the title and thumbnail. Like if YouTube somehow switched to letting you have two thumbnails, or some other UI element that you could customize, suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment.
It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and less and less on making contact with any kind of external reality.
I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.
Sometimes i feel like we shit on youtube creators because it seems like what they do is silly or frivolous. But is that last software feature you worked on that nobody is ever going to use but is needed to check a box so marketing can say we meet some standard so that we can sell the product to some big corp decision maker who is never going to actually use the software, really any better?
Jobs a job. Ultimately people are doing it to pay the bills, not for the sake of art.
It's clear by now that youtube is just a platform designed to produce the Infinite Jest video. Mr. Beast accordingly just appears to be a step on the way there.
> suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment
These people are the best positioned to figure this out. They've been experimenting with youtube changes for years and they already know how to experiment out the particularities.
Of course they're best positioned to figure it out. The question is whether it's a good use of anyone's time to figure out such things, or whether we have a good society if it's one where people think that is a good use of their time. I am best positioned to pick my own nose but I don't think that means there needs to be a manual on how to do so.
if you genuinely think that "literally everything in the creative industry" is chasing trends within the well-defined boundaries of existing paradigms that giant corporations have created for you, you aren't a creative
Great article. Its lesson is basically: go 110% in everything you do. Buck conventional laziness even when everyone else is doing it and be the ultimate "try-hard"
This document makes me want to study it so I understand what Mr Beast thinks it's the best viral video and then de-program myself so I never ever click in those. I'm halfway there, if I see a thumbnail of a guy in a ketchup bathtub I will tell youtube to never recommend that channel again.
I had been thinking about this as learning ability (fluid intelligence) and institutional knowledge both following a power law distribution. Mr. Beast refers to A and B players as being sufficiently high in learning ability and only differing in their position in the institutional knowledge distribution.
Packaging this effect into a 3 category model definitely makes it easier to operationalize. The severance part is important too, since there would be hesitancy to terminate even obvious "C players".
If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get them to A player status? Is there an effective strategy to getting someone to open their eyes, participate actively, and ramp up their performance to the highest levels?
I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?
>If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get them to A player status?
By definition yes, because a B player by definition can be turned into an A player. But by that token, anyone that can be turned into a B player, is by definition a B player already. Hence, a C player, who is by definition not a B player, cannot be turned into a B player.
>I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?
It would be motivation. Intellectual capacity can in principle be fixed, but motivation cannot because you would need to motivate them to fix it.
Trying to discern whether YouTube or TikTok influencers are better than the other is like picking which tooth you want pulled. Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.
I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing. The fact that a lot of HNers seem to look up to Mr. Beast is almost as tellingly acerbic as the reliance on Steve Jobs for intelligent business quotes.
>Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.
This is the new type of cable television and it's free. Yea sure I pay it with my data but at least I don't need to spit out money every month to watch it.
>I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing.
Again, entertainment on YouTube is free....even YouTube stopped bothering me to disable my ad-blocker so MrBeast is not getting a penny from me. I might buy YouTube Premium at some point in the future tho.
Well hey, I'm on the same page. I don't pay for cable these days, nor put up with adblockless YouTube in the first place. But content on YouTube - particularly popular content - is a race to the bottom worse than Keeping up with The Kardashians ever was. I've watched Mr. Beast videos (at the behest of my ex) and haven't found anything except hyperactive filmmaking married to absurd and ill-considered ideas. It's deconstructed short-form entertainment in ways that TikTok is probably envious of. Truly, they've cracked the marketing code for an ADHD-addled era of content consumption.
And therein lies "the problem" - this shit is garbage. I like some YouTube content too, but holy fucking cow is it worse than everything that came before it. TVFilthyFrank was just doing the same thing Jackass did with fewer safety considerations and lower production value. Historians making documentaries are basically recouping the task of The History Channel on a smaller budget with fewer regulations on construing truth. At the end of the day, as much as I hate cable television, I cannot honestly say anything on YouTube comes close to the production in an episode of Top Gear or Game of Thrones. It's garbage all the way down, supported by marginal advertising, kept out of Google's Graveyard by horrific levels of rentseeking and AdSense monopoly abuse, and ultimately propelled by sensationalist and meaningless content tailored to offend as few people as possible. Content on YouTube is terrible in new and terrifying ways.
It seems like the last several months have seen a trickle of information being leaked since the recent scandals involving Chris Tyson and some video series from former employees "exposing" the channel as basically scripted reality TV (I thought that was already well known, it's pretty obvious if you spend more than a few minutes watching it).
What Donaldson has done is effectively hack the Youtube algorithm, and as a hobby content creator for the last 10 years or so, I find it has been absolutely destructive to the "content" world. He's absolutely right - you're not trying to make the best content, or the best video, or whatever - you're trying to make the best YOUTUBE video, implicitly admitting what youtube floats to the top of recommendation algorithms is NOT any of those things. It's hyper optimized to be as addictive and as least satiating mentally as possible, it's entertainment junk food. At least old-school reality TV had semi interesting people on it.
It's just very saddening for me to watch the "beastification" of youtube and the overall creator space. I make content because I like making it. I make the content I would like to watch. It's secondary to me whether anyone else enjoys it, and that kind of creative spirit is absolutely gone on the web, and I completely believe content quality has suffered from it. To some degree the audience is the problem for demanding it, as sibling comments have pointed out, but I think this is blaming the victim a bit. Youtube also pushes these addicting videos out to people and highly incentivizes it. It'd be like handing out cigarettes at the hospital and blaming the subset of people that get addicted. Sure, it's their fault, but the hospital probably shouldn't be doing that in the first place.
MrBeast has a deep understanding of his audience. He often tailors his content based on what resonates with viewers, and he uses feedback to continuously improve. But still there are some problems with approach
So what really turned me off to this guy was his smarmy ~2019 campaign that also damaged my view of otherwise sensible Youtubers who shilled for him without thinking carefully. As such, pretending to save the planet while failing at math, logic, and physics because getting rich and being a internet->real celebrity are oh so much more important™ than emotionally and financially exploiting your audience or doing what you say you're going to do. sigh
Why did you think he was supposed to save the planet? He clearly wrote in the document that the goal is to make the best YOUTUBE videos. Not saving the planet or any other bullshit that he puts in the videos. If the numbers showed that the best YOUTUBE videos could be made by torturing third-world infants to death, then he would torture third-world infants to death. Because that would be how you get the best YOUTUBE videos.
Never really occurred to me why Mr. Beast content doesn’t appeal to me (nor have I thought about it much)… their sole purpose is CTR. Makes sense. Lame.
I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out.
But, what's the alternative?
For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.
Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.
What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
People might downvote this but it’s what our family is doing. We barely watch any TV and do t spend a lot of time on screens. We have a lot of books and entertainment for my kids is primarily through reading physical books, sports, hanging out with friends in their backyard etc.
Many people, when they say 'culture' in the context of kids, mean something that kids can discuss around a lunch table. If OP's kids don't watch youtube, they won't have this particular aspect of culture as an inroad to make friends.
Like other humans, kids don't have universally aligned interest in media. Also, "missing out" can be good in many cases, depending on the content of said media.
Sure, but if YouTube makes up say 20% of culture, that's 20% of conversations they cannot participate in. I'd love to read any source that says that "missing out" on making friends is actually a good thing.
Absolute nonsense. Even a few months difference in when children get sucked into the YouTube vortex means they have totally different understandings of creators, their content and the contemporary dramatics.
YouTube content, thanks to its short-lived nature, has become essentially useless as a shared 'cultural context' unless one is plugged in 24/7.
My kids have a lot (probably too much) screen time. None of them watch Mr Beast. I think he is recommended to people who don't have well developed Youtube histories. He is sort of the Taylor Swift of Youtube. She might be a fine musician for all I know but no music service is going to recommend her to a listener it knows wants metal. Beast is a safe recommendation for people who only have a casual interest in what the platform has to offer. He never appears in my recommendations. The algorithm knows better.
We watched Youtube together as a family at first and when the kids got older I helped them find creators and setup their own subscriptions. The worst thing a parent can do is sit them in front of Youtube Kids brainrot. They started with lots of education,science,maker/craft,animation and PG gamers like Hermitcraft.
good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity
Restoration and repair videos could be a good choice, although there's also plenty of fake clickbait content there too now. I usually actively avoid content with sensationalised titles and look for smaller non-profit creators.
We successfully moved to restoration videos. They’re great. Agreed with everything said about both Mr Beast and Mark Rober. Not what I want my kids watching a lot of.
Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a search based on the topics.
That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50% are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results, it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic isn't well covered on YouTube yet.
With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn before we turn the screens on.
Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark sculpture
Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.
Idk much about him but stacking school busses on top of each other with a crane or driving a train into a sinkhole seem like pretty interesting things to do. Better than geeking out over the bloodiest Mortal Kombat fatality or whatever I was doing at that age. What's an example of the more "crap" content?
Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video content must be rejected.
Learning to do things from books is the only way we can safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.
Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or collections of channels can be picked individually. Google aren't making it easy, but the option is there.
> Does YouTube kill those channels?
I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game shows.
i don't know of many, but I've got kids in a similar range and I endorse Kurzgesagt. CGP Grey hits nice sometimes too (they loved the flags, hexagons, and dragon videos)
The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.
It doesn't kill them per se, but it doesn't seem to promote them either. The good content takes a lot more digging to find. Not an easy task, considering how bad the search on YouTube is.
I like Practical Engineering. I also watch a lot of quality family vblog. You can tell genuine content vs influencer contents I am sure
Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors
I know this is beside the point but I remember the first time I bought a Mr Beast bar, I bit into it, and realized their standard bar was actually a pretty dark chocolate. I think they changed the labeling but I imagine there must have been a lot of kids who bought the candy bar and hated it lol
I know what you mean, but MrBeast cured 1000 people of (a form of) blindness, which is quite a benefit to humanity [1]. I would not be surprised if kids learn a bit of "kindness is good" from him.
[1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
Thinking that kindness content is good is naive. It is exploitative and usually what people get from it is "it could happen to me" rather than "I could help others".
It is a fine argument, but I mean it is youtube and it is kids we are talking about. It's really hard to show kids kindness through free content if you want to be nuanced.
The whole youtube/streaming/advertiser/influencer/product pusher ecosystem is complete shit for kids and, to a degree, adults.
We have a 10 year old son and best approach we have found is VLC on his ipad and family TV, coupled to a NAS that we drop the content on to (downloaded/ripped shows that contain no ads).
I just couldn’t with this, until the very last page. I feel like so many founders write and expect performance like this, and they miss what he said at the very, very end.
Dogpack404 is a former mrbeast employee currently exposing mrbeast for varying misconduct, such as faking his videos, running illegal lotteries through his videos, doing a crypto pump n dump, making fraudulent claims about his merch, inhumane treatment of contestants and harbouring multiple sex offenders at his company. The list goes on and Dogpack404 is not the only one currently exposing things like this, but is maybe the most prominent.
This is no different than the high performance culture that comes at top-notch firms or startups. The main difference between working for MrBeast and working at a startup is that at least what "high performance" means is codified in this 40-page manual. There's a lot of value in this document regardless of what you think of Youtube, MrBeast videos and the general place these videos have in our cultural zeitgeist.
He already has a huge audience so whatever he puts in that PDF is not really useful to anyone else.
Surprised that he says he studied youtube virality. It seemed that he got his ideas from 80s prank TV but over time his titles became increasingly audacious.
Also surprised that his videos are being watched to the end. The clickbait generates curiosity for watching , but his vids are so predictable it s totally boring
Everybody's riding the "MrBeast" train because he s so successful , even though they truly don't like him. 3 years down the line he will be in court defending his abuses
I think many readers would benefit from the sections on communication, ownership, and responsibility. I've seen way too many projects fail because of poor communication.
if an actual one, to me it is another interesting perspective inside the minds of a privately-owned, internet-based party that hold a significant mind-share in its domain.
Imagine the countless millions of hours people, especially young ones, have wasted on this content.
Sure, the argument may go, its entertainment and those would have gotten the same from alternative sources, but in this particular case, viral ready addictive video content is ultimately a bane for society.
This guy has studied 20000 to 30000 of videos, done data analysis on them, and then finetuned his videos to make them popular and earn a lot of money on it. As a business, this is genius, he is talented, he is profitable, his investors are circling around banks. But society has suffered for it.
My kid watches similar pointless videos, and he is on the verge of addiction (any and all free time he has, he jumps to the videos of colorful activity videos on you tube, from chinese or russian channels. He is 10 years old)
I am weaning him off youtube altogether, and involving him in books and other activities, but it is damn hard.
Despite whatever we think of Mr Beast, these instructions have helped build something impressive. The principles are interesting, and could be applied to build other impressive things. I like that. Elements that particularly stand out to me:
1. Taking direct ownership
2. Doing things that are effective, even though they're socially uncomfortable
3. Working towards the goal, to the detriment of other things which sound good but are not the goal
4. The way they fight to keep retention to incremental checkpoints. I don't know if this has any applications for Engineering, but certainly for marketing and communication it does.
5. The claimed method of constantly evaluating his employees _really_ appeals to me
The amount of bootlicking content in here is ridiculous. Nothing in this is special or has much to do with MrBeast's success. In fact, it has a lot more to do with damaging the brand which has happened recently. Thinking you will find success even remotely like MrBeast's by following the contents of this document is hilariously naive.
Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.
The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person.
I don't like coffee but I still might learn about the business since it's so big.
I like your perspective but I don’t think liking coffee is the right comparison. It’s closer to reading a manual for a successful casino, where a lot of it is about manipulation rather than creating value. Obviously Mr. Beast isn’t as far out ethically as casinos, but IMO more in that direction than coffee tea preferences.
Both perspectives are somewhat true. Mr. Beast is building the best YouTube videos. It is a quality product and it is entertainment. It’s garbage for education or self improvement but it’s legit for entertainment and you can’t dismiss entertainment as a net bad for the world, not completely.
You both are right and wrong in a way. Parent poster who only had negative things to say is totally out of touch.
> Mr. Beast is building the best YouTube videos. It is a quality product and it is entertainment.
Hard disagree. Is he making the most profitable, most clicked, or most viral videos? Maybe. That’s objectively quantifiable and I’ll give you that. But “best” is very subjective. I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if Mr Beast stopped making videos and deleted his account today. His videos are the audiovisual equivalent of junk food: not good for you; negatively addictive; and big shady business.
Give me Folding Ideas any day. Now those are some quality and entertaining videos. The kind I save up to savour with some wine. That’s my definition of best. Yours will differ, but that’s the point.
I don't think it's junk food. It's...just not compelling to me.
My junk food consumption is really just education/science/maker youtube recommendation engine. Yes, I am constantly learning lot of interesting things to a certain level of depth, but I would be better off with only consuming youtube in the evening to wind down and getting things done in the morning and afternoon or diving deep where youtube don't tend to go.
I’ve never watched this MrBeast person before, but the top result is “Last to to hand off Lamborghini, keeps it”. Other videos are similar. How is this not junk?
It's an examination of human psychology. That's why people are interested. How far are people willing to go for it? Who makes mistakes? How did the person who won beat everyone else?
I would say since it's about reality it's less junk then something like Shakespeare which is completely made up.
It's just Safe for TV Squid games (not as the Series, the games itself). And it's not examination of psychology. It's just a silly competition to get more eyeballs.
It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives on being "real" while having to do with reality as much as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
You put humans in extreme situations and you see how they react and you see what they do. It is an examination of psychology 100%. That's why people were interested in the original show because how humans behave in extreme situations is what a lot of people are interested in.
>It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives on being "real" while having to do with reality as much as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake. The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything. You made this statement up out of thin air without presenting evidence.
What's your evidence that Mr. Beasts videos don't have any psychology and are all fake?
> You put humans in extreme situations and you see how they react and you see what they do
That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains. By that stretch of imagination, you can construe any gulag or concentration camp as an examination of psychology.
Psychology would require a double-blind experiment, some kind of control group, etc.
> Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake.
Most of how reality TV works is by live editing to create narratives and guiding players along what the audience wants to see. It's lies by omission and exaggeration.
> The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything.
Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
No CEO is going to tell his employees, lie, cheat and steal to get our taxes to appear as low as possible, and our revenue as high as possible. They will say: "Be a go getter. Get those KPIs in the green. Only you can make a difference! Make me proud! Etc."
That said, the leaked production document is alarming even by these standards. "NO DOES NOT MEAN NO" stands head and shoulders above the rest in its implication, even if it didn't sound like a rapist's mantra.
>That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains.
No. Examining all human behavior under all circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
Even so. You call it torture and that's way over the top and offensive because what's happening here is NOT torture. These people are there voluntarily and are experiencing NOTHING even close to torture. I have family members who were in concentration camps so I know this.
>He already faked videos before.
Should've presented this first. I find it quite likely he faked some videos and others aren't fake.
>Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
I mentioned the manual because you didn't bring ANY evidence to the table. The only other official document on the table was the original article and I said IT had no evidence. There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Your link here: https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp... is good. But again it doesn't mean his whole operation is fake. AND this link is a mild and weak accusation at best that the abandoned city is near a popular beach or can't be reached by car. I happened to watch this video and he never mentioned it was completely remote like that. Those accusations are like saying yosemite isn't the wilderness because buses and shuttles drive around inside of the park.
>rapist's mantra.
Rapist? You're over the top describing things like this. Rape is a crime. What Mr. Beast does as bad as you think it is, is nowhere even close to rape.
> No. Examining all human behavior under all circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What you describe is sadism.
> Should've presented this first.
You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
> There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
Hell, just read about Google and how engineers were told to not use the M(arket) -word in any written communication.
> Rapist? Whatever this guy is, he's not a rapist. Your language is way over the top.
Step 1. Please read what I said.
Step 2. Don't add words to my sentences.
I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra. "No means no" is the female anti-rape slogan. What do you get when you negate an anti-rape mantra? A rapist's mantra.
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That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
>Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What you describe is sadism.
It's a science and observing human behavior is within the lines of that science. It's not formal application but it's observing human behavior nonetheless.
>You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
>Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
I don't care, without evidence everything is just made up circumstance. The possibility is there but your accusations are more than reading between the lines. The concentration camp thing and rapist comparison are evidence of this.
>I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra.
Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See what I did there? I only said you "sound" like that. What I said was an example but if it was a real comparison it's completely over the top and uncalled for.
Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an aggressive hustle culture.
>That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
> It's a science and observing human behavior is within the lines of that science.
That's not science. Science requires, hypothesis and testing, it also requires isolating confounding factors. Reality TVs and Mr. Beast videos aren't that.
> I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
Is it? Luckily, there is more, now go and look better.
> Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See what I did there?
Do you mean you're putting words in my mouth? I'm used to it.
> Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an aggressive hustle culture.
Seeing the culture/people he surrounded himself with, I'm not sure if that's uncalled-for. But I'm awaiting further proof to make a definite statement.
> He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
'Ends justify the means' is literally Machiavellian. That guidebook is full of it. Call it hustle, call it A-players, it's the same thing.
---
To sum up, you don't know what science is, you don't seem to be able to read between the lines, came into this uninformed and have a nasty tendency to misread and put words I didn't write/commission into my mouth. I'm done here. This is debate with someone who's arguing in bad faith.
I know what science is, I’m a scientist and I’ve studied the philosophy of science extensively as well. You’re talking about formal science. Therapy and much of the things that take place in psychology aren’t formal.
Informal science the lambo show has a question, hypothesis and actual test. It’s just not academic, but the results form legit qualitative data that can be used in a formal presentation if one should so choose.
I can read between the lines but choose not to.
I have not misread you are the one making comparisons to rape and using examples like “concentration camp” and torture. It is entirely true to say your language is over the top.
I’m glad you’re done. But I don’t agree with your accusations at all.
> You’re talking about formal science. Therapy and much of the things that take place in psychology aren’t formal.
It's not formal. It's the most common definition.
knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method
Look, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
According to Aristotelian Philosophy, there are only four elements and you can't disprove it. It's all the 5th element playing tricks on you.
> I can read between the lines but choose not to.
If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
> “concentration camp” and torture
That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
> comparisons to rape
I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
>It's not formal. It's the most common definition.
There's many many definitions going along the gradient of formality from informal to formal. The science you're referring to is more on the formal end where there's data gathering that's written down, a hypothesis is made and what not. Additionally we tend to use statistics to numerically quantify the information.
At the most informal end, data is simply gathered through observation, a hypothesis is made intuitively. We still did science in the sense that it's possibly still valid. Do you need formal science to prove there's ground beneath your feet before you jump off your bed?
>Look, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
science in it's most technical form can only falsify a hypothesis. When a theory is successful it means science only failed to falsify that hypothesis.
Philosophy as a whole is a bunch of BS. It's a bunch of conjecture that they try to formalize stuff that can be formalized and made up stuff that can never really be formalized. It's a mishmash of everything and is therefore nothing. You have the philosophy of science which is good by itself, but when you have something like the philosophy of morality side by side with the philosophy of science and Logic as if these things are equal... it becomes pure BS.
>If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
Freud made up his theories and verified it with his limited anecdotal data. It's much faster and is sometimes right. Formal Science is much more accurate but is slow.
>If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
Doesn't mean what you said is even remotely true. Like freud this type of prediction needs a bit more "formality" to back up what you said.
>That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Not even close. In it's most extreme form people go to jail. This is far from that and uncalled for.
>Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
No it gives you knowledge of the test and what happens in the presence of confounding factors. It also indicates the possibility that the same results could happen without the confounding factors.
>I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
Because it's extreme and unnecessary language that increases the hostility of the conversation and the accusation. I'm telling you that your response is over the top.
Most Entertainment is the equivalent of junk food.
Wine is toxic for your health. You think Mr. Beast is junk food based on an opinion while wine is scientifically proven to be garbage for your body. Yet here you are watching educational videos while downing liquid poison. You do more damage to yourself than watching a Mr. Beast video and not drinking wine.
The difference between you and people who watch Mr. Beast is raw snobbery. Sheesh. If you don’t understand why someone would watch a video purely for mindless entertainment and no educational value I don’t think you understand humans or how humans work.
You don’t need to be defensive, I wasn’t attacking you. I don’t think you have understood my comment in the slightest but I don’t wish to cause you further distress as you seem to have become quite irate. I will tell you that, like most people, I’m not above eating junk food on occasion. Also, I was upfront that I watch Folding Ideas videos for the entertainment. Savouring and entertainment aren’t mutually exclusive.
I urge you to attempt to engage with arguments as they are made, not with a version created in your head that vilifies the other person.
Finally, I wish you a calm and peaceful week, with no conflicts and all the YouTube videos you wish to gorge yourself upon, as long as the habit isn’t detrimental to you or others in any way.
your personal opinion doesn't matter at MrBest's scale and doesnt matter to this discussion at all, because you are a single person, but YouTube has few hundred million/billion other users and each of their individual opinion weights the same weight as yours.
basically what I am trying to say is you are not the median Youtube viewer
"Best" and "quality product" by a certain metric, ka-ching. I assume that the leaked PDF lays out what the metrics are that matter to them, but the article kinda skipped over how it's a choice what to consider "best". There's a lot of "quality" videos on YouTube by different metrics than MrBeast videos, that I enjoy watching quite a bit more.
Casinos are incredibly exploitative not only to staff (even relatively 'above board' companies like Evolution have awful labor records in poor Eastern European countries), but they thrive out of milking their customers in incredibly manipulative, tactical ways to bleed them as slowly and effectively as possible.
Tactics such as returning offers are specifically made to encourage people to pick up gambling addictions. Regulations are skirted by companies like Stake, allowing customers to skirt restrictions easily with a VPN and lax KYC. Their massive presence in sports as sponsors help them advertise to not just adults but children who engage with sports as well, a fact that I'm sure these operators love.
While Mr Beast might use tactics that could be construed as similar, or tries to hit KPI which are similar to those used by casinos, I'm quite sure that Mr Beast video addictions do not lead to thousands of suicides a year, and that fact alone leads me to think that it is in fact obvious that Mr Beast is not as far out ethically as casinos.
Maybe... but I read it more as (and tend to agree with) blow it off because it's explicitly an approach that makes the world a worse place in almost every way except perhaps your bank account balance. It's possible to be successful without being mercilessly amoral and there's a big difference between not personally caring for a product vs thinking a product is toxic and holding your nose anyway for the sake of a paycheck.
I mean should we be learning about how to run a private equity firm that buys up all the heart clinics in a metropolitan area then jacks up prices? It's not really that interesting unless you're writing anti-trust legislation.
I'm not saying Mr.Beast is even that bad but spare us the patronizing attitude at least.
A person could read this document without once thinking "this is how I'm going to do things". In fact, the first I heard of it was from people describing portions specifically to decry manipulative and toxic behaviors.
In your particular example, lawmakers don't wake up one day and decide to write anti-trust legislation. They do it in response to sustained pressure from constituents who must first understand what's going wrong and propose (hopefully somewhat effective) ways to fix it. So understanding what's going on in your own community and how a business specifically is taking advantage is a good thing to do if you have the time and inclination.
I read this post because I was curious about how these operations work. What I found is:
- Making good YOUTUBE videos is paramount, not quality videos
- Be quirky and crazy in videos using a blank check
- If something goes awry or you need it faster, also use a blank check
- Some advice related to thumbnails and titles (relying on YouTube's current algorithm which could change the next second)
The only thing I found semi useful is how he classifies employees using the A, B and C system (e.g. A is top tier, B can be trained to be top tier, and C is dead weight)
I agree on money != success in a broader sense, but we live in a capitalistic society where wealth creation is possibly the top indicator of "success", so in that sense wealth captured and created is _the_ metric.
If you read the full PDF it’s clear he is very carefully gaming the algorithm: he includes charts showing exactly when people drop off from watching videos, and explains how he has an exact set of rules for how the thumbnail, first minute, 2-3 minutes, 3-6 minutes and 6-end minutes of any video should work.
I find the lengths he has gone to in order to design his videos specifically for how YouTube works to be extremely impressive.
Statistics about when people drop off, or what thumbnail or content is appealing, is studying human viewer behavior. There's no algorithm telling the users to find it interesting and keep watching.
Talking about “the algorithm” always feels a bit foolhardy to me because it’s undocumented and constantly changing.
Given that, it’s pretty clear to me from the full PDF that MrBeast is “gaming” it to the best effect possible given no perfect information.
The thing he cares about is if YouTube is going to recommend his video for people to watch, even beyond his own subscribers.
He believes that the key to this recommendation mechanism is having a high AVD and AVP (defined on page 5). Given that he has the highest rated account on all of YouTube now I’m inclined to defer to his expertise.
I don’t dispute his expertise, I dispute your interpretation of what he’s doing if you think it’s gaming an algorithm. Perhaps we’re debating semantics.
These are metrics one might use even if there’s no algorithm, in fact historically they have. TV shows used to use Neilsen data for similar purposes long before there was YouTube. TV producers would measure audience dropoff and then use that to help writers write more gripping episodes.
Google’s hope with their search for decades was that their algorithm was ungameable and that the way to get your site to the top of any result was to make it the best. That’s why they made it a black box and changed it whenever SEO caught on and used it to push junk to the top.
That’s had mixed results on the web for sure but it’s probably worked much better with video because you can track these metrics in a way you can’t with text. Also with the web, the page you land on may make Google further money (with ad sense, inspiring more Googling, using a Google product directly, etc.) or it may not, they don’t always own the ad service at wherever you land when you click a search result link. They don’t have the pure financial incentive of just showing you what you want, something you want a little less might make them more money.
With YouTube they own it all. The more you watch YouTube the more they make. You’re only clicking ads to other YouTube videos.
Everybody on YouTube knows you want a compelling lead in to get the click over to your video, a hook to keep them watching, etc. He’s codifying what they all already know and do. He just is better at it.
>If you read the full PDF it’s clear he is very carefully gaming the algorithm: [...]
How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles? It's probably designed to draw people in and sell copies. Is that also "gaming the algorithm"?
“How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles?”
Because it’s extraordinarily effective?
He made it to the top of YouTube with it. If it’s the exact same thing as other existing techniques how come others haven’t been able to match his success with those classic formulas?
Presumably because journalism is centuries old, and techniques like this eventually become "industry standard" and you don't notice it. Once people figure out what the strategy is, they're going to try replicating it to capitalize on his success. Afterwards I suspect he'll still have a first-mover advantage, but he's going to be nowhere near as popular (comparatively). It's not any different than say, the reality show "format" being eventually copied by other production companies/networks.
I skimmed the summary and it describes every aspect about his production company, whereas your "summary" only described one aspect (ie. figuring out how to keep engagement up), so I only responded to that. You can't treat the entire document as "gaming the algorithm". For instance, the document also mentions only hiring A players, which could hardly be described as "he is very carefully gaming the algorithm".
So far as I can tell his "gaming the algorithm" is having a few short clips near the start to hook people in (ie. an summary/abstract), and periodic bursts of excitement to keep people engaged. The first is so banal that it's hardly worth discussing. Articles in scientific journals have abstracts/summaries. It's not anything nefarious. The rest seems like standard narrative/storytelling advice, eg. hero's journey[1], or how broadcast TV shows have cliffhangers/plot developments to get people to watch the next episode or ad break. Do you think 24[2] is "gaming the algorithm" by presenting 24 action packed episodes where there's always some new/unresolved plot point at the end of each episode?
Correct but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with intentionally gaming an algorithm. TV never had an algorithm and some people were a lot better at making TV that others wanted to watch than others.
You seem to be of the belief that for anyone to be the most successful at this field they have to be gaming an algorithm. But perhaps there’s really no algorithm, or perhaps (my opinion) the algorithm is so good at showing people what they want that you can instead just focus on making videos people want.
The problem is our society teaches us to separate a thing from the externalities of the thing. If it really was just about learning then there wouldn’t be a problem. You can learn from anyone.
However, it’s not just about learning. People are easily influenced by the author of what they’re learning from. They’ll read a Steve Jobs autobiography and learn some interesting business insights, but also hold him in higher regard and perhaps feel like it’s ok to be a raging asshole. People look up to successful people.
It’s entirely appropriate to remind people that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows and perhaps this person has toxic effects they need to be aware of.
I don’t disagree, but surely it’s even easier to bemoan that other people aren’t doing enough of the right things than it is to devote one’s own life to those kinds of problems.
it wasn't my point, my point was that we culturally celebrate "earning a lot of money" as "success" even though when you look carefully you see that they simply are ruining the planet... that's stupid and it should stop
I am as far from a fan as you can get. But calling it shit just demonstrates how little people understand, not how refined their tastes are. It reflects poorly on you guys.
Sure, there are different ways to be commercially successful and most probably require immense talent and hard work. Doesn’t really contradict any particular value judgment of the type of content he produces though.
His comment has merit. The Beast business is fundamentally at the mercy of YouTube, the algorithm and their business priorities. In fact Beast's intentional focus on making the best YouTube videos highlights this. Beast is a high-touch content farm, but ultimately still a content farm and vulnerable to the exact same risks as any other one.
MrBeast is working on other platforms (tiktok twitch etc) and is working towards diversifying. It is arrogant and lowiq to dismiss what MrBest and his team ahve achieved as "learned to game the yt algorithm"
People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.
And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.
YouTube Shorts is really dark, there's stuff that makes David Foster Wallace's 1996 vision of people hyperglued to a TV look prescient instead of allegorical.
There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.
Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators and it's just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn't care what it is. Just hours consumed.
The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...
I think schools need to start teaching "How to Train Your Algorithm" classes to kids, early and often - with a focus on critical thinking and how advertising companies manipulate them.
Couple that with regulations that require the companies to give greater control to the user over video feed customisation and I think it's possible to reign in the arms race for attention.
I'd say I get the adult baby videos 1 in 15 "swipes" and the bodycam / court stuff are for long form, and is definitely because I watch true crime - i.e. I found courtroom videos of long trials fascinating because I wanted to be a lawyer growing up
It's important to note it's not about individual feeds, but the basins that algorithmic content settles in given the data they have.
As things evolve, they optimize for brutally efficient production. "true crime" starts as "NPR award-winning podcast phenomena" and very quickly come to mean a swath of "DUI arrest" videos.
That's because the initial click, averaged across all of us, is *hyper*optimized for a thumbnail with an attractive scantily clad young female saying COPS DAUGHTER THROWS TANNTRUM AFTER BLOWING 0.24! It's not about individuals, or individuals feeds, it's about these niches get hyperdominated by nonsense because that's what best practice is. c.f. document's comments re: thumbnails vs. mine.
Note also, for instance, the curious absence of any programmer influencers making anywhere near the views of pretty much any other topic on YouTube. t3.gg is the top in software engineering videos by a mile, and they pull in 1/10th of what a bodycam video does.
not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share it.
but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every 2 minutes with two sentences:
1. vague statement about what's happened so far that could apply to any video.
2. "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!" (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get a favor like its 1994 still)
These "adult baby videos" are the default content on TikTok.
My paranoid take is that it is a type of hypnotism or mind control yet to be deciphered.
In reality, it is just a cheap way of generating (remixing/stealing) content with TTS voice overs and algorithmic selections of video clips. I would bet there is software tailored for it, but I am not interested enough to find out.
This is true, but it's a constant fight with the recommendation system, requiring a fairly strict approach to flagging "not interested" and "do not show this channel again" etc - as soon as you watch one junk-food video in a lazy day, prepare for another round of moderating tangentially related garbage.
The flavor of the cotent is a bit different, but all media is like that. Look at a horror film, or romance novel. It's very clear what human urges/interests are being targetted.
Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.
I think it's easy to believe that something will eventually go away just because we feel that something is not good in some way. But things only go away if people change their behaviour around those things on mass.
There's a growing sentiment that a lot of social media is more bad than good for us. But people don't just stop with a behaviour that they know is bad for them. We need a lot more to change a behaviour that has become established.
I think people are starting to drink less too. Now doctors are starting to ask patients how often they drink and advising them to drink less and less frequently.
Imagine doctors routinely asking their patients if they spend too much time on their phones. Would feel a bit intrusive but for some vulnerable populations like kids it might be a good thing to ask about.
This is absolutely the responsibility of the healthcare system tbh. It feels intrusive right now, but discouraging smoking would have felt intrusive once too.
Why are we calling it anything other than what it is, addiction. You mentioned sugar. Others mentioned alcohol/tobacco. In the end it is just addiction. If we can't talk openly about the actual problem, then it will never be solved. Just like the war on drugs. As long as people want it, others will provide it regardless of legality or self harm
Yes, and now I will argue against myself a bit but it's also important to remember that addiction is not inevitable. It can be fought on a population level over time. Just take a look at this graph. Press the play button on the world map:
I think social media lands somewhere between tobacco and sugar. We don't need tobacco. We need carbohydrates but not refined sugar. Social media can be useful sometimes, but is often a disservice. The feeling of usefulness probably makes it more addictive than smoking. At least for me.
Ever see Dhar Mann brainrot videos? I don't see it going anywhere. It's a big reason why films aren't good anymore. Content producers cater to the intellectual tastes of their respective societies. Long story short, we get what we deserve. Long live Criterion Collection for the handful of us who abstain from mass produced trash.
This resonates. Movies lack depth nowadays, especially cultural depth.
They do sometimes convey interesting messages and they are well produced and captivating but they lack soul. I think about films like "Forest Gump". Personally, I really liked the film, maybe other people didn't like it as much but I found it to be unique and culturally enriching. I'm not even American but I could relate. Modern "movies" usually don't have enough character development; or if they do, it's highly generic. Any character development in modern movies is focused on making the character relatable to the most common denominator among the masses so they lack individuality.
It's even telling that we have separate words "film" and "movies". It reminds me of the book "Brave New World" which is set in the future; they have something called "Feelies" which is described as a complete visual and sensory experience but they don't teach you anything; they are all focused on very narrow physical experiences. Everything in BNW is designed in a way to reduce people's awareness and reduce diversity of thought to the point that they never think to ask certain questions.
There's plenty of good film and TV out there, and you don't even have to look hard to find it. I find this attitude to not just elitist but lazy and ignorant.
Sadly it doesn't get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. Just picking adult animation as another example, for every series like Scavengers Reign (cancelled after 1 season), there's what, two dozen low brow family guy knockoffs?
It wasn't cancelled per se, rather HBO only ordered a single season and they never renewed the show. Honestly it's astounding that it got one season at all considering what HBO were doing to animated series at the time.
The show is fantastic but as far as I'm aware they didn't pull great view numbers, which can probably be attributed to some less than stellar advertising.
That's true. I only heard of it because I follow Charles Huettner on social media. If it had been a couple of months later, after I'd deleted Instagram, I'd never have known.
KOTOR, both of them but especially the 2nd are built on concepts (post-nihilist existentialism amongst other, to me it's the most obvious) that drive the story. I feel like nowadays, AAA games want to avoid philosophical stuff, or rather keep it way too simple, and we have shit stories (fallout 4/Skyrim. An exception though for Fallout 4 Far harbor DLC).
But we still have good non story-driven AAA games.
I certainly hope the irony of this exchange isn't lost on the both of you, the mass produced Criterion products being seen as the saviors against the wave of mass produced products.
Which doesn't make any difference in the context of their discussion, it's still mass produced and sold in supermarkets and thus by definition not obscure/unique/for initiated only.
If that was the implication then it's an even worse take, as it's textbook survivorship bias. There are plenty of terrible older movie, they didn't make it to criterion collection.
I, like many people, lamented about the media dumbing us down with lazy, brainless content. What blew my mind was when I read someone online respond to this assertion: “you have it backwards, the media is delivering what the market demands”.
As with most things it’s likely a bit of both. But deep down I suspect it’s mostly the market demanding trash.
I think this still has it backwards. People, who are not experts in the content they consume, can't be relied upon to distinguish good from trash. Not because they don't experience the difference, but because they don't know the indicators.
I couldn't tell you whether my surgeon was any good or not leading up to an operation, but if they were bad, I'd sure be able to tell 2 weeks later.
I think it is ultimately up to professionals to have some pride in their work. I think they'll also need to have a certain amount of protection from hacks willing to undercut them.
It's particularly apparent if you look at the Kindle Top 100 - https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digita.... I'm most familiar with the romances, so that's what I'll be discussing. There's a lot more to the genre than these examples, but that's not what sells.
• Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are poorly written fantasy romances that blew up on TikTok.
• Three books with bare chested men on the covers. These indicate that there's lots of sex scenes; no one reads them for plot.
• Icebreaker is a poorly written hockey romance. The author is ignorant about college, hockey, and the US to say the least.
• Credence is a contemporary romance that's best known for sex scenes and toxic relationships.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury. Both of these are mediocre fantasy romances by Sarah J. Maas; she's the Dan Brown of romance.
If 100's of millions of people are watching something, then clearly it has entertainment value.
His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but it's hard to dispute it's effectiveness. Nor do you have to work there.
His success is all the more impressive given he started with nothing and how competitive the space is.
On some level he's the personification of the youtube algorithm - don't blame him, he's just giving people what they want. On some level this feels like the same outcry parents had to video games in the 90's.
Not saying Mr. beast content isn’t valuable to millions of people, but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.
It’s also the case that people can succeed in spite of their management philosophies. If you only look at the people who have made it you miss out on all the people who tried similar approaches and did not, which is needed to figure out the effectiveness of a strategy before adopting it. Classic example are people trying to be like Steve Jobs who are not successful.
And on the value side - There are a lot of exploitive ways to hook people, and you can think something is exploitive / a local minima, without being an elitist.
Mr. Beast specifically seems fine to me in a similar way that porn is fine. I don’t think it crosses over to exploitive, but I don’t think it’s crazy to make that argument and I don’t think people are primarily motivated by sour grapes or jealousy.
> but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.
The GP never said this. They didn't say it was good because it made money, they said it was good because people like it and watch it. I like it and watch it. I agree with the GP.
> The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually.
Before teenagers were looking up to YouTubers, they were looking up to TV celebs, musicians, sports players, and so on. You had entire publishing empires built around following such celebs around and reporting on their private lives.
I don't think this is hugely different. The tech has evolved and the formulas have been perfected, but it's still catering to the same obsessions and urges that we had for a good while.
Crazy ideas and sensationalism usually works in the showbiz and in the media industry. This is just applied to YouTube or in another words: Old wine in new bottle.
How does it fall under the definition of a bubble? Sure, view counts contribute to more views. But that's not the main retention mechanism of these videos.
I see it as a bubble because they don't have to pay anything to host or publish content even though there is a cost there (storage, streaming, etc..) so they're essentially hoping that YT can keep providing a free service with ads even if they're running at a loss.
It's not clear if YouTube is specifically profitable, because Alphabet only separates revenue, not profit. But, I would imagine they're not running huge margins or even at a loss given their recent crackdown on ad-blockers and Google's overall fight against them with things like manifest V3.
YouTube just generated over 8 billion in quarterly revenue. YouTube has been a bonafide business for content creators for ~15 years. Nothing about this says “bubble”.
It’s inevitable that every business changes with time. And on a long enough horizon collapse is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it a bubble.
Here's to hoping but that could be caused by a number of things. High interest rates for example might make companies unwilling to invest in some types of marketing.
But MrBeast does pay. He pays for it with every video, because YouTube keeps 45% of the ad revenue for it. If he receives ~$300,000 for a video, YouTube has kept another ~$300,000.
there's something truly special about this era, we have so much comfort and "data" yet no one foresaw the enshittification of the web space even though it seems the exact same cycle that happen in any space.. when attention, fame and money gets involved .. most neurons are "working" at milking and abusing the mass. Same exact sleigh of hands really..
Exactly... it feels weird that someone like Simon would fall for this and not see through it for what it is... someone spending his life being very efficient at building shit to sell it to an audience who's too lazy to consume anything but shit, all that paid by a capitalist system running on oil to allow all this shit to happen and enrich the shitster...
We don't need to falsely pretend that those guys are interesting in any way... we should teach our kids to see through the bullshit, and ask to be less efficient, and more kind
You seem to see him as a "success", which means you have a weird definition of "success" (eg you see efficiency as success)
I see a lone tree planter saving the Sahara from desertification and not making a lot of money or being very "efficient on Youtube" as MUCH more successful than MrBeast for my values...
So indeed it seems that you were unconsciously attracted by "efficiency" as "success", which is a common trait of people in tech
And this should be REALLY questioned, because our planet is going to the shitters (environment, climate) BECAUSE of extreme efficiency (to suck resources out and waste it)
That's why we expect from people that they take such entreprise as that of MrBeast with a grain of salt and more judgment
Basically his document is: "how to be even more efficient at inducing addiction-like behaviors in teens so that Youtube can sell them more ads for products they don't need (wasting the planet) and that I can get a slight share of this which is going to make me multi-millionaire (although I don't really need the money)"
is that REALLY the behavior which merits to be called "success"? Is that the kind of behavior we want our kids (or ourselves) to emulate?
> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.
You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast, he is producing real videos at an incredibly high volume and they consistently do numbers.
None of those videos is easy to make.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting
"Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast" — in a discussion on the ethics of Mr Beast.
Sure I get it, probably there are lessons in there ethically good actors could look at and use — but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself. It is totally possible to learn about the whole system with a morbid fascination while being constantly aware of the ethical implications without casting them aside.
The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I don't expect to get a reply given how popular this article and discussion was and given how late I am but ...
What are the ethical considerations here?
The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:
> You could say that about literally any shady business
But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.
Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.
I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).
Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.
Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.
If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.
I found the top level comment to highlight useful ideas.
Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things"
If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment
> but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself
Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
I have got the feeling you are creating a disagreement where there is none. As I said: it is okay to look at how evil-corp is doing things, as long as you can disentangle that from their evil bits, keeping in mind the context within which it was written. That isn't stiff over-moralistic behavior, that is common sense. What isn't usually as okay is going all: "Let's ignore the ethics of $X and don't think about the context within it was written". E.g. a simple bureaucratic rule to collect the religious belief of people might be innocent in some free society, but if the same rule was written in a Nazi-occupied country it gets a completely different meaning. Casting aside the context is like robbing a thing of its meaning. Now just because the Nazis abused that rule doesn't mean other societies elsewhere couldn't use the very same rule in a positive way -- they would just be stupid if they ignored the negative abuses of that rule provided they know of them.
Yes, the context matters a lot. One of the frustrations with this conversation (and this is a thing that happens sometimes and doesn't other times - I don't mean to say this is always a problem on hn) is that we aren't able to discuss the thing because we have to spend the right number of tokens acknowledging globally recognized facts.
I want there to be one comment at the top level saying: hey just in case you're not aware, here's context that you need to know when evaluating a document by Foo.
And then I want the rest of us to be able to discuss it with the understanding that we all have that context.
I agree, but I also think that sometimes looking at the data we have holistically is a good idea.
as the most extreme example; we paid too high a blood cost that shall hpefully never be repeated in civilization again with the Holocaust. But some of the findings in those experiments to have value (I know many of the experiments and findings are worthless from a medical sense). I don't blame anyone at all that takes a moral stance to burn such data in order to discourage any backroom experiments from trying to repeat this, but some of that knowledge was used to save lives.
>The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I believe it can. a lot of the advice I read here is just good business sense.
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
This sucks to hear as an enthusiast focused on research, but this is honestly just talking about scoping and focusing your goal. very common business sense. But your goal hopefully isn't to shovel out slop with clickbait thumbnails that maximizes engagement.
> This is what dictates what we do for videos... If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
This is about making an engaging hook. Again, good business sense you'll hear launching any product.
This is definitely for clickbait (and the interpretation here focusing on AVD over quality can be scrutinized), but you can balance this and make a good hook without outright lying.
>An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video.... we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
crude language, but they understand the competition, and what they can and can't do. Ideally the lesson you get here isn't to just "outspend your competition", but that you need to understand your strengths and highlight them. Mr. Beast mindhacked the algorithms early on and uses those funds to do stuff others don't have the Net Worth to even attempt.
etc. It's possible, as long as you keep a moral compass in mind while understanding the undertones of the advise.
I don’t know if they’re necessarily two different conversations - there’s a conversation to be had whether the business practices discussed would have been effective in an ethical operation.
It’s entirely possible the success has nothing to do with the business principles and 100% the ethics. Same the other way around, or anywhere in between.
1. morals drive ethics, so no point separating the two.
2. ethics is not some ettiquite decided in a business room. they are formed by society. It was probably never ethical to let kids work in coal mines, but as long as it wasn't illegal (and can take the PR hit) some businesses would just do it.
Ok. I'll bite. Ethics is one aspect of humans that allowed us to survive the jungle and move beyond it.
I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people will not understand it that way. They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
This is apparently an unpopular idea but you're right: human nature is based on cooperation. Even under "free market" systems people do things that are not optimal market decisions because they are naturally predisposed to helping other people, even when it is often exploited. A lot of marketing deliberately exploits this, e.g. the common tactic of "giving something for free" to make the consumer feel like they owe a favor, or giving products a cutesy persona so consumers anthropomorphize the product and their interactions with it instead of seeing it as a disposable tool.
We come into this world naked, defenseless, starving and freezing. Other animals are able to defend themselves or at least flee, often only minutes after being born or hatching. It takes literal months for us to learn to meaningfully move on our own, about a year to feed ourselves and many more years to be able to pose a meaningful threat to natural predators or forage for food on our own. Throughout this entire time we not only need to be nurtured by our parents, we need an entire society to sustain us and our caregivers.
This is a common misunderstanding of our evolution: it's not simply our brains that gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom, it's our cooperation. Large brains are a natural consequence of complex social interactions and feed back into them. It's not just the ability to make and use tools that set us apart, it's our ability to teach each other about them and learn from each other.
It didn't take a great individual inventor, it took a tribe full of people to carry on each invention and pass the knowledge to the next generation while sustaining the tribe to allow the inventors to invent new technology or improve upon old ones for the benefit of the entire tribe. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on a human pyramid of all who came before us and everyone around us helping to perpetuate humanity.
Please indulge my hypothetical situation: there is a company that produces many very expensive videos every week and make a lot of money from each one.
Every single video they make is a hit.
In this hypothetical situation, I would be impressed that this organization is able to deliver such consistent product. I would be curious about what they do or say operationally that enables that.
At the end of the podcast the filmcast, they say "at the end of the day, it is really impressive that _ made a movie." (They name the director)
This is true if the director has made dozens of movies or one. It's always impressive. Doing things in the real world is hard.
Do you find anything in this hypothetical situation agreeable? Or is it only hard when someone you like does it?
Ethics only exist to provide value. If you can’t point to a value that your ethics provide then it’s not needed and excessive. Most of the ethical standards do provide value or mitigate risk you just need to understand what that risk and value trades is.
This is the line of reasoning phone scammers used whenever kitboga (a scam baiter) revealed his identity and asked them why they did this job instead of something better. One of them asked him "oh, so you are a saint, and you never did anything wrong?"
It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical sometimes ".
Ethics is no binary. You ethics are not mine and everybody does questionable actions from time to time. A company is an entity with potentially thousands people, one of them doing questionable things will happen.
Some legal entities are acting all the time in a way we would lock them up in psych ward if they were a natural person. That might be a good way to "succeed" but that's probably something the society shouldn't promote/foster.
In the real world it's not only revenue and profits. That's for sure taking most of the space but people behind the entities are caring about other stuff and takes non-profit-optimal decisions all the time.
Sbf is just an example of people who failed. Contrary, Musk or Sackler family are good examples of people who succeeded. Do you want to talk about their questionable ethics and how it made them extremely rich?
Games Workshop, multi-billion pound publicly traded British company. Manufacture their core goods in British factories, don’t engage in tax shenanigans.
I am from far enough back in time (started with 1st edition and then went to 2nd - and had almost all of the codexes, even though I only played a single faction/army) I would buy codexes (army books) for all the armies, because I liked the art and the lore.
The 2nd edition box set was about ~£35 in 1993, adjusted for inflation that would be ~£73 now - which then when converted into CAD is well...alot more than what I just paid for 10th edition (about $80 CAD+tax). So - it's a good deal - and I am sure that there is overlap amongst friends during edition changeover.
5-year cycle would be a happy medium, but "that's just like my opinion man"...
> There is no ethics in business, only revenue and profits.
Ethics affect everything we do. If you are doing something deeply unethical, you have way more difficult time finding good employees, for example. Because people don't want to work for scumbags. And the people you find, are likely also unethical and care only about money, how do you think that is going to play out in the long run?
Business and ethics are inseparable. You have to understand ethics to be able to make money - not meaning that you need to be ethical.
I guess people are taking this comment as supporting unethical business, but in fact what he's saying applies to capitalism in general, and why capitalism is unethical. Pretty much every big company did and is doing unethical things, but for most people it doesn't matter because they're "successful". If you equate amounts of money with success, as our system does, then it is pretty much guaranteed that people will do unethical things to reach "success", i.e., X amounts of dollars.
Ignoring the ethics of Mexican drug cartels, they are producing some crucial and consistently demanded products. Like high-volume of drugs and violence that rivals the state.
None of those are easy to achieve.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be impressed by the logistics of a militarized drug cartel, but from a business and systems view it's quite interesting. /sarcasm
This is literally cocaine logic, i.e. because I feel good when taking cocaine, it's good for me. Ergo, cocaine is good.
what if you study Mexican drug cartels, and you find that they have a certain method of communication that enables them to communicate more efficiently.
You copy this communication in your non-profit organization that feeds starving children and find that you are able to feed 50% more children when communicating with this more efficient method.
This is not "literally cocaine logic", it's learning from others.
To use an example you'll probably agree with more: You can hate the lyrics of a given musical artist but copy their production style and in doing so give your lyrics a better platform from which to be heard.
Methods != end goals
You can adapt effective methods currently used to accomplish questionable things to accomplish more noble things.
although, to be perfectly honest, I doubt you'd learn much from Mexican drug cartels that would apply to software, as the markets are completely different.
Ok, but the methods (hustle, grind-culture, high pressure on marks) are here just as questionable as the end goals (Be the biggest Youtuber).
What can you learn from Mr. Beast? Nothing that a lack of conscience and some basic psychology of engagement couldn't teach you.
To reuse your analogy, what if you could communicate information by arranging the corpses of your enemies in a certain pattern, then use international news reports to get the messages across.
What could this teach us about communication? Nothing.
We learn that they operate on a culture of radical accountability. They are also a pressure cooker organization that micro manages hard and expects employees to pull all nighters
There are probably business ethics in the cartels as well. They have different core values and risk profiles than conventional businesses but there are likely business operating guidelines and operational ground rules that we can ethics.
I would be genuinely curious to hear: in your mind, could any system be interesting to you, no matter its ethical basis? Or is there a line, and if so, what is the line to you?
Agree and I’ll take it a step further: shouldn’t we encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart them?
A big folly in political movements is completely disregarding their opponents rhetoric. Studying it and discussing it is not the same as validating it. You can't effectively fight what you don't understand and you can't understand something you refuse to know.
Mr Beast’s “youtube success hacking”, or whatever you want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals.
I don’t think either of these activities would surprise anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to be learned here? Where is the deep understanding?
People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of practically everything else they value in their lives. None of this is new or novel.
Most people avoid employing these structures because they’re viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of course, do, but I don’t see us using that information to ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see them lauded for “thinking outside the box” on Hacker News.
What’s interesting about this conversation is the different perspectives on the material, not necessarily the material itself. Nothing I read in the document reads like “use hyperbole all the time” or “extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction”. Instead most of it reads like the sort of things you’d expect to see in any high paced, high competition industry, just written for the sort of people that grew up in and would work at a YouTube company vs folks that grew up in and would work for a major manufacturer. Every company, whether explicitly said or not distinguishes between employees who are excited to be there and excited to be working on the company goals and the ones who are just there to punch a clock. And at every company the clock punchers have always been held in lower regard than the excited employees. We can worry about how that tendency can lead to worker exploitation (see also the game development industry), but the reality is any time you get a group of people together, the folks who have a vision and a mission are going to be more drawn to and get along better with the people who share a passion for that vision and mission.
Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we don’t make it explicit that sharing something like this isn’t to celebrate it.
I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
Let me ask that question a different way: let’s say what you learn had no value or it was something that was already pretty well understood (such as the fact that people click misleading or hyperbolic links). What was the value to society in that information being created or shared?
Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical quandary.
So you feel the person who is doing this competition doesn’t feel like they actually need the money in their lives? Or do you think there might be a power imbalance around financial stability being exploited?
I bet if you asked those people who were winning those life-changing amounts of money, they would say they felt the opposite of exploited.
Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.
The fact that I find the first chapter of When We Cease to Understand the World (the world war 1 bit) to be breathtaking/haunting maybe tells you everything you need to know
I think the ethics are important when you're looking not just at Mr Beast's businesses themselves but also their internal culture, especially when squaring it up against the perception of himself he's created as some sort of squeaky clean philanthropic billionaire, particularly among his primarily young fans. Those big charity videos aren't done altruistically, they serve another purpose of deflecting criticism.
You have the façade presented to the public, then the operations of the businesses he runs, then the culture built within them. If you ignore the ethics then you won't see that a significant part of his success is in his PR muscle, and how (young) people then expect that follows through to working for him or going on his show.
I don't doubt that this isn't unlike the dream of going to work in the games industry as a kid, getting to make the very kind of game you loved to play, only to realise that what's on the inside is actually pretty ugly, and perhaps your fanaticism has been exploited.
Honestly to this day, I don't know what he did wrong, it seems like a concerted effort to take him down and/or grifters want to profit from his downfall by 'exposing' him.
The allegiations seems to have been:
- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
- Some of his friends/production staff did some bad stuff (I won't elaborate). These people are not MrBeast, but sovereign individuals. Production staff in the movie industry rotates at a weekly rate.
- His productions are a shitshow, with tons of stress overtime, last minute heroic saves etc. - If you've read/watched anything Adam Savage has written, you'll realise unfortunately the entire film industry is like this, with everything being on a tight timeline. Practical sets often can be set up once and get destroyed during filming. If somebody messes up, it's often weeks of work and millions of dollars down the drain.
>- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to >anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Anyone who watches 99% of media should not find scripting to be a surprise. And many posting here on HN, who have given technical talks and presentations definitely do some level of preparation/script in advance. You can tell which people on YouTube/TikTok/etc actually prepare and have a script - against those who just ramble on with absolutely no plan outside of "this is a cool thing I like, that I want to talk about for far too long". (I watch alot of DIY/maker style videos)
Because - even if it is "unscripted" - there are soooo many hours of footage required to cut together even a short news interview segment. Many many years ago, I was interviewed for a short (5m) segment on "wardriving". The camera crew and interviewer took more than 8 hours to get all of their footage/angles and my various sound-bites for 5 minutes of aired footage. (And who knows how long in the edit room) It was eye-opening for me.
- Exploiting his employees to a degree that could be considered torture (Yes, we need to keep you awake in solitary confinement for the time-lapse video)
- Hiring Delaware a known Sex Offender, and not keeping him away from children.
> I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Some people assumed the story is real, and knowing it is fake lessens the impact of his contests and story arcs in his videos (Mac's trials hit different when you realize it's scripted).
But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.
Being efficient at destroying the planet is to successfully destroy the planet.
I think the original point was precisely to separate the concepts that make something successful - to be successful at what you do - from a judgement on the outcomes - the thing that you are doing.
> But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.
The reason why I would conflate them is that success had a positive social implication. You get respect if you're successful. In order to separate these concept, I'd use language that doesn't have positive connotations. "Efficient" is more than accurate.
The scope of “success” under examination in this guide is tailored for an artificial economic organism that wants to survive and capitalize in a particular competitive marketplace (YouTube).
It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.
That's probably why we need some morals to come in and balance stuff. You want quick and easy money, you run drugs or sell your body. I'm sure you can be very successful in both if you optimize to be successful in those ventures.
But those are not only societally looked down upon but illegal is most US states. Your success here also lies on the ability to operate discreetly out of the eyes of the law. Would that be a success? (even if I personally believe they should be legal).
"Success" is to achieve the intended goal, without causing new problems that outweigh the benefit of reaching that goal.
Reaching the goal is not a moral measurement, it is all about efficiency. If you don't reach the goal, your efficiency is zero.
The moral question is what new problems are acceptable. That's where reasonable people can disagree.
success without morals is exactly how we got into this age of enshittification. We got customers on lock, easy "success" to make a Big Mac $8 and mine data from an app, or retroactively increase our subscriptions from $10 to $20/month.
Maybe we should integrate that social value into "success" more often. Facebook was probably the most successful company, so successful laws are being made to reel their patterns in. It wasn't illegal before though, so success?
> Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
For some businesses being efficient means there is a side-effect of destroying the planet. For others it's causing customers/employees long-term health effects like cancer. Many industries that are considered highly profitable have these types of things -- think pharmaceuticals (legal or not), lending, gambling.
"Success" in a business generally means being profitable. Usually this requires being "efficient" but being efficient isn't the goal. Neither is "Net good for society/humanity at large" -- at least not the main one, taking priority over being profitable.
well maybe they should. That's why we have so much reguation. And why instead of following regulation they lobby to remove such restrictions.
Can I really say a company lobbying for worse people/worker/world conditions to be a "success"? The cigarette metaphor is apt here. if you wanna go more extreme, children in mines would be the best success; employees who can't talk back, can be paid peanuts, and are easily replacable is peak success.
I wasn't sure how MrBeast can "set viewers' expectations" so efficiently and mine so many minds with this formula until I recently witnessed a friend's children log into their YouTube Kids account and immediately be suggested a selection of choice MrBeast cuts. The six-year-old had the remote and went for several inane MrBeast videos in close succession but his older sibling was not impressed. But the bottom line is, children are involved in the equation, and in terms of interest in his customers' minds he is getting close to being the anti-Mister Rogers.
> If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with the goal, not with efficiency itself.
Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work
> Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.
> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."
If we're going this way, the next question - and a real one, this time - is whether we should study and use the medical data they acquired doing very unethical things to prisoners.
I’m not going to pretend to have an answer to that question, it’s above my pay grade.
But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that we should structure and operate our medical clinics like theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.
It's above my paygrade too, but what I remember from occasional discussions of that case is that:
- The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done, the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not use it?
- The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and encourages similar acts in the future.
(Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree with legitimization.)
- There's often a side thread going on about how the atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.
(Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on its own.)
Something to note here is that most (if not all) of the "medical data" acquired by Axis experiments is useless: a lot of it is on the order of "if we make someone really cold they die". The methodology was, unsurprisingly, generally biased, non-reproducible, and often cruel for the sake of it, rather than unethical out of necessity.
IMO there's a nice parallel between useless evidence from bad experiments, and useless business practices from unethical companies. If you want to take the lessons but leave the bad stuff, often you'll find there's nothing left.
> Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool
Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch, the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.
> Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
The problem is not the inventor but the invention itself. In your quite inept analogy, the wheel itself is somehow unethical. IE, they didn't invent the wheel they invented the slave.
Also notable: the first was accomplished under a fascist government intent on violent world domination, and the latter was completed under a (arguably less fascist, depending on exact time frame) different government, specifically because in the meantime there was a large scale critique of the people running the aforementioned initial government by (roughly) the rest of the world.
So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within this company might lead to a reorganization of control, such as might best position any further advancements to benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.
(von Braun being a clear “A-Player”, not a CEO, given the terminology at hand)
"Exploit" (mostly) only has a negative connotation in the context of people; if you exploit a resource or an opportunity, it seldom gets seen the same way.
Because of the latter, businesses leaders can also quite often talk about the former without even noticing that normal people regard "exploiting people" as a bad thing.
Sometimes it's hard to even agree what counts as exploitation of a person: The profit margin of every successful employer I've ever had is, in some sense, them exploiting me — but I've also worked in places where that's negative, loss-making, and the investors paid for my time with the profits made from others, which feels to me like the successes I've been involved with paying for the failures, not exploitation.
> You can pick almost any major company and find some way they exploit someone else.
Correction, you can pick any extremely large corporation.
Very large (i.e. successful) exploit people by design. Businesses not willing to exploit people are at a disadvantage and can never be as successful as those that are willing to exploit others.
The richest business in history was the Dutch East India Company. The richest below them are the Mississippi Company, rounding it out with the South Sea Company. Within the top 10 includes oil companies, who exploit our future for profit, and Big Tech, who exploit us for profit. Is it any surprise most of the richest companies in history exploited human capital for massive gains?
Exploitation and profit are the same concept just different framing. The distinction between shady and non is usually more about who is being exploited, to what extent they're being exploited and how transparent the business is about that exploitation.
I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.
>Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
The difference is the game he's playing (youtube) is similar to the game we're playing (startups) so the success is tantamount.
The game tobacco companies play is also very different, so the tobacco companies success will teach you very little about being successful in startups.
Personally the game I’m playing (building an effective edtech company) is probably less similar to the game he is playing (running illegal lotteries targeted at children) than the game Tabacco companies play (lean heavily on branding, marketing, and trying to control the academic narrative).
Heck yes, Marvel films, any big Hollywood films, are shady. HN is basically a vanity project so it's less shady. If HN was "optimized for engagement" the way a MrBeast video or Marvel film is, I bet I'm not the only one who would be out of here.
hn is not optimized (thank good) and didn’t change in forever. There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription, and if it were more popular it would be more expensive to host.
Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)
> There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription...
This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):
Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market films that a lot of people enjoy?
I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is now.
I'm not into the Marvel universe (obviously) but it seemed to me they had been doing multiversey stuff for a long time, so I looked it up. They've done it since the 60s. They have also done endless reboots and endless retcons.
In short, they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters, I mean their properties, as long as humanly possible and then some.
I don't even have any nostalgia for these characters. They were a really fringe phenomenon in my country. But do you think that means we don't get the 20+ Marvel movies shoved down our throats? Oooh, no. We'll eat what we're served, or not go to the movies at all (that's the option I choose). If you wanted to make a parody of hamfisted, audience-contemptous cultural imperialism, you couldn't do better than Marvelwood.
> they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters
No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.
In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't even know what that means in this context. Superhero movies strike me as extremely low on the scale of evil. Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s
Marvel films, which (like much of big budget Hollywood at this point sadly) at this point are infamous for their exploitation of cheap unorganized effects artists, are probably a bad example for something being "not shady".
HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front page items change fairly slowly (rather than algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest" feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever and actively preventing you from commenting too much within a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for something being "shady".
> Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast,
> that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?
The part where the GP says "Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success." invites counterexamples of companies that are successful but still deserving of critique.
They make money in ways that others would find morally reprehensible. The tobacco industry makes its money off of addictive substances that kill millions per year, and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention. In both cases they're highly efficient operations that make a lot of money, but whether or not you would call it a success story depends on your definition of success. If your definition of successful is "makes money", then the tobacco industry, Donaldson, fentanyl dealers, etc are indeed successful. If your definition is "the world is a better place for its existence", then not so much.
Regarding sources: if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative for argument's sake, you're capable of googling "MrBeast geneva convention" and following the sources from there.
>and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention
What specific acts are we talking about? "violation of the geneva convention" could mean literally anything between "putting red cross symbols on soldiers" and "summarily executing civilians", so it doesn't really narrow things down. If they're being put in uncomfortable positions, but they're not risking long term harm and it's voluntary, I don't see what the issue is.
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't really know why this kind of content is so engaging but I guess it is. Kinda like a sports match where everyone just shouts at how bad the other team is or something.
EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.
This site has a lot of interesting people that did and do interesting "hacker" type things that keep me coming back, but a lot of commenting is people looking to build things of questionable value, legality, or social good and sell them off and gtfo before the cracks show.
Less "Hacker" More "Greed via Computer" So the idea that they aren't bothered by Mr Beast's lack of integrity is because they too find deceit acceptable so long as they profit. Because, someone else before him did, so why shouldn't he? It's toxic greed all the way down in this view.
the bizarre social Darwinism nonsense that permeates the internet has done a nice job of taking this antisocial mindset - passersby at a glance recognize it quite rightly as the ideology of the asshole - and rebranded it as 'smart' and a mere recognition of the 'real world' (much to the confusion of people succeeding and enjoying the company of others doing so without robbing one another)
Thank you for putting this in words; it's been rattling around in my head too.
I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human flourishing.
the insightful intelligent discourse that this site's audience brings often lets the darker side of that blessing - resentment for the successful - to surface.
whether that is convenient altruism masquerading as a disdain for greed or sheer jealousy at their own lack of agency or fortuna or virtu is for their own ego to
hopefully one day confront.
Could not agree more, these days I feel like I only really read more technical posts where "sour grapes" comments are hard to insert. Basically anything about politics, tech, finance, management, news, the top few comments are so predictably negative its exhausting.
I think it mostly happened when HN became flooded by Reddit users. One of the reason I think this is because of how HN and Reddits way of dealing with new lines is different. In a lot of the comments on HN that I would consider to be fitting on GPs point you’ll see a format a long the lines of this:
This is the first line of my paragraph.
This is the second line of my paragraph.
They are separated because HN and Reddit formatting is different.
I think that's because people are commenting on mobile, where the lines are way shorter. What looks like a paragraph on my phone (e.g. this comment), turns out to just be a line or two.
This is also how 4chan differentiated users, by double space and ironically using >greentext wrong. I thought it was ironic to see this comment here, because, I've been using the old 4chan archives as datasets for interesting things. https://archive.org/details/imageboard_datasets
Slashdot got like that way back 20 years ago... every article about technology was a bunch of gumps wondering why we would ever need whatever tech the article was about.
It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel embarrassed for whoever posted it.
People think they are so high and mighty and have everything figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.
And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was fascinating. There is a lot of good management stuff in that document.
It would help if half the content on this site wasn't highly unethical lol. It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in. Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
Okay so now what effect are you having by making this ethical criticism? Are you changing the ethical outlook of the industry? Are you making a positive ethical impact?
> It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in.
I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
> Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
No I just do what everyone else does which is talk about tech elsewhere. I spent a lot of time over the last 15 years here so I'm sad that the place has changed, but at the end of the day I have several alternatives.
Moreover there's plenty of problems in the world out there. A few wars in progress, a genocide or two. My relatives spent the last few weeks in hiding because a government failed. MrBeast's engagement practices are probably the very lowest of my worries. If only HN comments could change the world...
> I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
You either missed the point of the GP comment, or you think that it's entirely pointless to discuss important issues unless it's with people of prominence. Depressing if it's the latter, but given how you started your post, I'm leaning toward that interpretation. That's some kind of fucked up elitism right there.
Founders aren’t here, but all the workers are, and they’re overestimating HN’s prominence? Or are you overvaluing the position of founder. Like you’re on some Randian philosophy shit, or something.
Hey everyone, let's take a leaf out of this guys book and only mention ethical concerns if he deems them worthy - like wars for example. Anything lower than that isn't worth mentioning because it kills the vibes. Wonder if he'll see this as he doesn't use this site anymore and talks with the intellectual founder-boys elsewhere...
> Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is.
I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts. (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that when you see posts with that kind of social signaling, downvote and flag them.
The downvote is because these posts are always extremely uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.
The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread."
This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.
I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
IME people are actually quite bad at thoroughly reading and absorbing onboarding material. Adding incentives so that they actually do it is probably pretty valuable.
I think there's at least some of the cliched HN behavior of "I read the title and used it as a prompt to write about my opinions on one of the nouns it contained".
I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.
If you think this is some genius business advice, find the nearest 20 year old marketing major on stimulants and your mind will be blown.
Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.
I really enjoyed the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about the Enron scandal for two reasons. The first and more obvious was that it was a deeper look into the systemic issues that led to the failures, which meant it was less "they did a fraud" and more about the way culture evolves at a company to the point that they did it.
Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
"History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here. Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my previous company had similar material (although likely far less controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on, which when read out of context or through the lens of a future scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.
We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been another way. We need to be better at actually learning from these things in a nuanced way.
> Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud. Wilfully and knowingly.
Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing genuinely bad things.
My read of the book was that at the beginning Enron was attempting to use M2M for their "Gas Bank" concept, and at that point it wasn't obvious that it was wrong, and it wasn't fraud either. We now don't accept M2M accounting for what they were using it for, but they were seemingly the first (or first to get noticed?) to use it in the way they did and if things worked out differently maybe it would have stuck. In this way I think it's a bit of a case of "history is written by the victor".
By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud, particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not working, but I don't think this was the only possible outcome.
Nuance is hard and everyone just wants a quick hit. Especially in these modern days of zero attention span.
I read the blog post and I found it interesting. It's something I will file under "interesting" and over time with many other things informs how I think about the topic of building successful businesses and teams. It's something I've been thinking and doing (more on the teams side, less on the business) for a while. It's not something that you just read a blog about and then go do what that blog post says. This is true of technical topics as well. If life was as easy as just do what this other (successful) guy/company does or thinks (in whatever discipline or on whatever topic) then we'd all be immensely successful at everything. It's true that success and failures should feed into building our intuition of what works and what doesn't but intuition is built over a lot of experiences.
That is a pretty interesting and accurate take. There is absolutely a ton of new innovative accounting going on still today. When / If these companies fail due to market conditions some of these accounting practices will most certainly be labeled as fraud. The takeaway from the Enron tale for the remaining firms wasn't we should stop finding new ways to increase revenue and decrease liabilities it was that we need to hire more teams to write white papers explaining why what we are doing isn't fraud.
> mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.
This is the point of the original comment, you have failed to engage in the actual material and have instead just concluded a binary position of "bad".
Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.
> where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
It's really not that hard. If they sincerely thought they were doing something legal they would have sat back and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-Shredder 2400™ in a panic and started feeding it what, for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to call "evidence".
Again, you're failing to engage with the comments here in exactly the way that the comments were complaining about. Your insights are factually incorrect and your comments say more about you than they do about Enron.
The Enron scandal took place over nearly a 10 year period. The company was weird but likely not illegal for probably half that, most of even senior leadership appeared to be in the dark about the actual fraud (willingly or otherwise) until probably a few years left. They only started shredding evidence with weeks left. This is a 20k person company, no matter how you slice it that many people aren't committing a large conspiracy together and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
I think this style of meta commentary is more damaging to any discourse than the behavior that you're saying you've identified. Looking over the top comments, other than yours, I see a good majority of people honestly trying to engage with the content. I'm not exactly sure where you're seeing a "ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude", but it seems to me that your own post typifies such a description more than the rest of the discussion here.
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
your priors.
I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th grade English" (which is roughly Mr Beast's core audience?). Here was its response:
I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
When someone writes something that goes against what most people
think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
think about changing your mind on this topic.
Assuming this is a reasonable analog to your original point, I would say that this definitionally what a mainstream response to contrarianism looks like.
* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.
* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
Most people find it incredibly annoying when somebody they don't like makes a good point. Often they would rather reject the good point to avoid agreeing with the despicable author if it. They value long-term group identity / loyalty higher than any particular good point [1].
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
Exactly, exactly, people feel it very uncomfortable to lean on results of Nazi researchers, no matter what objective scientific truth this research may have uncovered. It's like "objective" and "scientific" wane and disappear, because "Nazi" and "truth" are utterly incompatible in the post-war Western culture. We're lucky Nazi-tainted scientists did not discover something fundamental.
Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.
They're talking about Bayesian priors. Basically prior assumptions about the likelihood of a subject.
It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.
I also do not understand what you’re trying to get at with “internalized probabilities” etc. I understand the importance of this sort of jargon to the ‘ratsphere’ and all that (https://www.reddit.com/r/sgiwhistleblowers/s/nLaIGJbWAI), but that doesn’t make it any more intelligible to me. I guess that isn’t the point.
The goal is to update beliefs in all areas when they change in one spot.
As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.
Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).
Maybe it's exactly the wide support for irrational but mainstream views is what concerns the author. I mean, that's what you'd expect from a conversation in a random bar, but maybe HN used to be somehow different.
I've been here for awhile, and my take is that HN both now and in the past has an unusually high signal to noise ratio, which does not mean it has little noise. It's just that noise is the default state.
GP's post is also the top voted post, and most of it is complaining about downvotes and criticism which don't exist yet on his hypothetically valuable summary. If there's anything distressing about HN culture, it's this being an acceptable comment type period.
I've never seen a Mr. Beast video prior to reading this. I thought there was some interesting stuff in it (I have a recent professional interest in video stuff, though let me reassure everyone I don't plan to show up in any), some standard-issue "trying to keep a founding team culture going" stuff, and some stuff that read like self-gratification. I didn't write the PDF off. It's worth filing away. I'd be interested in your takeaways.
I did go watch a couple Mr. Beast videos. I can see why people knee-jerk about them here. They are just not my cup of tea, and they're not in a way that really rubs me the wrong way. That's OK! I can be convinced that's just a "me" thing! It doesn't matter; I'm not building too much of "don't like Mr. Beast" into my identity.
I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject? I get the frustration with superficial negativity crowding out discussions though.
> I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject?
I don't think it's just the fact that his videos are expensive click bait where he throws money around... it's the fact that he has some very shady, borderline illegal(maybe actually illegal?) practices. the livestream marketing the chocolate to children to win entries into giveaways that he then scrubs from the internet are probably not legal is one example. there are a few videos on how scummy he is. I think the visceral reaction to him as some kind of genius is warranted.
that said the pdf has some nuggets of wisdom even if it's from a tainted source.
I'm sure there are management lessons to be learnt from the Mafia ;) There are other tech companies the skirt things like regulatory and other borders.
I'm not a fan of Mr. Beast but it's quite a phenomena and human nature being something universal I'm sure there are some interesting nuggets from how that business is run.
I also don't get or watch reality shows from more traditional media.
I think there's plenty to learn from it, but there's two big problems when applying his approach in a more generalized way:
a) The youtube market is not like other markets, his strategy is successful because (among many things) the youtube algorithm promotes frequent posting. He knows youtube very well, but it's clear from his other business ventures that he's not good in other markets. I don't think you can translate ALL the stuff there into other markets.
b) There's a lot of unhealthy stuff mixed in with the parts that seem like they drive his success. If somebody does X, Y and Z and gets insane levels of success, they may not realize that it's X and Y driving the success, and Z is actively harmful. But I guess it depends on what you consider "harmful" - some might think "harmful" means "hurts the bottom line" and some might think "hurts those lowest on the rung". Either one of those might be true. It's like people who think being an asshole like early Steve Jobs is the way to be a successful leader, when he arguably achieved more lasting impact when he mellowed out.
With that context, I think some of the critiques you mention have substance.
"He's making low value content" -> I think this is true, because he's optimized for the market he's in. I think it's a legit critique that this strategies may not be sustainable or applicable to "high value content". He even expressly says this: "Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible."
"the culture of the company is horrible" -> I absolutely think this is worth talking about, and I find it hard to see building a long term company on his approach. The myth that you need to push people to breaking points to be successful is poison.
"he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill" -> Well anyone saying that is just wrong. He obviously is very good at what he does.
Personally, I don't think it's a good long term business strategy to depend so much on a single larger company, one who has a history of changing the algorithm without warning or explanation. But it's a good, but painful, short term strategy, and he will come out of it perfectly fine whenever he suddenly becomes irrelevant. But there are others who won't/haven't come out with much, and I think it's good to have a discussion if this is right or not.
But there are good things there, the critical components, the importance of communication. The direct feedback of "You are my bottleneck" is good, but it easily could turn into passive aggression and ways to pass the buck. I'm sure there's plenty of low quality comments here, but don't just write off all criticism as virtue signalling or whatever. There are def lessons in here, but that doesn't mean it's all above questioning.
It's true that having to push people to the breaking point is poison. However, there's the other, not poisonous side of the coin: Communication costs will kill your productivity, and communication degrades far faster than linearly as you add people.
So we don't want to break people, but adding one more person makes the company worse. So a very successful company is probably going to push people very hard, because otherwise communication costs eat it alive. I've been in way too many companies that got way worse over time, just because the headcount increases ruined productivity.
Well instead of posting what you wrote you posted this complaint, which just contributes to this vibe. You have the right to vent of course.
If you post something interesting people will read it! Sour grapes comments are kinda boring, and complaints about sour grape comments are also kinda boring.
If you don’t want certain kinds of conversations in a community, one of the best things to do is to “crowd that out” by just offering positive alternatives, with interesting posts.
I have a lot of social complaints about finance, but still love reading about it. Cuz it’s interesting in the abstract!
> He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill.
Does this guy know his business? Oh, hell, yes. He clearly knows his business cold. Success always has a significant chunk of luck, but skill is a part of luck, and he clearly demonstrates that skill.
However, just because someone really knows their business and does well at it does not mean we simply give them a complete pass. For example, payday lenders know their business very well yet we still consider them to be exploitative and parasitic.
This guy is super-specializing in explicitly targeting pretty much mostly teenaged males with purely dopamine hit content with very little benefit (if any and possibly a negative effect) to the audience. He is pushing the video equivalent of junk food to an audience with weak, underdeveloped impulse control.
This is going to get pushback, and it absolutely deserves that pushback.
> excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
Which priors should I reexamine? The fact that he is effectively targeting adolescent males? The fact that YouTube is all consumed with feeding the ad machine and should be forced out of Google? The fact that social media has turned out to be a pox upon our society?
You're not alone. Lately, I've found myself skimming towards the middle/bottom of comments due to this observation. I suppose the more normalized it becomes, the more people feel encouraged to continue writing with this attitude.
There's a bit of missed irony here that you decrying the 'sour grapes' crowd with 'sour grapes' of your own, and yourself have been upvoted to the top. I do agree this culture of indulged victimhood is really dragging internet discourse down, but you surely can see your own complicity in it?
One thing that woud help real people deal with internet comments and content is switching from a binary "true" vs "false" dichotomy, eg "this is good", "this is false", etc. That is, everything must be stamped with some version of a binary label.
Instead, a trinary should be used, so among true and false, you can have undefined. Or, more importantly for value judgements, "it doesnt matter".
And of course, like things in javasvript, everything should probably just live as undefined, and there should be plenty of guardrails before choosing the other states.
You are absolutely right that a large % of people, when confronted with evidence of the kind of obsessive focus required for unusual success, have mental antibodies activated which reject the message, to preserve their ego and sense of self-worth.
Don't dismiss the entire community because of the loud people and their upvoters though. There are other people here, and they don't necessarily browse HN at a high enough frequency to outvote or outcomment the majority.
(I personally think the document is very good, on-point, and great advice for ambitious young people. I'm no longer that young any more, and I'm also aware of a different side: when you push really hard, you can end up burning out. That's the other side of the intensity the document advocates. You can burn out. It's the single biggest reason I don't push so hard these days.)
I think I've been reading this same kind of critique of HN for over 10 years now. And I'm hedging here, I originally wrote over 15 years, but realized that my memory of 2009 might not be that good. But either way, a long time!
That doesn't mean the criticism is false. But it's always weird to me when I see it put forward as a new thing.
What changed your worldview? It was a fine read but it mostly boiled down to project management basics, some format optimizations, and some storytelling basics.
I thought it was an interesting behind the scenes look at how seriously they take their “art” but nothing world changing. Which part of the article did that for you?
They’re not saying it changed their worldview. Their point is that if a person is just immediately nitpicking it and dismissing it, then there’s probably something in it that can change their worldview. That person’s project management and storytelling skills probably suck (because most people’s project management and storytelling skills suck).
The way I understand this is that now HN commentators are filled with what Nietzche would call the “last-men” who have “last-men” values while in the past it was not as widespread.
Another site filled with such people is Reddit, where I stopped bothering to comment anymore as it is far more dominated by people in this category than HN.
Yes, it is exhausting to read through those comments, more exhausting to argue against them. Not sure if it is worth it anymore, this is probably not a tide that can be stopped. But HN is still one of the few sites that is not wholly dominated by last men, and you can find thoughtful comments that broaden your perspective occasionally. Enjoy it while it lasts!
What a stupid meme. "The last men" is most closely seen in that movie Wall-E, with the humans who are on that spaceship.
HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous than he ever was in their own eras.
It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all of the garbage from the french post-modern neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks. You are the thing you hate.
I'd personally love to hear your views and thoughts. Either about this subject or in general. You seem very thoughtful and self-aware, which is always a positive thing. Don't let the naysayers get to ya....^^
I can tell everyone here has something in mind that they're all talking about, but don't want to say specifically what it is. I definitely agree that if you make any sort of substantial post, you're going to get a million low effort replies nitpicking small details. If you try to respond to all of them, you'll either run out of posts or lose your mind. Most of the time people just pick one small detail, post something completely incorrect or unrelated, and move onto the next headline post to respond to.
Could you elaborate on the takeaways that challenge existing priors ?
The points in the OP boil down to:
* Focus on your product
* Hire well
* Be extra diligent towards bottlenecks
* State your metrics clearly
* Communicate often and immediately
________
These are standard guidelines for running businesses. HN commenters are unimpressed because there are no novel generalizable takeaways from his document.
For a few years, Adam Sandler was producing low-brow schlock that made 100s of millions in the box office. It was effective. It's not clear if there was a takeaway
________
There is 1 takeaway from Mr. Beast that appears generalizable.
Sometimes, for a short duration, you hit gold. During that time, obsessively extract all value you can. Merch, videos, exploitation, what have you. For a solid minute, you're Midas. So touch as many things as you can. Be shameless beyond recognition.
Too often, businesses see their hockey-stick moment as a sign of long term sustainable growth. That's a lie (in expectation). A moment is all it is. Wring out your business for every dollar you can extract, liquidate as much as you can, and bail before you're past the crest of the wave.
I'm confident that Mr. Beast's Youtube stardom will die in a few years. But, he will leave behind a legacy of obsessive extraction that is unlikely to be matched for quite some time.
For the "sour grapes" metaphor to work the grapes need to be desired at first.
This isn't the case here. Most people do not want to be rich at any cost. I might feel some jealousy about Microsoft or wolfram.com, but not about a YouTuber whose massive team produces bland addictive videos, especially if YouTube is full of good videos if you know where to look.
You are wrong to think public debates are here to reach an understanding between the debaters. Whining that nobody submits to you in a fight is ridiculous: fight, show us your genius, and don't come crying to mommy if we fight back.
Your goal is to convince the audience, not your opponents.
HN comment quality has been degrading for a while, I’m no longer that active here because of it (unfortunately). X is a better source in most cases now (if you choose well and only use the following tab).
People on HN need to think about how wrong others can be about topics they are knowledgable about, then consider that they might be that person in topics they don't know much about
> excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
Not being funny, how often is this the answer:
I didn't have one prior, I'm being told what to think by "smart people" online and I make my identity alignment with them. I'm empty and can't think of anything on my own, so when I read something, I add it to a memory bank to bring up later in life in conversation with others to come across as "knowing a little bit about everything"
I’ve noticed this a lot too. It happens across multiple topics, and if you present a well-thought-out counterpoint or idea, it often gets dismissed. As for his content, I don’t watch it and don’t have an opinion on it, but the document itself was engaging and well-written. It’s unfortunate that the focus has shifted entirely to the content he produces.
Yes, correction of a detail is good and not a problem. But using that to mock the central point is a popular strategy in discourse.
In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.
I wonder if this is meant to be ironic because this behavior is exactly what was being criticized. You just picked one specific detail to focus on and ignored everything else.
The anti nitpicking attitude is the core point of the parent commenter's post. I agree with sensible prioritization as exemplified in the linked article, as should everyone. But the author of the comment I'm responding to is expressing discomfort with a culture that identifies holes in their reasoning. They're so uncomfortable with having details of their arguments challenged that they aren't saying what they really want to say.
I know an "anti nitpicker" who is entirely opposite to that attitude when it comes to their social appearance and perception. One hair on their tie is catastrophic. One publicly searchable webpage that shows a decades old picture of them is an extreme problem that warrants hiring a company to clean up. It's interesting how, in matters that are important to some of these people, seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant details suddenly matter to an extraordinary degree.
The anti nitpicking stance is a byproduct of the extreme overvaluation of social perception. Often these people do not like to look like they have made a mistake. And thus they avoid conflict or paint it as irrelevant in belief that it will save their appearance.
No, a lot of people on this website value very highly their completely irrelevant nitpicks. I’m starting to think it’s just the kind of mind the tech industry attracts, because I’ve noticed it in some coworkers as well.
There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest improvement.
I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make a difference?".
If you write everything as if you must put your name to it, and then do put your name to it, your writing becomes stronger, and those kind of contrarian-neuroses go away.
This account name is not my real name, but I have thought about making an HN account with my real name. Mostly I just try to spend less time on HN these days.
Well I spent an entire week writing a 75000 word essay refuting his document that I shared with some select heads of state. No you can't see it, because of your attitude. Your attitude is really very bad. It's bad. Not good.
One of the biggest (and most imitated) channels... on the biggest video-on-demand platform to ever exist... Yeah, not worth being "condescending" over.
Maybe as a case study for the structural failures of algorithmic feeds. Should founders really be looking at what looks like a toxic micromanagment culture for pearls of wisdom? Maybe I'm just a type C employee who needs to be excised rather than a type A who will pretend they're an owner.
Let's not indite just HN here. It's more the world is the same and this is just an extension of the internet norms.
Think toxic game forums. They used to be nice and a good place, but now? It's a hot mess and everyone who wants proper discourse already self selected out.
I have a hypothesis, that once a thread has more than N comments, a sub-comment under the top comment is more likely to stay close to the top of the page, than the same thought expressed in its own top comment. And certainly more likely to be seen than any new thread.
Or, people are just more likely to see something closer to the top, that inspires them to comment.
Therefore, the top comment in a top page thread is itself a natural comment magnet.
I don't know of an antidote to this, except that I try not to do it myself. And wary of the possibility of a pot-kettle situation here.
Display comments in random order. Then it becomes possible to add a top level comment and have it not disappear forever into the bottom of the page, forever unseen.
Alternatively, comment as quickly as possible. Ideally, be the first person to comment. Just comment your general thoughts and then fill in everything you wanted to say over a series of edits while simultaneously improving the comment's logic, grammar and spelling. This one goes all the way back to stackoverflow. It's a habit I have never been able to shake to this day because of how active I used to be on that site. Probably contributed to my account getting rate limited here.
> One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
In as far as this is a document that says 'do your best, give 110% 25/8, sacrifice everything for the company', most of what I'm seeing here is the same general approval that latter-day HN gives all impractical advice that a very young person might come up with. ('Just do gooderer, all the time!')
I don't think the change is that people now are now closed-minded, I think it's more that something like Mr Beast's PDF of peppy twenty-something bromides simply wouldn't have made the front page at all in 2014. This would be over on Digg with the other pop-Internet stories.
More broadly, given that the comment section appears around 60-70% positive for Mr Beast, I'm unsure what it is you're actually after. Would you prefer it be 100% positive? Wouldn't that be a huge loss for the intellectual diversity that this site has to offer? Aren't there other, better places for hive takes (e.g. Reddit)?
Respectfully, I think the takes you're taking issue with are precisely the remnants of the old, diverse HN, and the takes you're tacitly encouraging are the monoculture that's taken over the rest of the Internet.
So true man, the best part of this site are the positive and thoughtful folks. It's pretty easy to be negative and find flaws in things, it's more difficult and constructive to find the positive and try to learn.
There's positive thoughtfulness, critical thoughtfulness, and knee-jerk reactions of both kind as well.
At least personally I appreciate both kinds of thoughtful comments, and it's what's keeping me coming back here. Equating valid criticism with "negativity" on the other hand honestly seems pretty toxic/cultish to me.
No one is going to be happy about what I'm about to point out, but reap what you sow HN. This is directly and fully as a result of 1. the current (terrible) set of rules and 2. Dang being a moderator (and this communities unending fawning over his moderation)
Fix both of these, and HN would have far fewer issues related to what you are describing.
All other explanations of this phenomenon which don't talk about the above two are not even close to on point.
Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything has been turned only into profit maximization?
And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've very often tried to have patience to explain in depth where my opinions come from. My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial (as I actually did a long time ago), and then being met by responses like "he's obviously doing something right to get all those views and he's promoting altruism", responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was.
If think if we really are supposed to improve the quality of discussions, asking more questions should be common when we fundamentally disagree so much. On fundamental disagreements, either the other party is stupid/naive/uninformed or they have fundamentally different principles that we might not understand, and without which a response is just flaming.
Later edit: I actually think the document by Mr Beast is exceptionally well written, and most startups could apply the main lessons from it. I still think his output is extremely antisocial.
> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world
I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is describing are people who have very little knowledge of the topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on some narrative that appeals to their bias.
The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct comparison. Ex: Sure, [insert person or company] is successful, but it's because they prey on [insert moral failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!
So the only reason somebody might criticize somebody/something is... jealousy?
Can you really not think of any powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given the opportunity?
I'm not saying the root of all criticism is jealousy. Obviously there's legitimate utilitarian value judgements to be made on any particular human activity.
However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
That's a bit tautological: in any popular forum, there are going to be "a lot of people pretending they are making 'highly rational' value assessments" — or really, doing anything at all.
HN also has a lot of the "other" type (those who are rational but honest and objective), and the main distinction should be which of those dominate.
And I'd argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their comments and upvotes/downvotes.
Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of person: someone who critically looks at most things, and is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with free and open source software or academia than from ever wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
Agreed that it’s definitely not everybody. But it feels like the “sour grapes” cohort is the fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all discussions that direction.
HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb masses!
You articulated this better than I would ever could. Yes, I absolutely agree. Many people here seem bitter or have an idealistic point of view (perhaps due to the bitterness?) that doesn't match the real world.
> Many people here seem bitter or have an idealistic point of view
It is the opposite of idealism to see the world as it is. Pragmatism is rooted in acknowledging both the good and bad.
Idealism is ignoring the bad in the name of "pragmatism". Maybe you have to ignore it for your Public Relations metrics, but not for your executive or engineering perspective(s).
> But it feels like the “sour grapes” cohort is the fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all discussions that direction.
> Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
I invite you to consider, based on your own wording, that you are doing more feeling than rationalizing. It is some work, and perhaps not completely possible, to do a comprehensive and correct meta analysis aiming to gauge the state of rational vs non-rational commentary on HN.
> bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable
The fact that the world is imperfect is not a reason to ignore that the world is imperfect. One must of course satisfy their Ego and make some peace with the world that is around them that it is in some sense "good", but the act of a rational mind, after it is done indulging the (necessary?) behaviors of the animal in which it resides, is to relentlessly nitpick, criticize, deconstruct the world around it, as far is it is possible, without feeling.
Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck about them. If one of them is the field in which you work, you may even resent the criticism. And yet, it is only by acknowledging what is wrong that we can build and do what is (more) right.
Perhaps what I will say, is that if HN is supposed to be a place of technical innovation, it is undeniably true that it is no longer possible to easily innovate, anymore. And if that is true, then there should some discussion of all the ways that what has been built now constrains/no longer makes possible the alternatives. That is not something you can change with a "happy go lucky attitude" or renouncing a cynical one. In fact, one can argue that "can do no harm" attitude is what has brought about this venture. Perhaps a slower, more considered approach, would have resulted in a better outcome.
>Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck about them.
I'm a long time reader, but only recently registered to post. I think this statement is quite illuminating to illustrate the point of the person you're responding to.
I actually didn't know HN existed until a colleague told me about it as a place to find a bit more optimism about technology than has become the norm on places like reddit. The overwhelming vibe on reddit is that capitalism bad, big tech bad, AI bad, etc. And I have definitely noticed this a lot more on HN in the last few years than when I first started reading.
I don't know why, and obviously it is just my anecdotal opinion, but it is how I feel, and I have seen many posters who feel the same.
Obviously we should all be open to different views, but sometimes I just want a little haven where I can read about technology and cool stuff alongside people who are mostly optimistic about that stuff, without having to be swamped by "end state capitalism" sentiment, like everywhere else. That's just what I want, I'm not making any moral judgement on what others want.
And some of us would still disagree: HN has, for a long time, been exactly the union between the overly optimistic technologist (tech founder) and a very critical engineer.
I mean, this is evident in posts by one of "model" founders, Paul Graham. Many of his posts are about how most are doing things wrong, only framed in a positive way (for success, do this instead of the usual things you've been doing).
So perhaps you came in attracted by one side, but stuck around for the arguments, even if unconsciously ;)
> And some of us would still disagree: HN has, for a long time, been exactly the union between the overly optimistic technologist (tech founder) and a very critical engineer.
Other's would know more than me, I'm just an anecdote.
All I can say is that I find many responses to be Pavlovian, not well thought out, overly negative or cynical, and in my humble opinion just part of a low effort zeitgeist against capitalism.
I think that when people are jealous of others, they cloak this motivation.
To give an example with interpersonal relationships- never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all the time.
I never went through a phase of admiring Steve Jobs, and to me the word "hacker" still has connotations of alleviating oppression. This post amounts to "you're just jealous!" - a total cop-out given the myriad ways this website and the people on it are /making the world worse/.
>The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
I never intended to be the next Steve Jobs, I just expected that my dedication to learning and building useful skills would be rewarded in some sense. Things aren't that simple, of course.
Many people expect ""rewards"" in the form of making a living, having a stable salary, maybe supporting a family.
Why would someone reward a personal choice in dedication? Usually because it's useful to them, economically.
I had a much more utopian and somewhat deluded outlook growing up. It was based on the things adults told me, e.g. at school, in the boy scouts, and elsewhere, or absorbed from fiction with a utopian outlook like Star Trek TNG. I think there's an impulse to shelter kids and instill hope in them which can foster a blindness to the dog-eat-dog ugliness of the world.
Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out!
I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.
A reward does not need to come from “someone”, and usually doesn’t.
You should expect reward from dedication because you’ll get it. Not from some god on high or some random person called Tyler Smith. It’s from yourself or the fruits of your labor.
The HN community is way more diverse than that, though you're probably spot on for a slice of the community. At least in my experience they are nowhere near the majority.
This has to be one of the most thoughtless comments I've read on the thread. You don't know about the lives of other commentors but are happy to make huge generalizations about them and in the process commit the same thinking error that you're accusing them of making. Do you not see the irony in that?
I think that this may apply to some people but as a blanket statement it feels incorrect because there are tons of counterexamples.
Plenty of very successful people that I know personally think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news.
Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals that I do respect.
I've seen what you describe often, people that are simply bitter and spew hate. But does jealousy and bitterness invalidate their point of view?
I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still generating revenue and still alive but practically failures for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of business model and distribution, all the classics. The second one I think should have been much more successful were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach this conclusion.
I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and unfair?
Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most success stories in the startup world have no more merit than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings to exist?
It's on you to figure out how the world actually works instead of taking the words of people who fell into riches for gospel truth. It's a hard lesson to learn, especially if you have to pay the price of watching your startups fail despite your best efforts. Sour grapes and bitterness is how people react when they discover, years too late, that they badly misplayed their cards. The anger is then directed at the injustice of the system when in reality what held people back was not that the game is somewhat rigged but a failure to understand the actual rules.
Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos creation, specifically designed to draw attention away from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR narrative and hilariously distorted.
Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being Steve Jobs.
We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from extensive exposure.
Right, a challenge with an artifact like this is that the writing is good. And it's a lengthy read. The early commenters almost by definition haven't read it and can only comment about their opinions on the creative output of Mr Beast
As someone who has assiduously avoided watching his videos (because of this opinion), I was impressed by the document because it is incredibly practical. The advice about communication, managing critical components and bottlenecks - very very good.
Of course he is singlemindedly focused on building a massive YouTube channel. In the employee handbook it does not say: we treat you well and do the most ethical thing
It says: come here and work hard, we will make a big YouTube channel. (Not: a YouTube channel that is good for society!! Just big!!)
> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything has been turned only into profit maximization?
I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the word "understanding"), but an opinion.
There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that "everything has been turned only into profit maximization". It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview, an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree, very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with little empirical basis.
As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing them at every turn is boring, and against the purpose of HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate for HN:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm of generic tangents and internet tropes.
> And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
I agree with you on this but I don't think it's a failure. I think people just get tired after a while. They get tired, and then they start displaying their disapproval in ways that require less work.
It's just easier than typing out all those words and being ignored.
> My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial and then being met by responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was
It's really tiresome.
At some point you start to realize that you have fundamentally different values than the people you're trying to discuss things with, that these values are irreconcilable and that further argument will just make people hate you instead of convincing them.
This isn't really about "sour grapes", we have moral objections to what others are doing, and there's no point in trying to have those arguments with people who do those things for a paycheck.
No chance it comes from understanding the world, it is an unfortunate social effect where attacking is much easier than defending. It is particularly apparent in politics where it has to be at least an order of magnitude easier to attack an opposing candidate for their weaknesses rather than defend a friendly candidate for some minor flaw.
And there isn't anything wrong with profit maximisation; we use profits to make decisions about resource allocation. That matters a lot, small inefficiencies leading to waste magnified over the entire economy represent huge damage to the people scraping by on the margins.
What did you think was well written about it? Did it provide any useful or unique insights? The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
I think it was well written because you could clearly hear his voice through the writing and empathize with his internal struggle with being in a position of authority while also feeling unqualified for the job.
> Did it provide any useful or unique insights?
As someone who has been very frustrated in the past by my perception of the inefficiency of communicating "up and over" instead of talking laterally to an engineer on another team, I thought he succinctly communicated why it's often necessary and helped me understand the value of that practice.
> The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
Orthography is only one aspect what makes writing good or bad. And a relatively less relevant one IMO.
The phrase "other party is stupid" really stood out to me, and it perfectly illustrates the problem I see. Instead of recognizing that people might have fundamentally different principles, upbringing, culture, or simply not be fully informed on a topic, the first conclusion you jump to is that they are stupid.
Have you read the entire sentence that was from? It listed pretty much what you said as an option until more information is gathered. Sometimes even people's culture/principles keeps them from seeing the truth.
I honestly don't know what you mean here, I hope you can clarify.
What I find even more tedious is the viewpoint that imagines itself "confronting to a consensus worldview" while echoing mainline meritocratic commercialism.
Is it just me or is the way you construct sentences jarring and hard to read? Not sure if it's my dyslexia but I had trouble deciphering the first couple of paragraphs/word jumbles.
It's not you. The entire comment is a disorganized mess of poorly thought out and non-cohesive grammar.
In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by writing about critiques, in which he appears to have immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview", which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for it to make sense as he likely intended.
Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression of erudition, compared to the people he believes he communicating down to.
"The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that."
Personalized to doesn't mean focused on; it means subjective and relative to the critic.
The "social purpose of the critiques is universal" is saying that, in opposition to the disparate and varied, personalized, nature of the specific critiques, their social purpose is all the same.
This universal purpose is saying "I felt uncomfortable ... might have to re-evaluate world view ... I'll upvote all the detractors".
> elevated personal impression of erudition
This is ironic, I have to say.
Anyhow, I found it easy to read the comment. It does flow a bit like stream of consciousness, but it's comprehensible, probably in part because I agree with a good amount of it. You shouldn't expect polished prose in comment forums on the interwebs.
If you felt that it talked down to you (personalized), then perhaps evaluate the social purpose of your own comment (did you feel uncomfortable? I got the impression you did).
Why "personalized to" doesn't work is because that line is referencing the text, not the author. If he would have preferred to have used "personalized to" he could have done so, as long as the subject in that line was changed to the author. Your interpretation of the universal social purpose line is creative and more intelligible than the referenced comment, but whatever the intended meaning may have been, it was not immediately clear.
As to your second to last comment, I wouldn't have even mentioned it had the other commenter not mentioned how they found the prose jarring. To your question in your final line, I didn't say that I felt I was being talked down to, I said that the author seemed like he thought he was talking down to an audience below him, such as with his line where he mentions his startup friends whom he shared his text with, but wouldn't share the same with HN.
"and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings"
Meh, just write it well and share, then ignore the feedback. You should really only listen to feedback from smart people that you trust anyway. But I understand your position.
He constantly runs illegal lotteries and lies to kids. What is so complex and insightful about your understanding of this situation that you have to hide it in the group chat? Companies like uber and lyft constantly ride the line of illegality and that's how they're able to turn profits.
tldr it's not that deep bro, business people are shady and draw ire mostly thanks to decades of business people being shady and drawing ire.
Um well, Mr. Beast IS a fraud (do a casual search), the content is crass, exploitative, and it's perfectly reasonable to critique a person when they have a personalized brand.
This is no different than what's done in ANY entertainment media contract negotiation that takes place with "on-air talent".
I realize this is semantics but he’s not a fraud, because he delivers on the things he says. If he didn’t spend 48 hours (or however long) underground that would make him a fraud, but he did. The content might be of dubious quality, but it’s not fraudulent
Here's a video titled "$1 vs $10,000,000 Job!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdjh81uH6FU). He then proceeds to look at a number of jobs, with a job that make basically no money ranging to an NFL player. It's clickbaity, there are a lot of easy jokes in the episode, but there's nothing fraudulent. He's not lying about anyone's salary, he pays people out in shows where they make money, and nobody is being scammed. All of his videos are like this. I'm not saying you have to like him, but fraud describes something very specific which he is not doing.
I'm sure there's some disgruntled employee complaining somewhere, but I have not seen any legitimate complaints about him. All those "Mr Beast is a fraud!?!" videos have no substance, and are just people using his name for views.
It alleges that many of the “contests” are staged and artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws around such games. I think to many that might feel like fraud.
The poor grammar drives me crazy. I get that I am not the target employee, but if I walked in to a job and was handed that on my first day I'd walk right out based on presentation alone.
It is at least self-aware on that front: the first page says “Sorry in advance for all the run on sentences and grammar issues, I’m a youtuber not an author haha.”
I imagine writing like this is a deliberate part of both his personal brand and the company culture he is trying to create.
MrBeast videos do not get better if everyone uses perfect spelling and grammar. They get better if people figure out and then execute kind of crass but extravagant “wow” moments.
If it’s deliberate there’s no reason to apologise and follow up with an excuse. Unless you’re trying to shield yourself from criticism you know you deserve and could avoid. That would be dishonest so I’m not going to speculate.
Of course there is a reason. It is part of the act and the meta-culture.
I'm not saying I like Mr Beast or this document, but it seems extremely obvious to me that this document is the way it is very intentionally.
The specific sentence offers relatability and a (perceived) degree of honesty. Stating the obvious isn't always bad — it often builds empathy and connections.
In my opinion, he is not at all trying to shield himself from criticism, he is building a connection with the reader.
He'd still have to work with the editor and review the results; that's at least a couple hours of work. This has a substantially lower EV than managing, networking, producing videos, etc. I'd make the same call.
That shows a total lack of self respect in my opinion. You don't have to be an author to put even the tiniest effort into your writing in a professional letter like that.
Modern culture is very big on self deprecation and not having respect for the tiny details. If you don't hold yourself to standards, you can avoid people dragging you when you fail to live up to them. Better to say "I'm not an author ha ha" and have writing full of flaws, knowing the only people that are going to give you grief about it are people that "take it too seriously", then to try and present a well edited and highly professional piece of text and have a mistake missed in editing become the focal point of a bunch of pedants who want to tear you down for being high and mighty. It's a balancing act to be sure, but that's the current side of the spectrum the culture trends are on.
Know your audience. This seems an intentional affectation.
Like a dude who puts in an hour of work to nail the "just rolled out of bed" look. Whether its a good or bad idea is debatable, but either way its not due to lack of effort.
Define "professional letter". "Chicago manual of style" professional letter or some other, less professional styleguide? Because if it isn't written using the proper styleguide... I'm walking out that door before the first hour on the clock.
And you're exactly who they are looking to move elsewhere. They are looking for people who want to make youtube videos. No faff about over font and comma placement.
The purpose of the company is to produce youtube videos not professionally written internal memos. In fact one might say that this is the core message of the document.
Other corporations seriously have employee handbooks with sentences like this in?
“… instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.”
They identified something their customers (viewers) like and the competition can't provide, and play to that unique strength. That's pretty standard, they just give an example instead of obfuscating the principle in management speak.
With some rewording this would be perfect for the USP slide of an investor deck
They do, but usually you'll find it worded something like "Deliver high value, seamless and synerginized entertainment that frontalizes our strengths and inspires diverse modalities of consumer satisfaction"
The bulk of content on Youtube today is some stock video footage, an AI-generated script read by a computer voice. Maybe a human spends a few minutes cutting together the video footage? But almost entirely automated spam designed to feed Youtube some pink slime and rake in the $.
Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.
Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups.
1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.
2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
3. Building value > making money
4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.
The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.
I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.
I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy.
That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture.
And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience.
How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.
What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.
That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not).
And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
I read the entire PDF and I felt he was pretty spot on about works and what doesn't in running a business.
This is Hacker News, ostensibly created as a website for hackers and founders.
If you are a hacker and a founder then a ton of this advice is spot on.
For example it's a simple concept but he absolutely nails a key factor by distinguishing between A, B and C employees. A high performing team really can't have more than one or two C's. It moves them out even if they're nice, cool, good people. If the team is run by good humans it does what Mr. Beast does and gives them severance.
I can smell a couple C employees fuming on here and in the Twitter thread. I've had C employees work for me and they were always the ones who lobbied me hardest for being more tolerant of mediocrity. Sorry but you just have to hold the line against the average if you want to succeed, this is dictionary definition level of obvious. To be above average, you have to be above freaking average. Half the world is C's and to win your team needs to not be in that half.
Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.
Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.
And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.
--
[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial.
See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.
I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:
> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.
My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.
The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane
> The company culture is extreme almost culty.
Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.
Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me.
To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home.
To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.
Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work.
The dichotomy sometimes
The blind poster is obviously more savvy than the "A players".
Can you please share the other post you are referring to?
That’s one of the most interesting parts of this document. Many people will read it and think “I would never work at a place like that,” and many others would think “that’s exactly the environment I want to work in!”
More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
It clearly biased for young people or those without a family with something to prove, the perfect type of employee to exploit and vampirize.
It’s not about exploiting. Getting work done isn’t inherently a bad thing.
It’s about everyone doing 60-80 hours of work a week though
Lots of people make youtube videos for fun. Work can be fun to the point where it's what you want to do. Not what you have to do.
If you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. If I wasn't employed as a software dev then I would still be writing code on a daily basis.
Lol. Hustle shops pay less and there are more hours. It is not exploitation, but usually there are better gigs. Finance is probably an exception where you know those long hours will be rewarded one day either in the current gig or another future one.
Some have a passion for their job. I know, it’s unimaginable.
I love my job, but I don't do more than 8 hours generally, and am paid very fairly, and it's quite competitive, we aren't slackers.
There's no exploitation, he wants them to get rich, he wants this to be their last career. He's asking who's interested in going on that journey.
The important thing (not mentioned in the document) is how much he pays them. That determines whether "wanting them to get rich" is real or not.
Once I worked in a small software company, and the boss kept telling us "if the company grows, we will get more money, and we will all get rich". Young and naive, we worked hard. When the company grew, he... hired more developers. Well, of course. That is obviously much more profitable than increasing the salary of the existing developers. At the end, he was the only person who got rich. Why did we ever think it would end up differently? I guess, because we were young and naive, and also because he told us so.
Being older and more cynical, if you want me to get rich, pay me. (Or make me a partner in business.) Otherwise, five or ten years later, when the company gets big and I will probably be burned out, you will have no incentive to waste money on the burned out guy, when the alternative is to hire someone fresh.
> Why did we ever think it would end up differently?
Because it has worked, countless times. Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc were all small software companies once, the current hotness is NVIDIA (ok hardware, not software). Obviously it doesn't happen often, or to a high percentage of startups, but hey, he wasn't lying to you, you took the job knowing the deal.
Did the original employees get rich when those companies grew?
How exactly do they get rich? No obvious mention of profit share or any other actual reward expect the growth of the beast media brand
I appreciate it for being honest tbh, 99% of job hunting in the IT field is filtering out the bullshit, or the greenwashing that what a company does is Good, Actually.
Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer? Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi? Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.
But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and external) is about reducing energy usage, their green energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the price is lowest.
It's just so cynical.
On the surface, it looks like they're prioritizing what the customer (or market) wants - lower usage/expense - over company profits.
What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?
You don’t understand the model. Residential customers pay most of the fees upfront as hook up fees monthly. You could use 0 energy in many areas and you would still pay almost the same amount.
> How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market?
You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.
How does that align with Dan Luu’s article “95th percentile isn’t that good”[1] and the general observation so many of us have that the companies we work for and interact with and buy from are executing so badly on so many fronts?
That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.
If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
[1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc.
Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).
> "Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc."
and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?
If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?
Where's that discrepancy coming from?
You might be stretching Dan Luu's essay a bit far. It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection of it was him saying the 95th percentile in an arbitrary hobby, say amateurs playing competitive esports (e.g. Overwatch), and that if you put even a small amount of time into deliberate practice, you would be better than 95th percentile player in Overwatch. I didn't get the sense Dan Luu was extrapolating to multi-billion dollar companies, what it would take to take the fight to them, and taking their market share.
Yep, 1,000,000%, yep, can't +1 this enough, saw it at another big tech myself, had friends who saw it happen at Google. The companies that were going from nothing to dominance were so different from the companies that rest today on their monopoly laurels. To go from not successful to successful there were all these insanely smart people pulling 80 hour weeks and all the work life balance stuff came later. Unreasonably hard work doesn't guarantee success but it's always a component of massive success. Mr. Beast is not making this shit up and if you're not down for this you are one of his C employees which is fine, you can be a nice and valuable human in other ways, but those companies who want to go big are not for you. Starting a company, certainly a VC fueled one probably is not either.
"you need to be insanely smart and work 80 hour weeks" ... to pass a bunch of MBAs managing 50-percentilers? How does that make sense?
The goal is achieved. The founders are rich and fulfilled (and probably exhausted), early star employees have mostly cashed out. This is not at all surprising or hard to figure out. Larry Page tried to establish a corporate structure that would sustain innovation (Google -> Alphabet) but they were never able to recreate what they had in search.
It makes sense because regulatory capture has become such a large part of how dominant American firms maintain their position. They don't maintain it through talent. They maintain it by breaking the law. Google's now been found guilty of antitrust violations in two markets and a case about a third just kicked off. And of course this is not just in tech, take a look at the cases against the Kroger/Albertson's merger or Ticketmaster.
The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.
It aligns, because 95th percentile isn't that good. It's right there in the title.
Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.
The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.
Because of switching costs. If you start a new thing this is definitely the case. It’s often said that a new product (startup), can’t be a marginal improvement; it needs to be 10x better. 95 percentile is not 10x
>If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.
I think what you are missing:
- not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one will pay for excellence of some services or goods
- being exceptionally good at something doesn’t guarantee someone will buy from you, people might just don’t like you or your branding
- there are bunch of other market forces that you have to overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95% on a single thing
a small focused group of tryers is probably a big help
First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build culture. No excuse, but still.
At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?
Learning why it’s done the way it’s done before bringing up the beginner questions they get answered over and over is reasonable.
If you're hiring junior people then sure. In Mr Beast's interview with Lex Fridman, he says he actually prefers hiring people from outside the entertainment industry because those folks really want to do what they did before, how they did it before, and not the Mr Beast way. Reading between the lines, I think he ends up hiring a lot of junior people because they're not set in their ways. Also probably they'll work long hours because they're just getting their start.
Makes sense. Training juniors is a thing and maybe this document is also speaking to how at least it's working there.
Past film and tv folks I know have a hard time just diving in and doing it because they're so used to the processes they've had before. Not all are like this, and the ones that aren't, have a huge advantage over juniors with the open mind and experience to boot.
Even the digital side of shooting with a high end phone and editing well enough with tools still seems to not convince them.
On the other side, the OBS crowd, and youtubers are year by year improving their production skills and some of it's kind of starting to look pretty high quality.
Youtube will have no problem if it wants becoming the universal cable network with an obscure channel for pretty much everything that is very decent quality.
I've also heard this exact same thing from my employer who hired ke straight out or college. Most of the company was comprised of young people. My boss, who was C level told me young people are easier to mold and now that I'm older I 100% agree with that. It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.
>It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.
How do you know they are 'good habits'. I have seen countless years of bad practices lauded internally as amazing/the etalon weight when it comes to code quality. In reality most of them were textbook examples of what should not be done. When you get folks without any previous experience, there's no one to question the status or the authority. If they learn/wisen up, they are likely to leave.
Recent grads tend to be more evidence-oriented than people with experience, IME. They'll e.g. benchmark something to see whether it's faster rather than going by reputation alone.
Hmm - that's quite nice/reassuring, although not my experience. Benchmarking, OTOH, is notoriously hard, esp. the microbenchmark type. The old: lies, damn lies, statistics, (micro)benchmarks.
They also don't know better.
It's a lot of work to stay open minded, flexible, free, and not know better.
Still, investing in their development can yield the kinds of people that an organization may be after.
It's the best company I've ever worked at so far. The fact that mostly everyone was in their 20s to early 30s meant we had an awesome cohesive culture.
Note I said mostly. Of course there were older people, but they were in their 40s and early 50s. They were few and far between, and they were the "adults" in the room when needed. It worked really well.
Age doesn’t mean anything.
It’s just mindset and maintaining it.
In our 20s we might not know better, follow others and end up letting the current take us where it may.
Sometimes when I meet an 18 year old I wonder how they are having experiences where they are growing or the rate of growing is slowing much quicker than someone who was on the early internet.
If you can stay young and build discipline in all ages it works as you are saying.
It’s less about being the adult in the room as much as supporting people to grow and become those people they are seeking.
Sure, at an individual level age might not matter much. But taken in aggregate, age means a lot in the context of company culture building. Take any average 24 year old and see how much they have in common with a 34 year old or 40 year old. Let's not pretend life doesn't change over time and hand wave it with a nice platitude.
But how do you know what's good, and what's bad without a diversity of experience under one's belt? You could be working at a cult, or the greatest company ever. What Mr Beast does works for Mr. Beast. Same for your employer.
An example of risk taking in operations is right there in the pdf - “no doesn’t mean no”
They give the example of picking a filming location you aren’t likely to get permission to film in but would produce outstanding content.
A lot of people here (and in tech in general) are conflating "being efficient" with "having success"...
that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency
but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"
I don't think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal.
Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success.
So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".
> is BAD, not a "success"
that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value.
Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.
No it can't, economic success is completely linked with morality when your success is linked to producing tons of CO2, which is going to put our planet, and in particular poorer people, in the shitters
Yes it can. It's as absurd as claiming you can't talk about a person without mentioning their eventual death.
Not entirely true - bad things can be measured. Harm exists and has a value. The value, in this case if you wanted to derive, would be the amount of money consumers spent on random advertised things.
Sure it would be hard to measure - but you could argue that money is money consumers lost as a result of Mr Beast (or maybe YouTube as a whole).
For example, looking to the tobacco industry: they were incredibly economically successful because they leveraged the weaknesses of the human brain to sell their product, namely nicotine addiction. This is now largely considered immoral, but let's look past that.
We can still measure the badness, or harm, of the tobacco industry objectively. We see how much money was/is spent on cancer treatment, COPD treatment, etc. These analysis have been done before and it's pretty damning, billions of dollars. In some cases, the cost of tobacco straight up exceeds the profit. Meaning, from a communal economic standpoint, they are a net-negative. Yes, it's true, tobacco, while wildly popular, is economically in the red.
Of course, we live in a staunchly capitalistic, individualistic society. Communal economic cost/benefit is almost never looked at. Which is why we had the problems with the tobacco industry, and why the obesity epidemic grows. Mr Beast videos are not of this scale, but I would argue they are of this nature.
> but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"
That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.
Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.
If 100% of his watchers were YouTube Premium subscribers and none of them ever saw an ad, would you feel differently?
If people were actively paying for the content, and thus "accepting to be endoctrinated" why not, although I think that all kind of entreprise with such a handbook of "how to make people basically addicted to the shit we build" is bad
People are losing communities, people are losing attention span, and this is because we make people addict to shit like this
And then idiot like Trump manage to take power
We need a society with longer pauses, reflexion, empathy
It’s still kind if garbage content
> that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency
I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.
I always love the "just hire A-players" line.
As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.
And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in.
Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.
Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.
It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good.
The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.
Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.
Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.
Of course now you have a function which isn't non-optimally performed, it's now not being performed at all. Because you're probably "running lean" so actually you have no redundancy for that function.
And then there's the sociological effect of course: are you even any good at identifying poor performers, does the team view it that way? You can be one employee departure away from an exodus since someone being laid off is usually a good sign for everyone else to reconsider how they feel about their position. Bad management is pretty good at generating a never-ending stream of "underperforming employees".
Like let's state the obvious here: you're looking back the 7 prior companies you worked for. Are the people you thought should be fired still there? Are they still turning up every day and doing something? Because in that context, whatever their fault, they are a more reliable resource to the company then you were (this isn't judgment: my resume is long too).
The major problem I see is: focusing on an individual, when it's the team that needs to be A-level. You can't just throw a bunch of A-players together and expect an A-team.
Expecting your workers to never make the same mistake twice is extremely harsh and only works if you are comfortable with a lot of volatility in team structure & in an employer's market.
I’ve seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having a choice. Usually it is because either:
- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)
- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability
- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.
Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.
It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said "A players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players". That was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will hire C players - and so on.
That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.
Apple wasn’t that at the start. But it had a few a players.
Absolutely. A part of that would have been Steve's legendary ability to convince folks to make the move to Apple even when they had options that looked better at the time. Another part was seeing the potential of those already in the company, another part was just dumb luck.
I believe Job's was providing this perspective more in the late 2000's after he had been through the whole Apple exile/Next thing.
I wouldn’t be one to speculate on steve
Steve Jobs would be non existent in terms of ver getting off the ground without Steve Wozniak.
Another visionary without the ability to execute and deliver.
It’s good they got together.
Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A compensation.
And a lot of A players are unique snowflakes so they have to be compatible with other unique snowflakes so it can be hard to fill the gaps. You need a few Bs who are moldable to fill gaps
>I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.
If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.
If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.
>And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.
He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.
>trying to hire mediocre people
It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.
Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.
> As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.
Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of 'mediocre people' instead of one 'A-player'; the ratio of more junior to more senior; etc.
I am hearing this stuff from bigger companies too now. By definition, everyone cannot hire A players.
Yeah most places can’t comp 2 Std deviation candidates. Either in pay or experience. Beast could because he’s got the top company in the market that makes it cheap to hire talent.
Having recently switched jobs, I was again reminded of just how terrible most interviewers are. The more senior the interviewer, the more terrible.
> I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business
I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.
So if he doesn't micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do?
It's not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no "Here's my past experience". None of that matters at his level of success.
> I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.
content for dumb kids
There’s a difference between writing down that you hire A-players in a document, and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles
I read the entire document and I don't understand where you saw bad culture or micromanaging.
Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that's a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.
> Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.
This is a deeply naive understanding of employment.
Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture.
Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can't choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn't.
This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and productive Youtube production company. People here work incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job, seeking it out specifically.
> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all
And this is BY CHOICE.
I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.
Yeah people will do the job for free basically. I don’t think you could have the same culture if your business was cleaning port-a-pottys.
We know this isn't true because of the necessity of unions. Mining coal and many other trades are a lot worse than cleaning toilets, and people still had to do them nearly for free.
While I do see the value in unions in some settings, this is not a job of necessity. This is a job for people that wish to self actualize and not settle for anything less than their dream job. Wouldn't creating a union for Mr. Beast employees is akin to saying something like "I want to have my dream job but I want it to be easy"? I don't think that the analogy to mining coal holds.
Unions are no longer necessary.
That's not a value judgement on my part, just a conclusion from decades of declining union membership, with no correlating uptick in starvation or massive reduction in wages.
(You may argue for wage stagnation, and you may attribute that to declining unionism, but that is not a collapse in wages!)
Well that’s because the alternative is starvation
> bad culture
The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.
> micromanaging
He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.
I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).
> where you saw bad culture or micromanaging
Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.
I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.
I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.
> Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.
I personally think (and I think the prevailing sentiment is) that giving early employees equity is crucial. There is no way I would do any work for an early stage startup (or, in general, if I can help it) with no stake in the company.
In bigger companies, it's a zero sum game. They don't really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.
Pretty well so far
Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net detriment of society.
You don't have to imagine very hard.
So most tech startups?
> 4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)
literally everyone says they only hire A-players. Beast hired someone now accused of sexting with teens. is that an A-player hire?
Maybe the subheading “no does not mean no” can be also taken literally.
Unfortunately, the person he'd hired to predict the future was not a A-player.
That's gross. IMHO, ofc. A bit like scientology or crusade-age Christianity, you know it's wrong, but you can't argue with the success, so y not?
Just like you can't argue about a lion eating a gazelle keeping the lion alive. Some people think it's gross but the lion is alive and ready to hunt again.
> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.
Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering.
EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there's little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.
And as all the past 2 months show, you don't get to this level of success without exploiting, if not outright abusing, your labor.
>I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders.
Id bet so too. Becuase he's definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data.
> Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
It really depends on your stage of scale. You don't need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.
SBF was very successful too.
I mean, there is also just hardcore survivorship bias at work here.
How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic / network capture?
You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content.
I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.
>2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
I love coming on here and seeing the world's wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as "only hire good workers; don't hire bad workers"
He gives clear and actionable definitions, which is what makes it remarkable and different to everyone else saying or implying what you wrote.
You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.
> can't deny the success
I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions.
I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.
He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles.
Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)
In this profile from 2022 Jimmy said his goal was to become the number one YouTube channel: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...
According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.
So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.
> I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.
He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.
Cutthroat competition but he cracked the formula. I think that’s success
> But success has different definitions.
Yes, except doesn’t Mr. Beast define the kind of success he’s aiming for in the PDF?
> I do not consider Jimmy successful.
By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?
Probably by more common definitions held by people OP respects...
For example, millions of people would not call him a success because he doesn't have a family with children (although Mr beast has definitely implied he wants one in the future).
Many millions more would say that he's not a success because he doesn't do anything that's a net positive for society, instead he's mostly a drain on people's time and mental capacity.
Uh, ok?
If you're going to debate why this guy is/is not a success we can all make up our own little definitions and go on all day.
But he defined his goals in this PDF and it seems like he's reaching/making progress towards those goals.
People DO make up their definitions, and put together they create a communities standards of success and then eventually a societies.
Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value? Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old? Then dies suddenly alone, only for everyone that met him to chuckle and move on with their day?
Would that be a success by most people's standards? Does it even matter if it's a success by one person's standards? Are the school shooters a success because they accomplish their goals before death?
> Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value?
If you accept a job that’s your market value. If you think you’re worth more, get a higher paying job. Or don’t and pretend that you were squeezed into working for under market value.
The guy employed people for 40 years. Not the worst thing in the world.
Not everybody values the same stuff. Some people like what other people call work. Some people don’t need friends.
> Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old?
If at 20 years old he said his goal was to accumulate 3x the capital before he dies, then I couldn’t argue that by his definition of success, he succeeded.
Hopefully he doesn’t care if I think he’s a success.
> Then dies suddenly alone
We all die suddenly and alone. We’re alive and then we’re dead. Nobody comes with us.
> Would that be a success by most people's standards?
Who cares what most people think?
If no one cared what other people thought, why are we even talking on here.
Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?
> If no one cared what other people thought, why are we even talking on here.
We hate ourselves and have nothing better to do?
> Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?
I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back quite so hard for finding this attempt at a clever gotcha. I thought by ignoring it you’d get the message that it wasn’t as good as you thought it was.
But nevertheless, I would say that they were successful in reaching their goals but that I find their goals and actions abhorrent. I don’t feel the need to add that final qualification to MrBeast’s goals and actions.
It wasn't a clever gotcha, and I wasn't patting myself on the back.
I just found it odd that you went through and systematically addressed every section of my post, but that one.
It was taking what in my opinion is a lame point of view, to an extreme, in hopes of helping someone see that it fails at the extremes... Thus maybe you'll think about it and agree with me that in reality someone's own goals and views of themselves don't matter that much because as a whole we as a society have views on what makes a life worth living and what adds value to society.
And yes I think MrBeast systemizing making mindless brain numbing stupid videos for teenagers and kids to be pretty bad for society. I don't care that be produces revenue doing so.
> as a whole we as a society have views on what makes a life worth living and what adds value to society
Oh, yeah I get what you’re saying now. Give in to peer pressure!
.... I didn't say that.
Just don't be naive and think that societal standards don't exist. And also, possibly give some thought as to why they exist so that you don't go down insane spirals and waste your life only to later understand that the collective had a point.
Yeah I agree that it’s better to live your life how other people want you to live it vs. charting your own path.
No argument here.
You're really dense. I'm not saying you should live your life how others want you to live it.
I'm saying you should examine why people set the standards they do and check if you agree with those values.
If you want to say "hell be with it, I'll be scum til I die because it makes me feel good" then more power to you. But don't go around saying you're successful. You're a rebel and a loser by most people's standards. Not by all. Even school shooters are respected by SOME for their bravery and determination.
Seems like a version of not counting points and giving all the kids a gold medal. It's pink and fluffy.
Literally nobody is denying that MrBeast is successful so what is the point of saying that nobody can deny it?
> 2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"
...seriously?
Good by what measure?
Is anyone seriously denying the success?
What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.
Success, but at what cost is more important, for those who are evaluating success.
A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs to climate are equally important.
We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.
There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.
By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.
You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast.
They got beat out by Salesforce...
We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.
A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.
But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.
For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...
> We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things.
Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room. However, it's very well known (empirically) that they won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.
Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled. People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.
Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically want.
I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few reasons.
One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it. This is the same game that consumer packaged goods companies play with apparent package size. Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I booked a flight, about half the plane was first class, business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't, it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive airlines have gotten.
I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.
Google Flights shows the leg room in inches, and there's several sites that you can research it on.
However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.
> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.
Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.
So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airli...
> jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point it's caused strain in my personal life.
I agree with your overall assessment that people will (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means, like 6' is not that tall.
I'm 6'5". To be clear I do always try for an extra legroom seat unless it's like 1 or maybe 2 hours tops. I don't go out of my way to pick jetBlue, so the "everyone gets legroom" thing isn't a real competitive advantage. I just consolidate my flying with a carrier and with even the lowest status tiers you generally get free extra legroom seating. Not giving everyone extra legroom seats means they can lower the sticker price and reward frequent fliers. The short people don't get nearly as much benefit from the extra leg room and don't value the seat as much so higher density means lower prices for everyone.
When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough to move the needle for me.
IMO it's very costly to compare legroom and is often obscured and switched up. Also people might use 'legroom' to also mean more expansive things like shoulder width of their seat, and that is definately not something you can buy with economy plus. Seat width has shrunk several inches and is universally reduced on all airline by now. To get back to 18/19" seat width, you have to pay double or triple, which seems absurd for a 12% to 20% increase in width.
i think the Jetblue thing is historically true but not anymore.
The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required ratio of persons per flight attendant.
> Kind of but not really.
You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.
Well the other thing is paying for luggage. No-one wants to pay for luggage. But if luggage is free, it means that everyone with no/small luggage is just subsidizing those with luggage.
Charging for luggage is fine.
The problem is when luggage costs the same or more as ticket without luggage.
I don't think I've ever seen the legroom listed on a flight comparison site. Is that a thing?
Google flights lists legroom for most flights. Although it doesn't seem like you can filter on legroom.
Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).
But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work.
As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM?
They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole.
It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)
>why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM
well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument.
the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input.
the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM
Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce?
Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?
You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same.
And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners).
>And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me?
I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion."
So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.
The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough.
Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.
https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers
IIRC the start up was beaten out by volume of features, granted some didn't work on Salesforce, but people buy software based on features for sure.
The market is always looking to be seen, understood and helped.
Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be overlooked more than it ought to be.
Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)
I like to think I do too.
However, I think we can recognize a collective we that even if the individual might not do a thing ... we're all in the same boat in the end.
I think part of Apple’s success is because they give people nice things.
They do indeed treat customers well.
The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.
> [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.
>Most companies have terrible code
1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out).
2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.
I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact.
We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.
Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.
This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics
Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
> The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them.
low quality consumption doesn't have an age range. Sometimes you just want to watch a cozy cat video, so I get it.
>We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
that sounds horrible for multiple reasons that could be a post in and of itself. I'll just point out the obvious one from the post itself:
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
If the algorithm shifts, they will shift and I'm sure something goodhearted like "make the best educational videos" will find some loophole to slip in clickbait or any other engagement metric.
Ultimately, let me curate my own filters. I can't save everyone else but let me make sure I never see that stuff if I don' want to.
> The audience is primarily children
Ask me how I know you didn’t read the handbook! Over 50% of the audience is >=25
Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.
The brain isn't full developed until 25-30 years old. I changed a lot, mentally, in my late 20's to early 30's. 25 is still a borderline child.
Sure, but a lot of people are besides brain-dead slop-consumers.
That doesn't really challenge the proposal about regulating content.
(I personally recoil at the proposition of China-like content moderation but whatever.)
Algorithm moderation is not content moderation. A recent court case found that algorithmic recommendations don't fall under section 230 protection.
Mr. Beast is FAR from the most pathological content on YouTube.
> And this is why we can't have nice things.
Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.
> Some counterpoints:
The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.
"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
> "No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida
This quote describes how things should be, not how things actually are.
In the long run it is true.
Name a company which has prospered, over many years, without rendering benefit to its customers.
Real estate agencies? Most middleman in general have a shakey premise for if they "benefit" their customers.
On a less subjectve level, I feel the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality runs counter to this ideal. the FAANGs did indeed render benefit to its customers early on. You can argue by now almost all of them 20 years later have long shifted towards being gatekeepers that employ dark patterns or outright rent seek these days, rather than acting like a customer-focused company.
Virtually every casino and gambling company in existence.
Are you suggesting casino and bookmakers' clients derive no utility at all from gambling? In the absence of any enjoyment or other benefit, who forces the clients to participate?
Same argument can be made for tobacco salesmen, drug dealers etc. If people pay money for something then they MUST derive some benefit from it... I find that assumption questionable.
Other things I could mention: multi-level marketing, snake oil sellers e.g. homeopathy astrology etc.
I find the assumption that every casino and gambling company in existence provides no benefit, of any kind, to any of their customers....extremely questionable.
In MrBeast's case, his revenue is directly correlated with customer engagement via YouTube's algorithm. I'm sure that were it legal, gladiatorial combat would be very popular and profitable on YouTube. I suppose one could make an argument that it would therefore "beneficial".
In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.
> No one prospers without rendering benefit to others
Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians, grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...
I hate that so many people live by “wisdom” that falls apart at the slightest scrutiny…
Our lives are made up of and guided by narratives that sound good and just on paper, but are empirically proven wrong time and time again. Yet they persist.
Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal, biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor, who did not take the time to look at the percentage of researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.
Almost all of his examples are/were failures, by all metrics.
Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.
None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.
edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.
[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2099001/ford-100-defective-pi...
nit: you can indeed know a pinto would blow up before it blows up. But you go to your city square and get laughed at because they trust Ford over some car mechanic who looked deeply into the car.
Of course, I'm describing a literal forum here (physical forums! good times). I wonder how many whistleblowers out there highlighted some dark pattern in the past 20 years and were cast off as a conspiracy nut. Both publicly and in internal company channels.
nit2: it's so strange how times have changed. 40-50 years ago his Pinto recall was company ending. Nowadays the Cybertruck has had what? 5 recalls now? And it still has this bizarre cult behind it. What happened to people? what happened to wanting a driveable car (nevermind those truck minded audiences the cybertruck targets who claims to do more than just drive)?
nit2, here are the four Cybertruck recalls [1].
1. Windshield wiper motor failure.
2. Loose trim from the bed.
3. Accelerator pedal can stick.
4. Wrong sized font used for the warning lights.
Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.
> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.
That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.
[1] https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-cybertruck/recalls/
[3] https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123283959/gas-pedal-woes-put-...
You're right about 4 and maybe 2. But #3 is pretty much by biggest one of my top 3 fears in a car. Stuck accelerator or non-working breaks. I was already cast off before hand but I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.
#1 is a big issue but not for my area.
Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?
> not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc?
The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.
The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).
You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
I think something that companies often miss is that improving the experience in an area where you have a monopoly can still increase profits by encouraging increased usage of that area.
The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.
After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.
U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.
Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.
U-haul is one of the shittiest experiences possible. Right there with calling comcast and going to the dmv. Compare that to truck rental from Lowe’s or Home Depot that’s actually probably more expensive but way more pleasant.
Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.
Not copiers, but the ice cream machines in mcdonalds resturants were kept unreliable because mcdonalds made money on the constant repairs. It didn't matter to them that the franchisee was losing money. When 3rd party companies jumped in to fix the machines the manufacturer and mcdonalds acted to stop that happening. There was a court case brought by the third party companies, which they recently lost.
Actually, it looks like the feds have sided with the 3rd parties?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-...
> ...they recently lost.
Who is "they"?
They being the third party repair companies. Johnny Harris did a long piece on the whole story [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
Why did you write sic after you quoted “warrantees”?
The correct spelling is "warranties" (since singular y becomes i when it gets plural).
[sic] means "I copied the word as written in its original, and it was already written that way" [0].
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sic
I probably meant warranties but warrantees works in the sentence just fine too :)
Hey, as long as it's readable, I don't care. I just wanted to note that I quoted you verbatim, not judge you because you pressed letter "e" twice instead of once in an internet forum. :)
In my experience, people very rarely use [sic] when quoting on internet forums - readers will assume any quote was copied and pasted; and the quoted text is directly above yours.
Sometimes people edit their comments after they realize their mistakes; grammar, spelling or otherwise. I use [sic] to denote that "it was like that when I copied it". It's probably from my "old internet" days (/., local forums, etc.).
>- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...
That's not a counterpoint, that's a list of examples of exactly what they're saying.
They're not saying make the best product possible, they're saying make the product that sells the most despite quality.
I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.
Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.
While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.
Those are problematic business goals, right? I think that's very different to aligning team goals to company goals.
You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.
A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
Those still seem like examples of “whatever the company is trying to achieve”, be it profitability, domination, cost minimisation etc.
> - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
Any good alternatives?
If you really want a Dyson, a better firmware: https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS
If you are OK on alternatives, YouTube channel ProjectFarm has some vacuum reviews.
Mine doesn't seem to have any problem with batteries. Just "airways blocked" error no matter what I do and the warranty/support service isn't very helpful. So I'm looking for a similar-or-better quality clone (cordless vacuum with the laser thing) but with better service.
Not to stan for Dyson, but they're not a vacuum-cleaner company, they're a fire-prevention company. Every decisionmaking process they undertake is going to have that at the top of the list. They don't want a lot of batteries in the field that are being stretched to the limits of their operating lives.
Of course, the company's best response to that concern would be to make the batteries easily replaceable, including by third-party products. But that's where job #2 comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson sooner rather than later.
Then why design batteries with built-in cell balancing support, and remove the resistors to disable the feature in the last moment?
You can safely say that if the battery pack's total capacity drops under 75%, disable it, or detect dead cells and take action.
Disabling life prolonging features while having a full MCU and a nice battery IC on board smells fishy to me.
Riccar, Miele, SEBO. Brands you may not have heard of (I know I hadn't). Highly recommend a visit to your local vacuum repair store. Talk to the guy who's job is fixing all the shitty stick vacs.
DeWalt, or any other power tool battery adapter like this: https://www.amazon.com/HICOPEET-Compatible-Motorhead-v7-v8/d...
Power tool batteries have BMS, better chargers, and if you have multiple batteries, you get infinite vacuuming powers.
I swapped to Shark and haven't looked back. Current one takes an absolute beating (masses of dog hair, kids mess, countryside dirt walked into the house etc. etc.) and still performs perfectly after 3+ years of almost daily (ab-)use
I went down the vacuum rabbit hole a few years ago. I decided on Sebo. These are more or less big ugly machines with a cord, but you can buy every part online no matter how small (screws, gaskets,etc) or big (motors, control boards, etc).
> Some counterpoints:
Maybe all of these companies succeeded _despite_ these?
I suspect the intent was the best for the customer. Like it or not, YouTube is the customer here. The viewers are YouTube's customers.
I'd say the viewers are YouTube's quatloos.
Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things, MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.
What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.
I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.
The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.
I actually admire that quote.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing things to happen.
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
Facilitate instead of forbid.
TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it.
Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
The most secure company is, of course, the company that doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most effective way to keep it secure.
Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly".
Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.
There is a natural tension between these equally important roles, especially when folks choose to view competing objectives as a zero sum game. I think your point of view is one-sided.
Reminds me of the "most secure computer is the one encased in a block of concrete at the bottom of the ocean".
Not disagreeing with you, can you give and explain one of the examples where you have seen this?
Your comment reminded me of the old content vs process Steve Jobs commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
There. Fixed it.
Ok but the main issue is the stopping things from happening instead of finding solutions.
Some things should be stopped.
For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
>For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce.
Note this is MrBeast doing it to himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E
I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to potentially psychologically torment himself for his channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.
(I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants as well. But either way, I think this particular criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)
IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of the game shows. That's definitely unethical.
Maybe those sure, but I guess I'm more talking about the corporate IT or legal department setting who are just worried about some micro service having some weird vulnerability or something.
> locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).
I think those are references to the Dogpack404 videos: https://youtube.com/@DogPack404/videos
They were the ones that stirred up a bunch of controversy, but had some former employee experiences in them.
I have no idea about he greater situation but I think that’s what the comment is referencing.
there is nuance to all things and that nuance is what GP is getting at.
What you say is also valid but in between, is a lot of grey. For example, should the federal government in your country issue standardised IDs to citizens? A lawyer may point to privacy regulations and say no but there are lots of benefits. If a workaround exists, should we simply ignore those benefits?
And the "best YOUTUBE videos possible" are... toxic, useless brainrot? (with occasional for-views philanthropy)
These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?
Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.
Yes, best is always wrt some metric, which here is clearly monetary gain.
His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic, useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is about on the same level as any number of classic novels (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister). Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the people involved, as they're thrown into complex social situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.
>toxic, useless brainrot
I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.
Notably, many of them are similar formats that you'd find in regular TV, except the MrBeast version puts 10 minutes of content into a 12 minute video, while the TV show would put 5 minutes of content into a 45 minute episode.
What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it.
If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content
2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something?
3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money?
I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently.
At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.
> I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.
Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying to publish self help books for profit. By that logic, you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because you don't actually understand the causal relationship between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-faith discussion.
Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, if you're willing to look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day, he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his reputation as a healthy net positive on society. Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to his employees to prevent them from presenting serious competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart, assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his popularity for profit.
By sincerely believing the image he presents, you yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert. Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.
Not disclosing that the beneficiaries are friends and family under the guise of charity to get more views seems pretty scummy to me. In general I'm sick of the fake charity we see with influencers, including the classic "show up to a volunteer event, take pictures, and promptly leave" bit that influencers occasionally get caught doing.
>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.
Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing.
I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything:
"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster."
Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.
This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.
> The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.
In this particular example, often this isn't remotely feasible, either from a business logic standpoint (I can think of plenty of fintech examples), lack of qualified DBA/sysadmins, network admins, cloud cost constraints, methods and controls to ensure to auditors that devs cannot access production data - none of this is trivial, and often to the dev it seems "silly" they may need to wait a few hours for something they could technically access in a few minutes, but acting like these solutions have no tradeoffs or are always worth doing suggests a lack of knowledge as to how these things actually work in a business and on a development team. It certainly isn't always laziness, and I'd even say it's not laziness that often at all.
In your example, I am not saying you need to give the dev access to prod. But you should be working with the dev to figure out why he needs access to prod and figuring out what needs to happen to make the end goal happen. Getting read/write access to prod isn't the end goal, the dev is trying to accomplish something and they see direct access to prod as the solution.
My point wasn't that lawyers/security/IT/whatever shouldn't do their job. It's that their perspective should be focused on helping the company achieve whatever it's trying to do.
I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.
This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.
Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life.
This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.
It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible"
Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.
Hey! Have you been reading my email? This is a perfect analogy of the medium-to-large business that I work for.
>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.
Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
> Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
> intentionally hostile reading of the content.
Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content.
> Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on?
> Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.
Because "lowest common denominator slop" is a culturally contextual judgement of media, and varies from place to place, time to time and culture to culture. Fine French Dining fans would call a pizza parlor "lowest common denominator slop", but no one would be offended if the employee handbook for a pizza place said "You're here to make the BEST TASTING PIZZA. Not the best looking pizza. Not a pizza made from the most expensive artesian ingredients. Not the fanciest pizza. Not a pizza lovingly hand crafted with dough that was hand massaged by virgins under the light of a full moon. If it's not making the BEST TASTING PIZZA, it's not your job."
>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.
So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.
Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
So your ideal model of a company is the infinite paperclip machine?
It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles—there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other parts.
I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.
An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.
One thing I find interesting over the last few weeks since this was released (and other MrBeast drama) is how there is now a separation between MrBeast the person and MrBeast the company.
Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.
While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
It just seems a bit weird to me.
Honestly I never met Jimmy even though I was in his studio for two weeks working on the video. I did meet a ton of his employees, many of whom I'd gladly work with again, just not on a MrBeast production.
I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).
The bigger the company gets, the more separate it becomes from its founder/face/whatever.
Inevitable.
(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)
> While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.
MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other people willing to give up theirs for his channel
He is fricking 26 years old. He hasn't given his life for anything. At the moment he is, yes, but likely after some years he is retired on his yacht.
Some things leave a permanent mark on you. Try being a workaholic a few years and tell me later how easy is to disconnect, and rejoin with familiy and friends.
Yeah, working constantly for a few years leaves permanent marks. You know what makes it better in ways we'll never have? Millions of dollars, luxury yachts, and fame. Mr. Beast isn't a doctor. He isn't a teacher. He doesn't fight our wars. He makes entertainment for children. He'll be fine.
I think parent comment was referring to employees who are willing to dig in and sacrifice a few years of their lives for MrBeast productions, not to Jimmy Donaldson (though I could be interpreting it wrong).
Giving up your life for many millions of dollar is a choice.
His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...
No, it's to offer them a chance to make a lot of money in exchange for a lot of work.
No one is forced to work there and they are not taken advantage of.
Any of them are free to start their own channel and outcompete him! It's literally how he did it!
the audacity to ask other people to give up their life for helping you fulfil your dream and even sell it to them as them fulfilling their dream.
is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?
if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
THIS. I would like to tell you a bit of a personal story and this may shed some light on your question. Disclaimer* I am American.
I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or something, then you were expected to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday.
I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never be Elon, working for Elon".
So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started having some conversations with potential clients to launch my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed] the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."
At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton, designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was just calling on all my old associates and references of references... life was great!
Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this person, generating "Work" for different people, and i freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers, only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within the company, scaling different verticles as different companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70 hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i hated "Consulting".
but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX, Tesla update ever...
And suddenly i realised, i deeply missed working at Tesla... i don't want to be Elon...
But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.
So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money but i could have chilled for a bit...
but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla, fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again, i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of people.
Very interesting personal experience, thanks!
I agree that doing meaningless work is soul crushing even if well-compensated.
It seems like it ought to be possible to do meaningful work without working 80 hour weeks, but maybe not!
And owning your own business isn't necessarily an easy 40 hours a week and don't think about it when you're not working, but sounds like you did have a lighter schedule? Or actually you didn't mention that! If you traded a 70-hour week as a well-compensated employee doing meaningful work for a 70-hour week being your own boss with possibility of making more money doing meaningless work -- yeah, I would make the same choice between those two! But I'd rather not have a 70 hour week, be reasonably compensated, and do meaningful work, if that were an option...
But we kind of forgot what we're talking about here... pretty sure nobody working for Mr Beast thinks it's meaningful work, and if they do, I'm worried about them.
How could anyone not think that entertaining literal millions of people is meaningful work? For some people, video production is their calling and having an audience is their life's dream.
sure, but holding a mic boom for entertaining millions of people is not meaningful work
I (ggp) actually don't agree, contributing proper mic boom holding to a project you find important and valuable and meaningful can be meaningful. Every contribution is meaningful.
I guess to me the crass eyeball-harvesting of MrBeast seems like exploitation of everyone involved with the only meaningfulness involved being profit. But I realize based on stickfigure's response that different people find different things meaningful, fair enough. Which is different than saying "just getting lots of money is meaningful for me" -- that is a different axis than meaning, and I'm unlikely to be swayed otherwise, although some people don't need meaning they just need money. It was hard for to imagine anyone is doing it for anything but the money at MrBeast, but different people are different and some of them are hard for me to imagine, fair!
Ever watch the Jackass movies? I know plenty of MFA-toting snobs that think it's high performance art. And I don't disagree.
I read the PDF; profit wasn't on the list of KPIs. In fact there was quite a lot of invective against it; he'll kill expensive projects just because he didn't think the quality was good enough. Of course $$ is related, but the focus really is on the eyeballs.
I worked in porn for a while. I found the work fun and meaningful. Not every mission involves saving the world.
Isn't what makes something meaningful in the eyes of the beholder? It might not be sending rockets to mars or curing cancer, but if you perceive it as meaningful, then it is.
what would you say are the chances for tesla to actually deliver optimus and start a commercial humanoid robots operation in the next 5 years?
no idea - I'm working with fanuc and kuka robots on the line, not those robots.
this read like a post written by Grok or Elon himself NGL
This is what we call a cult.
You can call it whatever you want, it’s obvious you’re never going to be part of it.
People should not do that, though. There are better things to dedicate lives to.
>There are better things to dedicate lives to.
Everyone seems to think that they have the answers to this question... Family, friends, community, god, volunteering at the local soup kitchen..
All over your own wants? If you are a video creator/ creative and that's what gives you energy and all the feel good chems, why not work your ASS off for THE CREATOR of our generation?
Cause from the way i see it, success and the confidence* it brings, solves all other issues.
*As long as you can avoid the pitfall of arrogance.
Because, in my opinion, this is a worse thing to do with your life than the many better options.
I don't have some One Right Answer to what the best thing to do with your life is, but I'm comfortable having a personal - but strong - opinion on a rough ordering that, for instance, puts family and friends much higher than a life dedicated to "THE CREATOR of our generation". Maybe you think that sounds impressive? I think it just sounds very sad.
Or, you can go work there for 1-2 years, learn a lot and move on. Maybe to some more relaxed work, or start your own venture. It actually sounds like a place where you might learn something.
Yep, to the extent that this is a sensible thing to do, this is the sensible way to do it. This is clearly analogous to working in high-pressure finance shops or in startups for a fairly short period of time in order to drink from a firehose.
The problem is that the kind of people who are ambitious enough to think this sounds like a good idea often (maybe usually) get sucked deeply into it.
But yep, I do think it's a reasonable model if you can avoid that outcome and get in and out early in your career.
> There are better things to dedicate lives to.
Then those aren't people Jimmy wants to hire for his company. There are hundreds of millions of teenagers on this planet that want to stake everything they own to make a YouTube channel and reap the rewards - ownership of their work, being their own boss, potentially lucrative amounts of money, microcelebrity if not greater levels of fame, etc. Some will do it, and some won't. Jimmy is very clearly talking to those people.
I know because I was one of them, making my first few hundred dollars ever from adsense at the age of 14 (till I was demonetized a year later and my channel got taken down for copyright, but hey, you learn). I've since grown a bit a taken that energy and it's helped guide me as I learn to make my own startup right now - it's the same adrenaline rush and pursuit of the American dream.
It's interesting to me that you did this with YouTube, as I did the same when I was 16 (almost 20 years ago now) but with AdSense. I earned about $70 (mostly off my buddies anime site) which I never collected. Seven years later Google sends the money to my state's unclaimed fund. Even more years later I finally collect that $70 check.
Just wanted to share some fond memories.
Yep, I get it. This is all true. What I'm saying is that, in my opinion, it's also bad and those people (and perhaps you) ought to choose a better path. I recognize that many of them won't. There are lots of things I think people (including myself!) ought not do, which we still do anyway.
who are you to dictate what people do with their lives and deny them their free will?
Not who you are responding to but I think it is more a case of, long term it might not work out as intended for them. They are more than free to pursue this goal with all their might, but don't be surprised if in a few years they are burnt out and scrambling for the exit.
That said, it might work out, who knows? But at some point it looks like gambling with your time and energy trying to seek fulfillment. Again, they are free to do this, just try not to harm others in the process.
even if it doesnt work, an employee was compensated for labor on mutually agreed terms & one comes out with valuable experience (and arguably a stronger ability to build something better than MrBeast if there is misalignment with MrBeast principles/values)
Note that I'm not dictating anything to anyone, simply stating my view about what things are or aren't good, which I'm certainly entitled to.
That's like me saying I've given up my life to have the job that I have currently and live where I do. Or you've given up your life for however you spend it.
It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
My biggest critizism of A/B/C is it is always either a delusion, lie, or manipulation. People that talk frequently about "A players/employees" are almost certainly not the ones hiring them. Why? "A players" don't work someplace where they are not respected and ground to dust as a non-owner. That means at best the best employees are "B-players" and probably most of their staff is actually "C-players"
"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.
I would like to believe that's true, but honestly, I know some really hard workers who are gluttons for abuse.
Sure. My point really was though that if you find a place that is openly discussing A/B/C dynamics it is a huge red flag.
"C-Players" tend to keep "A-Players" out of legal trouble, so Jimmy might just now be learning their value.
The no doesn't mean no section was about contractors and dealing with other people. It was a way of conveying that if you ask for something and get an outright refusal, then it's ok to ask again and pivot on details to try and find a fit. MrBeasts company drove a train into a big pit (one of the few videos I watched). That call, would have started with, I'd like to buy a train and a big pit. It probably started as a flat out refusal before he turned up with money.
I bet the folks at Train & Pit Co. Couldn’t believe their ears.
> labor laws and unions
Perhaps this is as much a commentary on the state of labor laws and unions as anything else.
You don't understand. In this culture if you have enough money no does not mean no. You have less laws to care about. In some cases you ARE the law.
I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rather" conversations I had in middle school.
Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).
For as much slop as gets produced on YouTube, I think the high quality educational content more than makes up for it. You can literally look up any subject and find a full blown series on the topic.
His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.
This is why those who can appropriately select good information will flourish in this age. I still suck at it (get pulled into mindnumbing shorts for 30 minutes), but then I learned a new musical instrument for _free_ using YouTube.
Agreed, YouTube is the PBS of the internet. It's free and fast.
PBS is not, at least nominally, advertising-supported.
YouTube very much is.
It’s a wonder of the modern world
and it just works. I'm glad there's a monopoly of UGC video
>Youtube is net bad for the world
Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.
The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word website.
Knowledge share is finally global.
> Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.
Agreed.
> The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
These seem like the outliers.
The good news is they don't have to be outliers for you. Watch what you want; skip the rest.
Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking project.
The value isn't determined by watched hours.
No other streaming platform offers a video catalog that covers nearly all aspects of human activities.
This has never existed in all of humanity.
This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
What you're saying is that the high quality educational content is subsidized by the trash.
It doesn't make it net-bad. It makes it an ad-supported educational resource. Is that surprising, given that it's owned by an ad company?
It does make it net-bad because the educational content should exist without the trash, which is far more prevalent. It forces the positive stuff to comply with the trash algorithms that make them worse and also forces them to comply with the monopoly of one of the largest, most monolithic corporations in the world that can do whatever the fuck they want with the content. Of course it's not surprising! It's just shitty and needs to be different.
But the educational content DOESNT exist without the trash and you cannot make a case that it just would, that’s unlikely and impossible to prove.
“Net bad” means the world would be absolutely and inarguably better without YouTube. This is so outlandish, honestly; YouTube at its core is an information sharing platform and a lot of useful things have come out of it. Immense amounts even.
> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.
> However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from.
Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
> Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
Off the top of my head, Gamers Nexus is a counterpoint. Obviously not Mr Beast-scale, but we're also looking at a huge difference in target demographic breadth.
Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube. For as long as cheap printing and mail services have been around, artists have had strong incentive to go design ads rather than pursue their art independently.
YouTube definitely has a race to the bottom going on, but it's not all-consuming and well-researched, high-quality material is still profitable for creators as long as you know how to play the thumbnail game.
> Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube.
I extend the same criticisms towards traditional television as well.
They're both just symptoms of the advertising problem. Advertisers are the enablers of this stuff. They'll back any content that draws attention, and the ones which draw the most are memes, controversy, generally negative value slop. People endlessly scrolling apps with infinite content being fed instant gratification with product offerings in between. Algorithms that actively push them towards controversy and hate because it maximizes "engagement".
> Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube
And I would say 99% of it is worse than the goofy YouTube stuff. Reality TV is mostly people hooking up and pretending to fall in love.
But are they enjoying what they are doing? If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?
While many try to make a living off YouTube (and some do) there are no guarantees offered nor should any be expected.
> If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?
I think it matters a lot. It creates massive distortions in society's perception of value.
Because of YouTube's advertising, you have people becoming multimillionaires by making total nonsense videos where they do things like react to other videos. Literally a YouTube video of a guy watching other YouTube videos, pausing and saying whatever pops into his head. Like this comment section. And he gets millions of dollars for it.
There's something deeply wrong with a society where you are rewarded for nothing. The people who actually do something tend to feel cheated when they see it happen. Imagine being a professional, a trades person and seeing a random dude get 1000x richer than you because he said stupid shit on the internet. And if you point it out, some startup founder accuses you of sour grapes.
Society should think deeply about the incentives it offers to people. Because people will respond to them.
IF it were a net good, they'd let me disable Shorts. But they don't.
This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is only watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn't exist.
> This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is.
No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.
That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.
Are you arguing that the public fascination with it makes it morally acceptable? If so would you consider gladiatorial fights to the death and gruesome public executions, both of which have been massive crowd-pleasers in the past and no doubt would be again if they became socially accepted, justified by the same argument? If not, what do you think is different here that makes condemning Mr. Beast for feeding unwholesome public appetites wrong, but condemning Roman emperors for it right? Just a question of the degree of nastiness?
Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.
> Just a question of the degree of nastiness?
Just a question of degree of nastiness? Yes, competitions involving life and death are qualitatively different from competitions involving money. Something interesting to think about is that we do have ultra graphic action movies and horror movies. Are those also net negative?
> Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture.
There is no human culture that I know of that was not fascinated by things like money and fame.
> I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral
I don't think Mr Beast is immoral and not for the reasons you state. I think you have in your mind some very judgemental ideas of what is right and wrong.
I think shows like Mr Beast and all celebrity culture is dumb. I think sports are dumb too. I don't think they are evil and I know that humanity will find a way to create variants of these things no matter what kind of insane rules society tried to put in place.
Human nature is full of self-conflict and contradiction. There are more base aspects of it and higher ones as well. This has been known up and down the ages. Vices and virtues. "You're against vice, hence you're against humans because vice is what humans like to choose!" Well, no. You can be against catering to the base urges. You wouldn't feed your dog 10 cakes even if it continues eating it. And that's not hatred of dog-ity.
I would disagree on the net bad for the world, or at least be skeptical about it. Personally, Youtube was my life changing tool which I used to learn almost everything essential to my career and personal development, and I would assume lots of others would be the same. The type of content it recommends goes with the type of content you interacted with in the past. It just a tool and it matters how you use it
> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world
Overwhelming majority of things designed to exploit human imperfections for personal gain are a net bad. Youtube has become one of those things.
Unfortunate, 'cause that's where the money is.
youtube still has a net positive value. the amount of knowledge & learning (and ok, entertainment) i get out of it on a daily basis is immense and i can't imagine the amount of wisdom i'd have sucked up as a kid if i had access to all this.
if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.
What the algorithm seems to favour is a better indicator of what people use Youtube for overall.
I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.
I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads. Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is blocked at home and kids don’t have smartphones.
Youtube is the single most important and valuable learning tool that exists on the planet. There are lectures on literally everything, i have been recently learning my way into geometric algebra and lie theory for my physics phd. Sure, there's a lot of crap and youtube is just as happy to waste your time but if you search out and only watch educational content, your Frontpage will become educational content. It's hard to keep that way because there's tons of fun but uneducational things to watch, but there's browser extensions and things to help with that. Extensions that block the homepage and video recommendations, extensions that let you group your subscriptions and create your own feed. It can be amazing if you use it right, it's hard to use right sometimes
More and more it's crystallizing that people with high agency can elevate themselves as never before, while the average person is dragged down into a mud as never before. The divide is crazy and it's starting already in early childhood.
Yes, you and people like you can seek out the best browser extensions, install them, understand how to use them, and can curate a nicely tended online garden for yourself, and this is genuinely great. But "we live in a society", even you are subject to wider trends of how people around you live their lives and spend their time. And average people's front page is filled with slop and AI generated chum and Youtube-face thumbnails etc. While you can configure ublock origin to remove irrelevant recommendations from the middle of search results, the average person browses the internet without adblock and sinks hours into mindlessly scrolling social media.
Our parents worried about us staring at the TV all day, and today we have that on super steroids.
It's super hard to avoid rabbit holes. Once the recommender engine picks up on something you find interesting it will exploit that with no end.
The mind numbing stuff can be highly specific that no human TV program manager would ever think up. For example, I clicked a few videos about cow and horse hoof trimming and horseshoe applications. Kinda interesting, geeking out on skilled crafts like this, never seen it done in real life, maybe I learn something interesting! And a few days later I find myself regularly clicking these because I get so many of these now on my frontpage and I kind of take a step back and think, is this really time well spent? Watching hoof after hoof being trimmed? (By the way, these videos have millions of views each, and have entire channels dedicated to producing them over and over again. It's an entire genre, not just a few videos.)
I see this stuff with family members too. Zoning out and watching repetitive crap, like the hydraulic press channel, red hot ball, a guy who cleans up backyards, powerwashing objects, dashcam crashes, arrest bodycam footage, pimple popping, mukbang. (And I'm not even getting into political outrage stuff, that's a topic to itself.) Once Youtube figures out which type of repetitive brain-numbing genre you respond to, it will push it. It takes more self-awareness to get back in control than a lot of people have. Some of these "genres" are shockingly weird, like jigger removal (a kind of larva) from dog paws. I don't know if this has been studied properly. It's kind of like a non-sexual version of fetishes. Highly specific and somehow repetitively able to "tickle" one's brain, and while it's soothing and satisfying to some, it's disgusting and weird to others, pretty much like sexual fetishes.
"YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation."
oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk
It absolutely does offer more maths lectures than you could ever conceivably watch.
They’re there. Hidden somewhere. I watched some of them. But you need to search for them. Like there is quality food I prepared for my workday today. But I must actively work on that and not take offered junk food.
>But you need to search for them
Oh the horror
Yes, but good luck trying to watch them when the thumbnails in the side bar are full of seductive junk.
Browser extension solution to that problem: https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
I see it differently. I don't think YouTube fundamentally changes people; it might serve up low-quality content to those seeking it, but they'd likely find it elsewhere if not on YouTube.
On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.
It's infinitely better than television because you can remove ads and choose what you want to see! I know you never compared it to TV but that was the main mode of entertainment before streaming.
I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.
there's lots of ways to succeed on youtube and in this world. MrBeast is only one form.
As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
It's not YouTube per se that's bad. YouTube is just a symptom. The underlying pathology is advertising. The attention economy, surveillance capitalism. Those are the real problems. Those are the reasons behind this distortion of the world. They enable people who make moronic meme videos to make orders of magnitude more money than people who actually try to contribute something to society.
Yes agreed. Another commenter said YT is the most valuable educational tool in existence today. I think the real answer is a library.
YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that doesn’t make up for the 99%.
There are plenty of terrible books and trash novels. Easily 99% of books are junk (often junk dressed up as non-junk). I think it's very possible that in 2024, YouTube is net more educational than reading. (Speaking in terms of total amount of knowledge acquisition.)
Maybe but YT recommendations are good enough so that you don't see those 99% you are not interested in.
Trusting an algorithm that wants you to watch the next video for ad impressions may not be the unbiased metric you think it is.
So, you always go to the library for every problem you have where you need a detailed guide?
Does youtube have a lot of trash? He s certainly a (very big) outlier but the other trashy content is mostly about expensive cars and shit which is harmless by comparison.
This guy has a genuine love of torturing people
Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...
Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.
Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.
In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.
>is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.
Weird how things that seem to make sense in one context seem to make no sense in another context. If you told me a factory runs their widget making machine at 70% capacity in case someone comes along with an order for a different widget or twice as many widgets, at first glance think that's a bad idea. If your customers can keep your widget machine 100% full, using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful. And through cultural osmosis the idea of not letting your hardware sit idle is exactly the sort of thing that feels right.
And yet, we do this all the time in IT. If you instead of a widget machine told me that you run your web server at 100% capacity all the time, I'd tell you that's also a terrible idea. If you're running at 100% capacity and have no spare headroom, you can't serve more users if one of them sends more requests than normal. Even though intuitively we know that a machine sitting idle is a "waste" of compute power, we also know that we need capacity in reserve because demand isn't constant. No one sizes (or should size) their servers for 100% utilization. Even when you have something like a container cluster, you don't target your containers to 100% utilization, if for no other reason than you need headroom while the extra containers spin up. Odd that without thinking that through, I wouldn't have applied the same idea to manufacturing machinery.
This is a very key insight many need to be aware of. The thing that can be sacrificed in order to obtain efficiency is resilience.
To master the bend not break model.
You can make a bridge that can handle a 10 ton load for half the material of one that can take 20 tons. 99% of the time this isn't an issue but that outlier case of a 18 ton truck can be disastrous. This is why power cables have sag in them, in case there is an extreme cold snap. Why trees sway and bend with the wind so that anything but the most extreme evens do not break them; with that analogy, grass is much weaker but could handle even higher winds. The ridged are brittle.
I'm not saying to not strive for efficiency but you also have to allow those efficiency gains to provide some slack in the system. Where I work, there is a definite busy season. So for most of the year, we operate at about 70% utilization and it works out great. Most people are not stressed at all. It means that when those 2 months of the year when it is all hands on deck, everyone is in peak condition to face it head on.
In my previous job in manufacturing, efficiency was praised over everything else, it was 100% utilization all of the time. So when the COVID rush came, it practically broke the business. After a year of those unrelenting pace, we started to bleed out talent. Over the next 6 months, they lost all the highest talent. A year later from those I still spoke with, they said they lost about two thirds of their business over the next 12 months, they are now on the edge of collapse.
Slack allows a bend, pure efficiency can lead to a break. There is a fine line between those two that is very difficult to achieve.
I see the parallel you're drawing but even the core idea is I think different enough to be worse dissecting.
In manufacturing, you keep spare capacity to allow for more lucrative orders to come in. If you don't expect any, you run at 100%. For instance when Apple pays TSMC all the money in the world to produce the next iPhone chip, they won't be running that line at 70%, the full capacity is reserved.
Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.
We run our servers at 70% or even 50% capacity because we don't have control on what that capacity will be used for, as external events happen all the time. A manufacturers receiving a spike of extra orders can just refuse them and go on with their day. Our servers getting hit with 10x the demand requires efforts and measures to protect the servers and current traffic.
Factories want to optimize for efficiency, server farms want to pay for more reactivity, that's the nature of the business.
I think even for a company like TSMC these ideas are important to understand.
To give you an example TSMC might have a factory with 10 expensive EUV lithography tools, each capable of processing 100 wafers per hour. Then they have 4 ovens, each able to bake batches of 500 wafers per hour.
TSMC could improve efficiency by reducing the number of ovens, because they are running only at 50% capacity. But compared to the cost of the EUV tools, the ovens are very cheap. They need to be able to produce at full capacity, even when some ovens breakdown, because stopping the EUV tools because you don't have enough ovens would be much more expensive then operating with spare capacity.
> Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.
I think it's always worth thinking about what you can leave slack / idle space in. For example, you might not keep multiple stations free, but you might invest in a larger oven than you need to make the cakes you currently make. Or you might invest in more bakery space than you need, including extra workspace than you can utilize at 100%. Not because you necessarily anticipate higher demand, but because you might get a customer that's asking for a cake bigger than your standard. Or because you might have a customer placing a large order and need some extra room to spread out more, or to have a temporary helper be able to do some small part of the job even if they can't use the space as a full station.
But also idleness might look like "you don't spend all of your time baking orders for customers". If you never build in slack for creating, experimenting and learning, you'll fall behind your competition, or stagnate if your design and art is a selling point.
Even for a server farm, you can prioritize the web traffic and still use the excess capacity for CI or whatever.
> using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful.
Because it is. My brother works in industrial manufacturing machinery supplies. I can assure you the overwhelming majority of manufacturing machines on the planet are not only run constantly but as near to 99.999% as possible. So much that they are even loath to turn them off for critical maintenance rather preferring to let the machine break down so they don't get blamed for being the person to "ruin productivity"
This book sounds like one of those flights of fancy armchair generals are so found of going on.
Perhaps it works in small boutique shops making specialized orders but that is a slim minority of the overall manufacturing base. I could see why the advice would appeal to HN readers.
It really depends on whether the capacity is fixed or not. If capacity is fixed and demand is unlimited (eg. because you just can't get more EUV light sources this year) then you should probably run as close to 100% utilisation as possible.
But if you can easily scale production capacity, you should not strive for 100% utilisation. You should expand capacity before you reach 100%, because if you are running at 100% you will not be able to take any more orders and lose the opportunity to grow your business.
Yeah it mostly only works for small boutique shops like the Toyota Production System or Ford’s manufacturing line.
And yes, a lot of manufacturing doesn’t behave this way. That’s the “counter” part of “counter-intuitive” revealing itself.
This comment is yet another of these excellent cases in point!
You really don’t see how “they’re afraid to turn them off even for critical maintenance” might be actually suboptimal behavior in the long run?
One of the most insightful things I heard someone say at Toyota (in an interview) was that they replace their tools (drill bits and the like) at 80% wear instead of letting them get to 100% and break.
Why waste that 20%?
Because if the tool breaks and scratches a $200K Lexus, then that might be a $20K fix, or possibly even starting from scratch with a new body! Is that worth risking for a $5 drill bit they buy in boxes of 1,000 at a time? No.
Then the interview switched to some guy in America looking miserable complaining how his bosses made him use every tool until breaking point. He listed a litany of faults this caused, like off-centre holes, distorted panels, etc...
And you wonder why Tesla panels have misaligned gaps. Or why rain water leaks into a "luxury" American vehicle!
Toyota uses price premium and reputation to achieve this. Its not something every company can do, and I don't mean in theory. I mean that economics don't support it. Most buyers cannot and will not pay extra premium for reliablity. The reality is letting them break/damage/fix/replace actually is cheaper overall otherwise it would not be the popular choice.
If tomorrow Ford decided to start this process it would be a decade before the market believed that hey had changed their ways. Would they survive this gap? IDK the new ford Mach-E is not selling so I doubt it but I"m not an economist. People don't buy fords because of the reliability. They buy it because it's cheaper and the risk of downtime is less important to them than the price premium. Don't forget that in order to achieve that lost resource return you must be disciplined all the time and most people/corps cannot achieve that.
Toyota’s strategy is cheaper, and their cars are very cost competitive.
PS: “It’s too expensive to save money with your methods!” Is the most common response I get from customers to this kind of efficiency improvement advice. Invariably they then proceed to set several million dollars on fire instead of spending ten thousand to avoid that error. It’s so predictable, it is getting boring.
I would really recommend coming into these conversations with more curiosity!
Toyota makes some of the cheapest and some of the most expensive cars on the market. They don't "use" their reputation to do this, their reputation is the result of excellent production.
You're missing the point with Ford, which is an example of another very successful manufacturer who uses similar techniques/philosophy as Toyota, which are not similar to what your brother's machine shop does.
Edit: Sry, missed your Poe's law. People buy fords because they are cheaper for the most part. People that have more money buy Toyota. This is just market segmentation of a couple of the biggest brands.
Companies that have hammered out an effective cost/production/time ratio are not something you can compete with without becoming the same thing as them. Which is why factory managers are literally afraid to turn them off for any reason.
My brother constantly tells me about how when they do repairs they will see something within 1-3 months of failing and tell the factory manager. He said almost without exception they always ask will it increase the repair time "TODAY" and of course the answer is yes. They always decline and deal with it when it breaks at a greater time/cost. I think this is more an effect of the toxic work relationship that has become forced on everyone by MBA's.
What are you arguing here exactly? Most production systems work the same way as your brothers', which is to say they suck. We're pointing to a methodology that has a very strong track record of making production systems that don't suck, such as Toyota's and Ford's (empirical disproofs of your claim that such an approach is only applicable to boutique shops).
>Toyota's and Ford's (empirical disproofs of your claim that such an approach is only applicable to boutique shops).
Where was this provided? I didn't see you or any poster provide claim or evidence that Toyota or Ford intentionally leave unused production capacity. I had a busy day so I may have missed it somewhere.
Far as I'm aware they also run their assembly as close to 99.999% of the time as possible.
My brother is not a mft. He works for an engineering company that makes and maintains manufacturing equipment. He has worked in nearly every major company you can name's manufacturing plants fixing their stuff or installing new stuff. Its a whole world I did not know about until he started. I'm just forwarding some stories he tells. Not sure why you think you know more than all the people involved.
Interesting -- I'll have to read The Goal! I've only read the reference material around ToC, so this sounds additive :)
This sounds intriguing. Of note for anyone with an audible membership: The Goal is in the free library.
It's also included in Spotify Premium for free.
One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to optimize every part of his content for years before he really blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to success, given enough time and resources.
As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.
Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.
Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.
[0] https://www.viewstats.com/
I didn’t know that YouTube supports multiple audio tracks for the same video. Can alternate tracks be uploaded at a later point in time? Can the feature be used to replace the original audio in a video?
It's only available for certain channels. You can see more info here.[0]
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13338784
It might be interesting to contrast MrBeast’s management approach with that of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). He is also a successful YouTuber who leads a team that puts out videos on several channels. While his videos don’t have the huge production scale of MrBeast’s, they seem to be produced on short deadlines and must require close coordination among his team.
If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.
Brownlee is such a mystery to me. The #1 rule of Youtube is show energy, show enthusiasm. Brownlee is like if Urkel were given a sedative and told to review the latest iPhone
You mean he talks more like a normal person talking about a product rather than a Youtuber going over the top with everything? The fact that he is genuine is a big part of his appeal.
He’s been doing it a long time, has an excellent understanding of the tech industry, and is a master at producing content that is easy for everyone to digest. I’ve been watching him for years and have always thought he had a knack for his craft. Just because he has a calm demeanor shouldn’t take away from what he does, but in my opinion should add to it even more.
The #1 rule is clearly not show energy, show enthusiasm. It's the #1 rule for a subset of content, like MrBeast. The content world is a big place, and the silent majority has no interest in loud and obnoxious.
Right. Take Asianometry-- a channel dedicated to economics, politics, and tech in Asia. Very high quality stuff. He goes into deep detail about a lot of technical stuff.. and as you can imagine his delivery isn't anything like a showman. He can be monotonous but if anything that is likely preferred by his audience, given his niche.
despite less views, MKBHD is more net positive for humanity than MrBeast. MrBeast's whole game is to draw people's attention to not-so-useful content.
Is product fetishism really better than light entertainment? The MKBHD slop is just branded with that same vibe of the products he likes to cover, namely the self-satisfactions of luxury goods that people mistake for high quality. That gives the false signal it provides more value than Mr. Beast. Yes, MKBHD technically covers products, but so did Top Gear. The content is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an informed purchase decision.
Watching a review on a device you'll never buy is hardly a net positive compared to watching a yacht get blown up.
Not so sure, while I like Marques, he has a 100% focus on consumerism.
MKBHD feeds the worst aspects of consumer culture.
Come on, they're both useless consumerist slop (i watch a lot of slop not throwing stones just don't see either as beneficial at all)
MKBHD intentionally has a small team that makes relatively low budget videos. I think MKBHD mainly has a relatively large audience because he was very early to the high quality videos game on YouTube. I wouldn't be surprised if his edge is lost now and his viewership does not grow faster than would be expected of an active channel of his size.
Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.
MKBHD is not even in Top 500 of the most subscribed Youtube channels, first give me the details of what those other 500 channels are doing then maybe MKBHD... (and I'm saying this as a long time subscriber)
Would you say the same about companies, that the only interesting ones worth talking about are the ones in the Fortune 500? If anything, I would say many of them are rather boring examples, we all know roughly how they're managed and run.
That’s a bit naive. I’m willing to bet that most of them have interesting details, with each one doing things in their own unique way.
> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page.
I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."
Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.
I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.
I feel the same, but I realized I don't want to be the blunt person; I just want some other blunt person to do my dirty work. This is not really a fair expectation for me to have.
That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.
It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.
The pdf is fine nothing really sensational. Some good advise for video creators and how to commit to succeed at their company. Written in what you need to invest not what you need to sacrifice. The bar is high which is fine tho. For example he wants one to work on 3 different projects on a workday instead of 1 project for 3 workdays.
I watched one video of MrBeast in the past and the pdf explains well why I actually watched it to the end. I do dislike these kind of videos and don’t watch them but success is success and he does things right. One of his rules which is kind of neat is that the clickbait title and thumbnail needs to deliver on the promise - which is a great concept considering over 97% clickbait isn’t.
I think following through on the crazy thumbnail is the most defining part of the MrBeast brand.
Lots of Yt videos have crazy thumbnails; only MrBeast follows through!
I was fully expecting to read a load of nonsense, but it chimes quite a lot with military training, which shouldn't actually be that surprising.
e.g. if someone is your bottleneck make them aware, give them a due date, check in regularly, in person comms is better than written etc.
> “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”
Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family Guy joke generator from South Park[0].
Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea generators based off his formula.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM
Just wanted to add, completely unrelated to the line of business and the moral judgement on what Mr Beast Production does, that I really cherish seeing such a well written onboarding material. The sharpness in articulation, the consistency in the leadership vision, and the cultural undertone is of very high level. For comparison, any tech company I've worked for, doesn't get even closer, drawing in acronyms, micro-cultures and personal interest.
He has annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars. "lol"
goes to show formal language isn't a necessary component of high communication. might even be antagonistic
This point caught my attention, as my experience has been quite different, though in completely different industries. How does one go about finding genuinely good consultants, in any industry?
Disclaimer: I'm a software consultant, so obviously biased.
MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way more important to him than to a software business.
He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.
Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend people they worked with.
I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.
Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people in very different technical fields by their thinking and communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're good technical people.
I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".
In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.
That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.
Just an aside, not arguing...
You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to pick their brain.
A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.
Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas were terrible.
For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would respond.
It's really a question of your expectations.
If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a team that will stick together to build value over the long term.
If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever) then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're making.
If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of customization is pretty critical to consistently making those deadlines.
> How do you find them?
Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.
Both of the examples in the quote give you the answer: talk to someone that’s actually done it.
It’s always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the next person. Instead, too many people act like they’re the first person to ever attempt whatever they’re working on.
Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in almost anything other than powerpoint and credential attainment.
Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.
This, like a lot of the advice is "Things that worked for me that likely won't work for you". A lot of people are going to talk to Mr Beast that won't talk to you, Mr Beast is doing a variety of one off projects that he'll never need to revisit. Mr Beast has a shit tonne of money and a shit tonne of resources. For all those reasons, it's something that he can do that you probably can't.
I can't be the only person disturbed by the penetration of terms like "obsession" into nominally professional culture. You should not be asking your employees to qualify for DSM symptoms just to not get fired (with severance, lol, that is genuinely a step up from nothing even if it's clearly meant to soften the psychological shock of reading about A- B- and C- employees).
You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession. It’s not a balanced or psychologically sound way to live—no one claims it is. If you believe great achievements come from people working regular hours, taking it slow, and maintaining a comfortable pace, you are mistaken.
Newton, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie...the list goes on. These people's success wasn't a product of balance or moderation
> You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession.
Great, don't force it on your employees. I am not working for you for anything other than a paycheck and flexible working conditions and stimulating work.
Nobody is forcing you to work for Mr Beast
> Nobody is forcing you to work for Mr Beast
No, being unemployed is the coercive factor here. It's not fair to treat at-will employment as non-coercive unless non-employment is actually zero. Non-employment currently stands at about 7.7%: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em...
Why would anyone turn down a chance to make a living if a job is offered? Why do you think the fed ensures that there are never enough jobs for everyone? Why do you think the fed and the business world talks about the economy in terms of "jobs" and "unemployment" when these are metrics largely unrelated to stuff like "am I actually getting a fair wage" and "is housing priced anywhere near rationally"? etc—the non-coercive labor market is a complete illusion.
"Obsession" predates the DSM and psychiatry as a profession.
You'll find that most undesirable human behavior and perception does. This is just "product obsession" marketing bullshit forced onto real-life relationships. If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with. Don't force it on others.
> Don't force it on others.
Nobody is forcing anything on anybody here so there's no need to end your thought with a defiant coda.
> If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with.
You misunderstand the objection I hinted at. Which is fine. I'm not pro-"marketing bullshit" because it's not an either/or choice. What I object to is taking a perfectly normal word someone uses and then choosing a narrow, fraught, medical interpretation of the word to ascribe to them a viewpoint of, essentially, "they want you to be mentally ill!"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559705
I wouldn't wish "obsession" on anyone. It is extremely unpleasant and harmful to experience. Willingly giving your life to a company is not obsession, it's a choice.
So does schizophrenia.
i would argue the communication registry of influencer/youtuber culture skews superlative.
meaning i would translate obsession -> dedication in common language.
The only information about this obsession in the document is about learning, and there is a specific mention that people are judged based on results and not hours, so I am willing to say that this language is much less alarming than what I heard in my experience in startups.
Yea, you're right. I really hate this though.
this is why we need unions.
in order to disallow obsessive work?
Yes, this is a large part of the concept of liberation. Why are you trying to sell people shit nobody asked for? We could be making technology that enables expression of the individual and of society rather than commodification of it.
Direct link to the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
Or the actual PDF file instead of Google docs: http://splet.4a.si/dir/How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production....
MrBeast - an OG Founder Mode guy?
I'll leave it to you all to debate the ethics of MrBeast's videos, YouTube, and the questionable value of these videos.
Meanwhile, the most fascinating part of this is a glimpse into a new kind of media company, where he instituted a particular process and approach and scaled it up outside of the initial set of producers.
You get the sense he's flying by the seat of his pants into a whole new world, and he's creating the org and the processes on the fly based on what's been successful so far.
The energy, drive and enthusiasm required to create a new model of not only "product" (even one that solely exists to please the algorithm) and company is fascinating.
There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.
> There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.
It is a startup and he is a founder. There are no parallels, he is simply an example. His video production company is very similar to other entertainment companies catering to the same audience like roblox (studios) or mobile gaming startups in general.
Fair, I should have said "tech founders" I suppose. I think it's reasonable to draw distinctions between tech, media, clothing, retail, etc startups.
Like, MrBeast seems like a media startup which is different than, say, a SaaS startup or an AI assistant startup. Fair enough?
This is actually a really good document for someone who is a junior or assistant. I've worked a variety of jobs and didn't get much documents on training like this, mostly compliance stuff. You could take a lot of it out and get good points on managing people and taking ownership for tasks. It seems redundant or basic, but a lot of these things aren't explicitly mentioned, usually informally only.
You are correct. There are way too many assistant roles in the creative industry that come with little to none real job training, just “watch what I do, or do as I tell, and never make a mistake twice or you’re toast”.
I think it’s due to the sheer amount of candidates, and the total power some superiors have over you.
It’s a sink or swim strategy, but you’re also swimming with sharks.
It is nice to see the red flags in writing ahead of time. After all "boys will be boys"
That’s there, but the parts about taking responsibility for your work, keeping people you delegate work to accountable and negotiating with vendors and being persistent is stuff you usually get informally.
I also find those signs that it’s a more honest document. Most things publicly available are so neutered there’s not much useful grey info
It's hypocritical, those closest to Jimmy have get-out-of-jail-free cards and others get fired. And the "no doesn't mean no" stuff reeks of toxic hustle culture.
Most handbooks are boring and legalese because they can be evidence in court.
> “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”
> In general the more extreme the better.
I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
I don't know what subculture you're living in, but in several of mine there absolutely is pushback against this, with people avoiding consuming this kind of content and trying to prevent their children from consuming it, too.
Now, the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same is much more interesting, but there's no known reason for this and most of the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to talking about why your theory is more plausible.
I wish we knew.
IMHO it's quite divisive; there's a significant percentage of the population that's addicted to this sort of content, and there's another which actually finds it boring.
I've watched a few MrBeast videos and similar content, out of curiosity. It just does not appeal to me, in the same way that "influencer" content and celebrities don't.
Your acute observation that a large number of people find MrBeast content boring suggests part of the reason why there isn't more cultural pushback to it - because lots of people simply don't care about it.
Not only boring, I am stressed out by it. I feel like I'm losing valuable seconds of my life watching it, and it makes me feel depressed and disconnected from society to think about how popular it is.
It’s boring in part because it’s so blatantly formulated and packed up to be something that, for lack of better explanation, shouldn’t be formulated or packaged.
It’s like going to the store to buy fun. It doesn’t work that way. Excitement and wonder occur organically and typically in real life, and at the very least as the product of something truly awesome. In the case of Mr Beast, it seems like the ostensible happiness and excitement of the crew and contestants is combined with money to convince viewers something really great is happening. But it’s simply not. It’s vapid and fluffy, and really loud and obnoxious.
But I also feel a bit like Mr Skinner wondering if I’m out of touch. Yet… This stuff probably would have weirded me out as a teenager, too.
It's not English-speaking community specific. In every language I can speak, I can think of an equivalent of MrBeast for that area. Maybe a majority portion of the entire world's population actually enjoys that kind of content. Nobody in my friend group enjoys that, but looking at my nephews, they're all going crazy about it. There are going to be people who grew up with him for almost a decade, and that's a crazy amount of time to build parasocial relationship with your favourite celebrity.
Ah, sorry, when I said "the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same" I meant "why there isn't greater pushback" not "why aren't there other MrBeasts" (although that was my assumption).
It's very interesting that the phenomenon itself is multi-cultural, though. Or maybe it's internet-cultural? It's probably tied into the nature of human beings and people exploiting that.
Most people are dumb because they are lazy and gave up long time ago. Their parents the same way, so the kids never had a chance. Like I had a house mate in my 20s. His parents just gave him everything. He busted his car, parents got him a new one. He lost his job and he just played call of duty all day and drank or smoke weed.
One day he asked me about programming and this dude just couldn’t sit still without needing a distraction.
He consumed all these meme videos and used to bug me by sending me brain rot.
Unfortunately this is the majority of people. I used to be poor so I lived like this in a house where 4-5 people shared the space.
They just cannot think because they gave up and it’s impossible to do anything for them.
On one hand I’m glad gig economy exists so it can keep people like him busy. I believe people like him would be dangerous if not provided a distraction.
I don’t understand how people don’t have curiousity to learn more. Instead they will waste time since kids just throwing all potential to waste playing games like COD or watching YT all day. It’s not even sad anymore just pathetic.
I like the idea that entertainment made for broad appeal is an existential threat to society worthy of comparison to drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. People have been appealing to the lowest common denominator for forever and yet the world soldiers on.
Your larger question of “why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet?” is worthy of exploration, though I don’t think many posters here are in a position to dig into it deeply for you
Comparison to drugs is a bit extreme, but I think that some level of concern about MrBeast-style operations and the content they produce is warranted.
It’s not just broad appeal, but the mass reach of YouTube, the audience targeting and tight feedback loop it enables, and the resulting race to the bottom for who can make the most stupid and/or shocking videos, which in turn informs the tastes of the masses. Where does it end? Will it eventually get to the point that the only profitable YouTube channels are MrBeast-style because nothing else can bring in views?
IMO, spending 24 hours in ketchup doesn't sound any "lower" than jackass sitting in a circle and throwing stuff at each others' balls. So I would say that raced ended 20 years ago.
Watching Gallagher’s Sledge-O-Matic and mourning the once brilliant minds of humanity
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nxls1KnKCA4
It's not just "broad appeal". Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal. I see nothing wrong with the broad appeal. It's what this appeal is made to and how. Humans have a lot of ways to appeal to them, and this particular way of appealing targets very base very addictive psychological mechanisms that ultimately hurt the person - just like addictive substances do. They don't make the users better or smarter or calmer or anything like that - if anything, they make them dumber and more attention-deficient. That's my problem with it.
> why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet
You are not good at reading, are you? I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me. But I guess the joke is on me since you didn't even bother to read that part.
>Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal.
This statement is misleading because the broad appeal of both Shakespeare and Mozart today is the culmination of centuries of attempts to understand (and misunderstand) them. Calculus can be taught to high schoolers nowadays, but how many scientists in Newton's days could understand the Principia in its entirety?
Not to mention that Shakespeare and Mozart were both able to produce works of the highest sophistication that leaves most of their contemporaries (and many today) baffled. Harold Bloom wrote that the sophisticated word play in Love's Labour's Lost was not surpassed until Joyce, and Mozart's contemporaries complained endlessly about the complex textures in his opera finales. When Mozart wrote piano trios for the public, his publisher cancelled the series after two pieces because they were judged far too difficult for the masses, and when Mozart intended to write some easy piano sonatas at the end of his life, the first (the only one he completed) turned out to be the most difficult he ever wrote.
Invoking the popularity of Shakespeare or Mozart as analogues to Mr Beast reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the longevity of both Shakespeare or Mozart, and leaves unmentioned the extensive body of difficult works on which their reputation rests today.
> I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me.
What does this mean? You introduced the idea of government intervention unprompted because you wanted to be misunderstood by me?
Generally speaking if I do not want to introduce a topic to a conversation I just don’t do that. The laying of rhetorical traps is too complex for me when conveying something simple like “I don’t like this guy on youtube”
How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos? How many potentially otherwise productive hours were wasted watching someone in ketchup? Obviously it’s not a 1:1 ratio, but it’s a valid question to ask.
Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks
> How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos?
This is a good question. I would say that I don’t know how to quantify “societal progress” aside from arbitrary wishes that I can imagine, so I guess since we still have war, hunger, illness, poverty, crime and indignity in our society… all of it? All societal progress has possibly been killed by mrbeats.
I haven’t had a lot of time to reflect on this. What in particular do you envision society could have accomplished without this man on youtube?
[flagged]
Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Since this reply is to something a day old and identical to another one on an adjacent post, is this an automated post in response to the inclusion of the words “good/bad faith”?
If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?
1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...
2 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40761301>
Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.
Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).
Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018>, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.
If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at hn@ycombinator.com. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.
The ratio probably goes the other way. You'd be counting the amount of productive hours that were enabled by letting people relax their brains watching novel and enjoyable content. MrBeast videos likely add to GDP.
Personally I think that’s a stretch, but I’ll admit it’s a possibility. I’m not claiming to have the answers on this subject, just trying to objectify the premise put forth by the OP.
You make a good point though! There are definitely a non-zero amount of productive hours resulting from his videos, just as there are a non-zero amount replaced with his videos. It would be fascinating if there was a way to quantify this, but it’ll likely forever be a philosophical argument
Meh, we don't know what the counterfactual of a different media environment would be. For example, it seems not-even-crazy to believe that media's addictiveness has played a major role in sedentary lifestyles which in turn is a major contributor to several of the top causes-of-death in the developed world (far greater than drugs).
Most hobbies are just as dumb when you think about it.
Sports = watching grown men play with balls, Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve, TV/Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information
What do you mean unnecessary, I saved king Casimir twice, random people at the tavern are talking about it every single day.
watching sports is entertaining as you're watching highly skilled individuals perform at the highest level + gives you a sense of belonging; games - entertainment and skill development, whether those are multiplayer games that teach you cooperation and competition, or single-player games that is fun and in a lot of cases learning (through lore), developing motor skills, strategic thinking and so on; tv/reading - learning (nothing is useless information, it helps create more connections in your brain);
yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value
To be fair, watching sports is absolutely also brainrot for people not enjoying it.
Watching sports is literally watching other people live their dream…. While you do not.
I'd literally prefer to watch MrBeast sit in ketchup for 50 hours than watch an NFL game.
I get the feeling, but at the same time, this feels like normal culture gaps. I don't get "sponge bob square pants" but there are people out that that insist it was if not a pinnacle of animation entertainment, then a hugely creative and entertaining show that deserves its place in the pantheons of animation. And all those huge 80's era properties that so many have years of nostalgic memories of, like transformers, he-man or voltron were all "cynical cash grabs" and 30 minute commercials for toys. So much so the concerned parents of the time demanded the government step in. Now the jury might be out on whether that generation is worse than previous generations, but if they are I don't think it's going to be because transformers was a toy marketing gimmick instead of high art with a strong moral message.
Kids I know find all sorts of things ridiculously amusing and entertaining and it all seems stupid, brainless and mind rotting to me. But then again, the stuff I found ridiculously amusing and entertaining at that age was (I can attest, having gone back and watched some of it) was just as stupid, brainless and mind rotting. Some of it is not having a "sufficiently developed palette" for humor and entertainment. Some of it is because that humor and entertainment was genuinely new to me at the time, where as now I've seen it before so when it shows up in the kids stuff, it's not entertaining anymore. It's sort of the reverse of the "Seinfeld isn't funny" issue. We're not looking at something in the past and wondering why it was so great because it's been out shadowed by what it inspired. Instead we're looking at something from today and wondering why it's entertaining because we've been entertained in the same way in the past.
Can't agree more. 10 years ago I looked up transformers uploaded to YouTube, and they couldn't stand the nostalgia test. Plots are primitive, characters are flat. It made me actually recall that by 13 years, I started feeling little embarrassment watching them because of thqe plot itself.
Apart from that, what surprised me was that it had vibes of 1950s: watercolor still images, and the music score not with analog synths (that we'd expect from the '80-s), but a (small) orchestra with TRUMPETS leading. (This was the biggest '50s factor for me.)
Wasn't Fear Factor this exact same concept already, twenty years ago?
And just reality TV in general. His "Girls vs Boys" stunt is just a budget version of Big Brother, Survivor, etc.
I think it's worth reflecting on why you feel that way. I don't see how other people are spending their time is something I need to push back on...
> They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts
Looking at this phrase in isolation is such a fun. There are whole industries which work exactly like this (food, news, games, politics). These particular people aren't the cause, they are one of many many symptoms of the causes.
Causes are in rules, norms and incentives of the social and economical systems. We can't solve the problem at the leve at which it was created. These videomakers aren't even close to that level.
> but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
And they are getting it. Which is not enough for a change, as "benefits" they are getting are way greater. Main driving forces behind the phenomena is rooted somwhere else, not in space of scope this type of conversations (moral, value, human-centric or achievement-centric aspects).
On another hand it's a point of turning for all those that dismiss it like yourselves. Maybe culture needs this so all "bad curiosities" are catered for, so it can serve as a base for more ambitious next steps.
Maybe more "old man yells at cloud" but I am kinda with you in thinking it's trash. The thing is that every generation has had its own equivalent swill for kids, this one is no different. His channel won't last, there's too much baggage around it, but it'll get replaced with something equally trashy.
I have a lot of memories in my childhood, but I can't remember anything on this level. Sure, I grew up in a very different environment than the US, but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing? All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons? I surely wasn't.
I would say it depends a lot on environment the children are raised in, I grew up in the 90's my family had one television set in the house (in our families living room) and it was only turned on if someone was watching a program. There was a tv guide which you would consult, if there was nothing you were interested in then tv would never get turned on. My Dad in particular would get annoyed at what he saw as "needlessly flicking between channels".
I can remember visiting friends houses where there would be multiple television sets (including tv sets in bedrooms) and television would always be turned on, even if no one was watching it. It was like a constant low level background noise. I found it strange but it was normal to them, they were used to eating dinner or playing with legos etc with tv constantly on in the background.
> All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons?
In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.
Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.
For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)
These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider
And such is the age old tale of old people forgetting what they were like when they were children.
The younger generation always has been, and always will be, totally so much worse than the older generation.
Don't afterschool cartoons every weekday and several hours of Saturday morning cartoons qualify? IIRC that was the usual habit of children a few decades ago.
> but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing?
Depends on your era. The 90's gave us Beavis and Butthead, Southpark, Ren & Stimpy and the Power Rangers. It gave us XTREME!!! everything. It gave us Mortal Kombat and AOL. There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming.
The 80's gave us Transformers or Voltron. It gave us MTV and the rise of Nickelodeon. It gave us GI Joe cartoons, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an endless supply of toys imported from japan and accompanied by 30 minute commercials for those toys (see also Transformers, Voltron, He-Man etc). There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming, heck they got the federal government involved they were so concerned.
Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes had people concerned for its mindless violence and effect on kids. Remember that Mr. Rogers started his show (and pitched continued funding for PBS to congress) on the concerns that TV was just mindless dreck rotting children's brains.
Start going much earlier than that and the ability of entertainment to be just broadcast into your life and home reduces considerably, but I imagine parents in the 1800's also had plenty of concerns about various mindless entertainment drivel that was luring their children off the godly paths.
Having been a young kid in the 80s, what I recently discovered was the primary concern with parents at the time (because, I genuinely don’t remember) was using those afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons as a vehicle to sell products to kids - a barrage of advertisements. Seems pale in comparison to extreme behavior that potentially endangers others, e.g. deliberately crashing your airplane for views/hits.
I'm only 26 and I'm also perhaps falling into the "old man yells at clouds" thing, but this feels different to me. Not Mr Beast by himself perhaps (never watched anything he's made), but just in general the kind of content that is being pushed to kids algorithmically is insane to me.
Watching my nephews grow up, I'm sort of gobsmacked about what my sisters are allowing them to watch. It's quite literally brainrot, I genuinely think what they watch is actively detrimental to their mental health and intelligence, especially since they're all below 10. It's just constant stimulation every single millisecond with no room to breathe, filled with random sound effects and noises constantly, while the "plot" is always some nonsensical crap.
The minecraft ones are the absolute worst for this, and to me the saddest thing is they'd rather watch some brainrotting machinima-style thing rather than play the damn game themselves.
As a side note, reading this comment back I'd like to formally apologize to my parents, because it seems I've turned into them and saying the exact same things they said about my hobbies :)
Maybe a little sprinkling of PT Barnum in there as well?
Is it shallow entertainment? Sure.
But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-star gourmet meal, and that's fine too (and I can't stand people who malign what other people enjoy because it's "not pure enough").
Sometimes? Sure. All the time? You'd likely to hurt yourself pretty badly doing that, eventually (and maybe sooner than you'd realize). Nutrition-wise, I think, people starting to understand that. Information-wise, not so much.
Do you think you should go to a Michelin starred restaurant every night?
I think there are many options between pink slime and Michelin three stars. I have never been in Michelin restaurant, and I don't eat in pink slime ones, but I never felt I am lacking options for food service. The middle road is extremely wide, you don't have to go to the sides.
Been only to one but it had decent food that you could eat ever day.
The couple I've been to were pretty rich; I don't think you'd actually want to go there every day. Example: a dish at Chez Panisse which had an inordinate amount of duck fat. Delicious, but...
I am that get of my lawn guy, no shame. You are 100% correct and I do call for bs like government intervention, as the lesser evil, ofc. See what happened with tobacco. IMO it's the same.
> I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS
Why is this BS? It wouldn't be unheard of to pass stricter age restriction laws so that at least the kids are not so easily exposed to brain damage. Same thing with the drugs you mentioned.
Yes, but there's a difference between drugs and this. The lack of evidence that they are the same or even similar for example.
Also, would govt stepping in even help? We all know where that led to with the "war on drugs" in the US. I think there is no simple/easy fix.
My view is, you need to educate parents (backed by solid peer reviewed etc studies), and give them the tools (and free time) to help their kids. Most parents I know are too busy working to put food on the table to spend time encouraging their kids not to watch trash tv/youtube.
> Why is this BS?
Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both parties don't have my best interest in mind, but only one party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And we're so far beyond that point that any addition at this point is extremely suspect.
Interesting, I only learned about this Youtuber recently, maybe 2 months ago or so despite him having so many views. Youtube seems to be good at not showing you what you don't search for.
What his videos are lacking in my opinion is the quality of scenario and planning. They build an expensive set, give away a large prize but the challenges are either too simple or not very creative. Too little challenges, too little competition, too little motivation, too little expressing of personality like mutual help, sacrificing or betrayal, too little unexpected scenario twists. In this aspect they are not as good as TV shows. As an extreme example, take "give away money to random people" series. What fun is in getting money for nothing? And watching that is probably 100x more boring.
Keep in mind that you are not the target audience. Also:
"Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple."
I find his stuff sloppy and uninteresting, too, and he has no charisma. This just goes to show that he really does know what he's doing. He identified the statistically meaningful things to focus on and perfect. Imagine if he was just the producer for someone who actually gave a crap about making quality content.
Billions of views and total YouTube dominance disagree with you.
No, they're not exclusive at all. As the guide itself says:
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
You can get billions of views and total YouTube dominance without making particularly engaging content, and I think that's the interesting point here.
It does not define best.
Best revenue? Best profit margin? Best viewed?
They spell it out pretty clearly in the PDF.
> The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP).
> How to measure the success of content
> Like I said at the start of this the metrics you care about in regards to virality are CTR, AVD, and AVP. If you want to know if the contents of a video are good, just look at the AVD and AVP of a video after we upload it.
I feel it’s more that the average person likes to watch something simple sometimes, myself included
In other words, the commenters suggestion would not make the video better fit that need.
MrBeast's videos are total slop that I would put serious effort towards preventing my children watching if I had some but reading this it's immediately obvious why he's successful.
I think the authors intention was to pull any positives from this document that they could, but it seems almost negligent to not even mention the "no doesn't mean no" section of this document. As well as the context of the current ongoing gigantic mess, where Mr Beast tortured a guy while doing a "I spent X Hours in Solitary Confinement" video, and had to scrap it after the contestant was harmed.
They refused to shut the lights off for days on end and then coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up without directly making some kind of distinction or acknowledgement here.
I didn’t try to extract positives, I extracted what I personally found most interesting.
I skipped the “no doesn’t mean no” section because it felt like pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which wouldn’t work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so heavily on their brand - “find an employee who has a kid who is a fan” etc.
I didn’t actually spot the relationship between the “no means no” section and the sexual abuse scandals (I’m apparently not completely up to date on MrBeast scandals) - I caught the bit about squid game and though that would be a useful thing to highlight to remind people that MrBeast’s history isn’t without its nasty incidents.
you empower your employees with a mindset of "no doesn't mean no" and have them get results with pushback on no's. they are young kids mostly, don't you think that they will apply the same learned mindset the next time a girl tells them no?
Honestly I think the biggest problem with that section is the choice of title. I don’t think we would be having this conversation if that part of the document was titled “If someone says something is impossible, always try to explore and see if there are alternatives ways we can get it to happen instead”.
When a big chunk of your business is about filming ludicrous stunts that nobody else on YouTube has been able to film it’s understandable that this idea would end up in your employee handbook.
You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it. Nice one.
> You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it.
No, it was because I had not read the news about MrBeast having a sexual predator on his team. My interpretation of the earlier comment here was that this should have been a flag that the heading “no doesn’t mean no” should have been called out.
Without that knowledge of the current predator scandal, I don’t think I was wrong to skip that section when writing up my summary. I read that section and it didn’t make my “highlights” list for when I wrote about the document.
I’m being defensive here because it sounds like you are calling me out for something, but I’m not sure what that something is.
Fair, it wasn’t clear to me that you meant “skipped writing about it” - I thought you were just some rando that was commenting on something that they skipped over reading in the article (which I now understand you wrote). Sorry for the misunderstanding!
sigh skip as in skipping to write about it in the blog
Some dramatic takes in this thread. Is watching a mr Beast video really that much worse than watching Friends or Spongebob or Game of Thrones?
At least your two examples try to tell a story. They have some artistic integrity.
Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.
I barely know who Mr. Beast is but isn't his whole channel about, like, the joy of doing nice things for people? Like yes, it's for profit, and yes, it's schlocky and distasteful to us wise adults or whatever, but there's seriously nothing you find redeeming about kids enjoying seeing people getting their vision restored?
That’s some of his channel. Other bits of his channel are about putting people through extreme conditions to try and win money.
The Rolling Stone profile has a good breakdown of his content cerca 2022: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...
I'm not sure I agree. I don't watch his content but from reading the document it's quite clear his goal is to make stuff that's "fucken funny" - he's not creating any content for the sake of it, he wants to entertain himself.
that's a ridiculous take and blinded by your own preferences... It's all content... and it's all trying to get "Eyes on content. For a long as possible."
By his own admission in this onboarding document he admits his only goal is to make viral youtube video by any means necessary. It's all about "hacking" the algorithm and peoples' attention faculties.
Contrast that with very traditional Hollywood media - yes, of course they want to get people to watch their shows, but for the most part they try do that via a story and art. Not hacking peoples brains.
His content is like "Reality TV" on steroids. I don't watch or believe in traditional "Reality TV" either. Both are trash content - amongst the lowest forms of "entertainment" available.
> but for the most part they try do that via a story and art.
No they don't. When you are young and everything is new it seems that way, when you get older you realize it's all just nonsense for entertainment.
That's also why film critics seem to hate all films, except for the boring ones. They are looking for art, but it's not there.
Indeed. At least when it comes to your regular type of broadcast tv we must not have any romantic illusions. One of the most glaring tricks is having multiple items within a program and round-robining them in short chunks. And even the supposedly higher art of netflix shows uses inane stuff like cliffhangers and needless sex scenes.
yeah i thought that was interesting, as if to say, if we made a pet torture video that has the most views ever, that's what's important. Also how wedded it is to youtube. understanding how youtube works is more important that making funny or engaging content. it's a reverse of 'if you build it they will come' when it comes to excellence.
never saw GoT, but I wouldn't think so. you put an episode on and all of a sudden half an hour has passed.
all these things are just convenient timeskip tools.
> Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.
Excellent.
I know virtually nothing about Mr Beast other than that he's massively successful due to dumb videos that apparently raise lots of ethical questions.
That's not an endeavor I'd be interested in participating in, but I did find the PDF fascinating and read all of it.
A good bit of his guide is about 1. taking responsibility for delivering what you are expected to 2. keeping the big picture in mind
Plenty of folks could benefit from that advice and the examples he provides to make it more concrete.
This, fr, is a better explication of "founder mode" than anything pg & co have put out about it so far.
One thing I find interesting is that y combinator content (like Michael and Dalton videos) don’t talk much about team intensity and culture aside from cliche terms, but successful teams obsess over it. I mean he’s literally saying he’ll give you $1000 to study the handbook, and the handbook says average employees should be fired immediately (in all caps). I’ve never heard something like that come from y combinatory, but I’ve seen other successful teams do similar things
Reads like a "How to PM" and "Extreme Ownership" rolled into 1 doc.
The one area that I'm wondering a bit on is the statement that you need to be working on multiple 'videos' aka projects at 1 time and if your not then your a FAILURE... so whose priority list is "prio" when, lets say, you are working on 5-10 projects? And they all have prios/emergencies etc.... Interesting expectation setting here. And concludes with a rather harsh statement too with the "failed as a MrBeast employee that day"...
For reference: Work on multiple videos EVERYDAY Please do not come in and only work on one video during a workday. That’s how you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle that i’m trying to stop. If you drop everything and go all in on a video for 3 days then that’s 3 days your other videos will fall behind and eventually you’ll have to drop other videos to focus on those videos and it will snowball into you can’t do anything but focus on what’s right in front of you because you murdered any lead time you had. If you ever only work on one video during a day, you failed as a MrBeast employee that day
Seems incompatible with a 40h work week.
Any ideas what is being referenced with this quote?
> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
Willing to Die for MrBeast (and $5 Million)
https://archive.is/lDVoz
He blames Crowdstrike for his org treating humans like shit for money. Nice.
Is that all you got from the quote?
"was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues"
"extreme weather"
"communications issues"
Are you doing this on purpose? I'm not even a fan of the guy but this type of out-of-context taking just hurts discourse. It's the type of thing I came to HN to avoid.
I notice you don't correct anything I've said, because none of it is false.
He did blame CrowdStrike, right at the top of the list of blame. He did not take any responsibility for what he and his org did.
I appreciate this is how a startup must run, but must every small tech company be a startup? Where do you find jobs for small companies which are just happy to exist and grow sustainably. Where you can come in at 9:00am, have an uninterrupted hour long lunch break at 12:00pm and stop working at 5:30pm? While also not being paid pennies? I can care about your company and be passionate about my work without having to sacrifice all semblance of any aspect of the rest of my life. If that makes me a "B" or "C" player then that's fine.
They exist, but they are rare. Large tech companies have the benefit of economies of scale. For what you're looking for, you really need to find a niche player, and those folks don't hire very often. OpenDental, Rogue Amoeba, Impexium, and Cronometer are a few.
I've seen these be referred to as "calm companies" which is nice.
From the referenced doc:
> CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it.
That's actually 1/CTR.
Another example of math fluency not being required for success at the top.
I think it's a good example of understanding how people think is good for the success at the top. Out of 1000 people asking "Wtf is CTR now?" maybe one needs a precise definition usable for immediate conversion to the programming code. That's the person for whom CTR and 1/CTR difference is important. The other 999 need to understand what's this term is used to measure and where it comes from - and for them this explanation is just fine. They are not people who make decisions or calculations based on it - those already know what CTR is. They are random people that need to fit a new thing into their mental model - and they won't even notice the difference, especially given the followup explanation.
whether you're looking for CTR on one end of the continuum or 1/CTR on the other end of the spectrum, you're looking at the same thing, just without understanding what one word means
... Sounds like a person with plenty of fluency made a typo.
How do you guys find employees/founding team members who actually value results over hours worked just like MrBeast?
At this point I’m convinced any great company follows this same principle. I also strongly believe in this in my startup.
But I’ve been finding it super hard to find employees or founding team members with this kind of mindset.
How do you spot these people?
> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.
This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.
A close friend of mine was an associate of Mr Beast, even living in his house in Greenville for several months. He confirmed a lot of the negative press about him in the media, and was himself ultimately screwed over by Jimmy and has been trying to get recompense for years.
MrBeast has always been clear that his goal is to make the best videos in the world. Not to be the most nurturing place to work, or the most philanthropically minded. This document makes that clear. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that in becoming the best in the world at youtube, he's had to become an extremely toxic individual.
He is sick. This is the work of a sick person. He even knows that he is sick but does not care, because of the sickness. I pray for his audience, really.
What's this about the Squid Game video and the half a mil lost because of the "waiting in the sun" ? Did someone die ???
Here’s the squid game story. Thankfully nobody died but it was not a safely run set: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games...
How to Succeed in a Torment Nexus: Make the best TORMENT NEXUS videos possible
"Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."
Gonna keep that one handy.
Huge +1. If I'd understood this mantra earlier in my career it would have saved me a large amount of hassle.
For juniors: any time you send something important to your manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific question that would require them to read the contents of the document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting, changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in writing.
And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have either acknowledged understanding of the required information, or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front of their manager.
Mr.Beast is in some big controversies right now, and it's honestly much more interesting than this PDF, I expected to see the "no does not mean no" section in this PDF.
If you read the content of the PDF instead of focusing on the problematic wording of the section title, you'll see that he doesn't mean it in a personal boundary context, but in a problem solving / sales context. Most people's default answer to ideas that are totally new to them is "no" and accepting that first no on its face means you don't get to achieve your goal.
It's there, on page 19.
I think this document predates the current scandal - the page 19 reference is to https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games... where the more recent scandal is https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna164777
(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)
I wonder why it wasn't mentioned in the article.
I hate the actual content he produces - the first time I watched it, I kept thinking it's a trailer because of all the cuts and I wondered, where is the actual video, when I realized no, I am watching the actual video - but I have to commend the grind.
He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!
I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super optimized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzpK0tGFcE
Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I respect the grind.
(I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever, and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name. It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I guess.)
Average Americans (his main audience) always visit "Europe" or "Africa", never mentioning a specific country.
In similar fashion, European students with a gap-year will go backpacking in Asia
> He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!
That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...
Let's fact check that final comment:
"I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!" 127M views, mentions Jamaica 45 seconds in: https://youtu.be/KkCXLABwHP0?si=3oMfNy0iAGVrTwqo&t=45
"I Built 100 Wells In Africa" 202M views, mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8?si=qYc8jZWsYXwF1qrm&t=11
"We Powered a Village in Africa" 26M views (different channel), mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQvRZg3bcg
It's just fast food content.
There is a reason it's called "content", "content" for the mere "container" we've become
Yeah and I respect fast food chains in this regard. So, that makes sense.
except it doesnt even feed you
Arguably neither does fast food - it gives you energy, but it's also quite bad for your health and your wallet. So, it feeds you, sure, but the negatives likely far outweigh the positives.
If you've ever cooked meals for multiple days with just some ground beef, cabbage and some lettuce and friends for ~10 bucks per day, you'll see how crazy expensive a $20 fast food ""meal"" is.
So this is fast food content, because it does entertain, but you could do many things to get good entertainment and also not consume absolute slop.
Fast food aren't worth much nutritionally so they aren't much different.
Lol he didn’t build 1000 houses. 100 only. But also, I think many of the houses were rushed to build… so…
His section on monitoring your information diet is generally applicable to many fields.
If you want to be expert in X, consume content in X (in addition to the deliberate practice and focus on the craft of X).
Reading through the document, this company seems hellish for its employees. I wonder how the pay and perks are
Seems like your average creative industry company, to be honest.
Underpaid, overworked, expectations of “total dedication”, for the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.
Spoken like a “c-player” haha. I’m with you though. It’s only for people who really very much enjoy working on the things he does.
The unwavering fixation on metrics like Click Thru Rate, Average View Duration and Average View Percentage explains why so many of my previous channels get formulaic over time. It sounds like a small thing, but for some reason the thumbnails/titles with the Youtube face enrage me the most.
Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.
But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.
There are various browser extensions that you might like. Clickbait Remover for Youtube, DeArrow, etc. They remove the thumbnail images and replace them with a frame from a random time within the video, and replace or modify the video title to make it less sensational. I also recommend Sponsorblock.
I'm using an even more nerdier variant: Subscribing via RSS feeds, then downloading as MP4s.
Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and/or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.
Yep, I do something similar as an alternative to subscribing to things on Youtube itself.
There's a disincentive for YouTube to change because it'd make both creators (to a greater extent) and users (to a lesser extent) unhappy.
It's almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it's disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream/downstream fixes theirs.
I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that's not owned by an ad company.
Are we sure this got “leaked”? Or is this merely part of the not leaked production PDF?
It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it’s bad?
As far as I can tell this was leaked to a person who’s been having a high profile disagreement with MrBeast, by either a current or former staff member.
Maybe it’s a fake or a deliberate release, but it doesn’t read like the at to me. There is a ton of commercially sensitive information in here. Not to mention that note about the expensive squid game incident which I doubt they would have included in a document for public consumption.
I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.
> I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.
Well he is in the middle of a PR push responding to the claims from former employees that he fakes his videos and is generally fraudulent
Mr Beast’s company has been getting a ton of negative attention for how it works and how it treats employees and contestants. It seems plausible it was leaked as another example of toxic culture.
It was leaked with a lot of attention being paid to the "no doesn't necessarily mean no" section in the context of abuse at the MrBeast org
Let's work hard to make the rich man rich. It is poisonous to only do your work. You need to sacrifice everything for the well being of the man This mentality should be banned from everyone's lives
The informal tone of the document is powerful. Makes you feel like Mr Beast is being real with you, that he really does care about this, and that he wants you to be in this thing together with him.
I Googled a bit (I'm not a consumer of these types of YouTube videos) and apparently this guy is pretty rich by now. He identified a path to wealth that clearly works and exploited it well, so he is definitely smart. Well deserved from that point of view.
However, it makes me sad that we as a society even let what he does (a zero-net as many pointed out) be a path to wealth on the first place. The fact that we reward so much something that is so void of value is our fault and IMHO what needs to be corrected somehow. It's sad to think we throw so much money at people covered by ketchup, but many PhD's barely make any money and we cannot figure out how to make open-source sustainable.
If our reward schemes were more aligned with actually providing value to society, this guy might have applied his intelligence and amassed his wealth doing something more worthwhile for everybody.
> Here’s a darker note from the section “Random things you should know”:
>> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
Can someone explain this to me? I don't quite get what the original quote means.
The conditions when filming their Squid Game episode weren't great for contestants: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/net...
I don't know what "cost us $500,000" refers to though.
medical expenses and lawyers I imagine.
s/consteatants/contestants. My guess is that they left the players in Squid game is the sun and someone got hurt?
I really liked his distinction between A, B and C-team players. This could be a really good framework for recruiting in an ambitious startup.
I personally deeply disliked the semi-cult like explanation that anyone moving out was basically not good enough to be there in the first place.
Apart from that, it's the good old Netflix playbook: empower managers to remove adequate team members with good severance to give space to good team members. The danger is letting it deteriorate into stack ranking if you are not careful with the deleterious effect on team work associated.
I hope everyone here who is praising the A, B, C-player framework recognizes that it comes from Jack Welch’s much criticized Vitality Curve system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Ratings
I don’t see much similarity here, other than the use of those three letters and the idea that Cs should be removed from the company.
The MrBeast As are rated on their ability to learn - which is surprisingly a characteristic that’s not mentioned in the Welch model.
MrBeast Bs are As who haven’t got there yet - Welch Bs are not expected to get there.
MrBeast Cs are reasonably capable but are missing out on that crucial learning instinct - again, not mentioned by Welch, who has Cs who are incompetent procrastinators.
I agree that they're not perfectly similar, but I strongly suspect that MrBeast's idea stemmed from the Welch model. They are suspisciously similar haha
I think it’s likely that the idea of A, B and C players is pretty widespread to the point that MrBeast was exposed to it, and that Jack Welch was the person who first popularized using the first three letters of the alphabet to categorize employees.
I was thinking that too. It’s something you don’t hear much from YC but a lot of founders have similar corporate hiring policies.
[flagged]
You can't post flamebait like this to HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like we've been having to ask you to stop breaking the site guidelines for years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39281820 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35656288 (April 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34844518 (Feb 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585046 (Dec 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18575831 (Dec 2018)
Continuing like this is eventually going to get your account banned. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, that would be good.
This is a great "leaked" pdf and honestly, shows the evolution (or degradtion) in media. Typical phrases, e.g. sign of the times, if it makes money of course it exists, etc etc but really it's great insight.
I personally don't/wouldn't do this, but I can't ignore the money making machine youtube has become / the producers of said videos.
While I don't like his content (obviously as a 37 year old man), he's a really interesting person and has certainly built something people want (people being children for the most part).
For anyone who isn't aware of the problematic issues currently surrounding MrBeast (see sweeeter's comment here for some context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649#41551656), I encourage you to read the linked Rolling Stone document and actually find a working link of the original leaked document and read it (link in post doesn't work).
The blog post happens to miss a few of the points in the original document that would raise a lot of eyebrows and I'm not sure that it's a fair take on "what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation" if it lands you in all sorts of management trouble and potentially criminal allegations.
Will have to read this (the PDF) in a free minute. Almost sounds a bit like the Manual by KLF (which was for dance music production)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
This has one of the best sections I've read on why communication lines are important:
>It’s very important as a company we maintain proper communication lines. ... If you skip and just go below you prizemust then call and let the people in charge know. Let’s say you’re a production coordinator and you call a writer and tell him you need some bits about a sandwich being cooked with lava, seems harmless... and then tyler askes her why she is making lava and she has no idea and everyone is confused. This is what happens when you don’t follow proper communication lines.
Skipping over all the typos, it's just such a great visual of the communication breakdowns that can happen when a lot of things are going on.
Also this section on tracking contractors:
> [Y]ou can’t just dump and forget your projects... Ask him to send videos everyday to spot problems early, hell maybe talk to him twice a day. I don’t care just don’t leave room for error. No excuses, stop leaving room for error. Check in daily, receive videos, and know weeks in advance if you’re fucked. Not days.
This is more extreme than I encounter in my day to day, very on brand to MrBeast, but it's interesting to see this constant accountability and ownership are so critical in their production. I see similar behavior in some of the more effective people I've worked with.
Questionable as his techniques and friends may be, hard to argue with the results
On one side, an army of HN commenters: “Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”
On the other side, Mr Beast:
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here.
I read that as less about "building on someone else's platform" (though that's still a risk they're taking) and more a youtube / media content producer version of "perfect software doesn't pay the bills, shipping software does". I've known plenty of good developers that if they didn't have hard deadlines and people reminding them about what the real goal of the company is, would spend 6 months developing a perfect, provably correct PDF to JSON converter for reading any possible design of tables in all PDFs. Missing the fact that they only need to parse the tables in the CSV files that the vendors are sending us so we can invoice the customers.
That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.
>That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.
It's more specific, a YouTube video is very different from a TikTok video or an Instagram video.
For every MrBeast there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands (millions?) you've never heard of. And for some of them, it's because the platform pulled the plug on them.
If someday YT decides to pull the plug on MrBeast, he might start singing a different tune. Or not, I mean, his millions and millions of dollars will probably make him feel better.
Building on someone's platform is a gamble.
It paid off for Mr. Beast.
Maybe it will pay off for you, or maybe you will get banned before you make enough to retire or create another company. This is prime example of survivorship bias.
There's a difference, video is probably transferrable to an extent (with their capital they could probably buy/launch beast-tube quickly and kids would follow).
Building your software to depend on Google API's and then be banned from Google would put you in deep trouble, building on Google systems but not relying on their API would still allow for an migration.
YouTube is fine as a distribution channel for now. Though there is some risk of being extorted or losing access, the bigger threat will come some years down the road when video is a legacy distribution format.
Diffusion at the edge is going to change a lot of things. Especially since it won't have to encode to linear formats.
Many people are so uncomfortable with risk that they publicly advocate (and personally live by) a policy of taking zero risk. Of course they also throw away the very real benefits that come packaged with many risks.
“Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”
Initial growth on someone else's platform is a good idea. However, once you see some small success, it's best to think about diversifying. Mr. Beast has already done this. He's essentially his own brand now.
Mr Beast videos do single digit millions in revenue per video, and he operates on razor thin margins re-investing everything. Youtube does $8.5Bn a quarter in revenue. For startups the target is the Youtube exit, not the Mr Beast exit. In fact, whilst Mr Beast is obviously doing a great job and making tonnes of money it's not clear if he even ever could exit. What Mr Beast is doing is incredibly successful, but it's not the silicon valley start up model.
You actually believe he makes razor thin profit? And you believes he reinvests everything? Sorry but none of us have verified his company’s books. Just saying
Is this supposed to be a gotcha of some kind? I don't see any point or value in this comment.
Yeah this hit hard for me as well.
I’ve studiously avoided building on platforms, but very different mindset to decided to be the best player on that platform.
Lesson learned: don’t make it about something else. Win the algo.
Fine Arts would like a word with you
Some people have alluded to this, but I find it sad that so much energy in our modern society goes towards trying to exploit arbitrary particularities of arbitrary platforms. Even if we set aside the stuff like "you're taking a risk building on YouTube because they could ban you", there's the more practical stuff about how the plan is all about the title and thumbnail. Like if YouTube somehow switched to letting you have two thumbnails, or some other UI element that you could customize, suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment.
It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and less and less on making contact with any kind of external reality.
I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.
Sometimes i feel like we shit on youtube creators because it seems like what they do is silly or frivolous. But is that last software feature you worked on that nobody is ever going to use but is needed to check a box so marketing can say we meet some standard so that we can sell the product to some big corp decision maker who is never going to actually use the software, really any better?
Jobs a job. Ultimately people are doing it to pay the bills, not for the sake of art.
> I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.
Yes, that is also sad.
It's clear by now that youtube is just a platform designed to produce the Infinite Jest video. Mr. Beast accordingly just appears to be a step on the way there.
> suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment
These people are the best positioned to figure this out. They've been experimenting with youtube changes for years and they already know how to experiment out the particularities.
Of course they're best positioned to figure it out. The question is whether it's a good use of anyone's time to figure out such things, or whether we have a good society if it's one where people think that is a good use of their time. I am best positioned to pick my own nose but I don't think that means there needs to be a manual on how to do so.
What is the alternative? Don't do the above, and hence not get the views, and hence not be able to sustain what you wanted to build.
But my point is it's not clear they "want to build" anything. There is no intrinsic goal.
This is literally everything in the creative industry...
if you genuinely think that "literally everything in the creative industry" is chasing trends within the well-defined boundaries of existing paradigms that giant corporations have created for you, you aren't a creative
Great article. Its lesson is basically: go 110% in everything you do. Buck conventional laziness even when everyone else is doing it and be the ultimate "try-hard"
Not to detract from it in any way.
I think successful anything it is "go 110% in everything you do".
This document makes me want to study it so I understand what Mr Beast thinks it's the best viral video and then de-program myself so I never ever click in those. I'm halfway there, if I see a thumbnail of a guy in a ketchup bathtub I will tell youtube to never recommend that channel again.
The bit about A, B, and C players is good.
I had been thinking about this as learning ability (fluid intelligence) and institutional knowledge both following a power law distribution. Mr. Beast refers to A and B players as being sufficiently high in learning ability and only differing in their position in the institutional knowledge distribution.
Packaging this effect into a 3 category model definitely makes it easier to operationalize. The severance part is important too, since there would be hesitancy to terminate even obvious "C players".
This sounds like it's all been paraphrased from the old Netflix HR document that compared itself to a professional sports team.
Actual PDF, 2 links away from the original article.[1]
Has a lot in common with Roger Corman's "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime."
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d964dd8c-047e-4b02-bb....
If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get them to A player status? Is there an effective strategy to getting someone to open their eyes, participate actively, and ramp up their performance to the highest levels?
I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?
>If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get them to A player status?
By definition yes, because a B player by definition can be turned into an A player. But by that token, anyone that can be turned into a B player, is by definition a B player already. Hence, a C player, who is by definition not a B player, cannot be turned into a B player.
>I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?
It would be motivation. Intellectual capacity can in principle be fixed, but motivation cannot because you would need to motivate them to fix it.
I respect his dedication and grind....I prefer more YouTube pop culture and YouTubers than TikTok and TikTokers. YouTube is so much better.
The grind to do what? Make an endless stream of shit content? Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Trying to discern whether YouTube or TikTok influencers are better than the other is like picking which tooth you want pulled. Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.
I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing. The fact that a lot of HNers seem to look up to Mr. Beast is almost as tellingly acerbic as the reliance on Steve Jobs for intelligent business quotes.
>Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.
This is the new type of cable television and it's free. Yea sure I pay it with my data but at least I don't need to spit out money every month to watch it.
>I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing.
Again, entertainment on YouTube is free....even YouTube stopped bothering me to disable my ad-blocker so MrBeast is not getting a penny from me. I might buy YouTube Premium at some point in the future tho.
Well hey, I'm on the same page. I don't pay for cable these days, nor put up with adblockless YouTube in the first place. But content on YouTube - particularly popular content - is a race to the bottom worse than Keeping up with The Kardashians ever was. I've watched Mr. Beast videos (at the behest of my ex) and haven't found anything except hyperactive filmmaking married to absurd and ill-considered ideas. It's deconstructed short-form entertainment in ways that TikTok is probably envious of. Truly, they've cracked the marketing code for an ADHD-addled era of content consumption.
And therein lies "the problem" - this shit is garbage. I like some YouTube content too, but holy fucking cow is it worse than everything that came before it. TVFilthyFrank was just doing the same thing Jackass did with fewer safety considerations and lower production value. Historians making documentaries are basically recouping the task of The History Channel on a smaller budget with fewer regulations on construing truth. At the end of the day, as much as I hate cable television, I cannot honestly say anything on YouTube comes close to the production in an episode of Top Gear or Game of Thrones. It's garbage all the way down, supported by marginal advertising, kept out of Google's Graveyard by horrific levels of rentseeking and AdSense monopoly abuse, and ultimately propelled by sensationalist and meaningless content tailored to offend as few people as possible. Content on YouTube is terrible in new and terrifying ways.
>I cannot honestly say anything on YouTube comes close to the production in an episode of Top Gear or Game of Thrones.
>Content on YouTube is terrible in new and terrifying ways.
Most of the YouTube's content is amateur UGC(user generated content) and it works pretty well for what it is.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e524204e4b97c7eb607eea67...
Dependencies and critical components - so much of software development fails because these aren’t understood and managed accordingly.
Excellent write up. Intolerable videos.
Yikes, I am glad I never watch that channel, probably instinctively sensed its rotten smell from distance.
Never watched one video either, but it seems to just be "Ow, my balls!"
Just useless brain rot.
Saved you four clicks:
https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1YaG9xpu-WQ...
It seems impossible to reach great success without someone trying to tear you down.
It seems like the last several months have seen a trickle of information being leaked since the recent scandals involving Chris Tyson and some video series from former employees "exposing" the channel as basically scripted reality TV (I thought that was already well known, it's pretty obvious if you spend more than a few minutes watching it).
What Donaldson has done is effectively hack the Youtube algorithm, and as a hobby content creator for the last 10 years or so, I find it has been absolutely destructive to the "content" world. He's absolutely right - you're not trying to make the best content, or the best video, or whatever - you're trying to make the best YOUTUBE video, implicitly admitting what youtube floats to the top of recommendation algorithms is NOT any of those things. It's hyper optimized to be as addictive and as least satiating mentally as possible, it's entertainment junk food. At least old-school reality TV had semi interesting people on it.
It's just very saddening for me to watch the "beastification" of youtube and the overall creator space. I make content because I like making it. I make the content I would like to watch. It's secondary to me whether anyone else enjoys it, and that kind of creative spirit is absolutely gone on the web, and I completely believe content quality has suffered from it. To some degree the audience is the problem for demanding it, as sibling comments have pointed out, but I think this is blaming the victim a bit. Youtube also pushes these addicting videos out to people and highly incentivizes it. It'd be like handing out cigarettes at the hospital and blaming the subset of people that get addicted. Sure, it's their fault, but the hospital probably shouldn't be doing that in the first place.
The abuse and toxic workplace had been exposed a few years back but nobody took those allegations seriously
MrBeast has a deep understanding of his audience. He often tailors his content based on what resonates with viewers, and he uses feedback to continuously improve. But still there are some problems with approach
> Prelude (idk what this means)
10 second lookup for an "important" document...
So what really turned me off to this guy was his smarmy ~2019 campaign that also damaged my view of otherwise sensible Youtubers who shilled for him without thinking carefully. As such, pretending to save the planet while failing at math, logic, and physics because getting rich and being a internet->real celebrity are oh so much more important™ than emotionally and financially exploiting your audience or doing what you say you're going to do. sigh
"#TeamTrees vs. REALITY" (2019, Phil Mason) https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY
Why did you think he was supposed to save the planet? He clearly wrote in the document that the goal is to make the best YOUTUBE videos. Not saving the planet or any other bullshit that he puts in the videos. If the numbers showed that the best YOUTUBE videos could be made by torturing third-world infants to death, then he would torture third-world infants to death. Because that would be how you get the best YOUTUBE videos.
Never really occurred to me why Mr. Beast content doesn’t appeal to me (nor have I thought about it much)… their sole purpose is CTR. Makes sense. Lame.
I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out.
But, what's the alternative?
For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.
Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.
What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
Does YouTube kill those channels?
> But, what's the alternative?
Ban YouTube. Have only 1 movie/TV night.
Mandate books as primary entertainment.
Stock the home library with classic tales of heroism and adventure. Own an encyclopedia set.
Reject the brainshinker system and look to works of more enduring worth.
Videos should be thoughtful. If that's not possible in the family dynamic, shut it down.
People might downvote this but it’s what our family is doing. We barely watch any TV and do t spend a lot of time on screens. We have a lot of books and entertainment for my kids is primarily through reading physical books, sports, hanging out with friends in their backyard etc.
I salute you for taking this approach. At least I know your kids are going to grow up well-rounded.
Not quite “well rounded” as they’ll miss a lot of cultural context from YouTube that all the others watch.
I think many people conflate popular and accessible media with essential culture.
Many people, when they say 'culture' in the context of kids, mean something that kids can discuss around a lunch table. If OP's kids don't watch youtube, they won't have this particular aspect of culture as an inroad to make friends.
Like other humans, kids don't have universally aligned interest in media. Also, "missing out" can be good in many cases, depending on the content of said media.
Sure, but if YouTube makes up say 20% of culture, that's 20% of conversations they cannot participate in. I'd love to read any source that says that "missing out" on making friends is actually a good thing.
Absolute nonsense. Even a few months difference in when children get sucked into the YouTube vortex means they have totally different understandings of creators, their content and the contemporary dramatics.
YouTube content, thanks to its short-lived nature, has become essentially useless as a shared 'cultural context' unless one is plugged in 24/7.
Cultural context with YouTube as the primary source? Are you smoking something? Give me some if so.
Why on earth would anyone downvote this? This has to be one of the most common viewpoints held on HN.
Try Vihart on YT, eg this one is one of the most awesome explanations I’ve seen: https://youtu.be/VIVIegSt81k?si=yRlWlEf2-rEICgtk. And kids love this stuff.
My kids have a lot (probably too much) screen time. None of them watch Mr Beast. I think he is recommended to people who don't have well developed Youtube histories. He is sort of the Taylor Swift of Youtube. She might be a fine musician for all I know but no music service is going to recommend her to a listener it knows wants metal. Beast is a safe recommendation for people who only have a casual interest in what the platform has to offer. He never appears in my recommendations. The algorithm knows better.
We watched Youtube together as a family at first and when the kids got older I helped them find creators and setup their own subscriptions. The worst thing a parent can do is sit them in front of Youtube Kids brainrot. They started with lots of education,science,maker/craft,animation and PG gamers like Hermitcraft.
> I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him.
Nah, you didn't. You're the parent, if you don't like the content, don't let your kids watch it.
good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity
Restoration and repair videos could be a good choice, although there's also plenty of fake clickbait content there too now. I usually actively avoid content with sensationalised titles and look for smaller non-profit creators.
We successfully moved to restoration videos. They’re great. Agreed with everything said about both Mr Beast and Mark Rober. Not what I want my kids watching a lot of.
> But, what's the alternative?
Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a search based on the topics.
That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50% are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results, it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic isn't well covered on YouTube yet.
With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn before we turn the screens on.
Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark sculpture
Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.
Yeah, I sometimes think that the shift to "push content" is the underlying problem here.
Idk much about him but stacking school busses on top of each other with a crane or driving a train into a sinkhole seem like pretty interesting things to do. Better than geeking out over the bloodiest Mortal Kombat fatality or whatever I was doing at that age. What's an example of the more "crap" content?
Why watch youtube at all? It's not obligatory.
> But, what's the alternative?
Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video content must be rejected.
Learning to do things from books is the only way we can safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.
Tell your kids they have to perform a challenge worthy of getting the chocolate bars.
> But, what's the alternative?
Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or collections of channels can be picked individually. Google aren't making it easy, but the option is there.
> Does YouTube kill those channels?
I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game shows.
An alternative would be to use YouTube Kids instead of a regular YouTube and to ban MrBeast's channel. Problems solved.
i don't know of many, but I've got kids in a similar range and I endorse Kurzgesagt. CGP Grey hits nice sometimes too (they loved the flags, hexagons, and dragon videos)
>But, what's the alternative?
The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.
I don't think buying some chocolate bars is such a big deal. Just like buying some Mickey Mouse toy or sticker is fine.
And nothing wrong with some entertainment videos, some leisure is good. It doesn't need to be all educational.
It doesn't kill them per se, but it doesn't seem to promote them either. The good content takes a lot more digging to find. Not an easy task, considering how bad the search on YouTube is.
I like Practical Engineering. I also watch a lot of quality family vblog. You can tell genuine content vs influencer contents I am sure
Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors
The funny thing about those chocolate bars is that (I think) they're better than the century old brand names they're competing with.
Face full of eyes makes long form video essays analysing video games.
https://m.youtube.com/@FaceFullofEyes
I know this is beside the point but I remember the first time I bought a Mr Beast bar, I bit into it, and realized their standard bar was actually a pretty dark chocolate. I think they changed the labeling but I imagine there must have been a lot of kids who bought the candy bar and hated it lol
> What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
Kurzgesagt doesn't have daily videos, but it fits that bill.
> I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him.
No you didn't. You chose to do so.
I know what you mean, but MrBeast cured 1000 people of (a form of) blindness, which is quite a benefit to humanity [1]. I would not be surprised if kids learn a bit of "kindness is good" from him.
[1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
Or that signaling altruism saves the obscenely wealthy from criticism, which is a popular cynical take on the utility of philanthropy.
Thinking that kindness content is good is naive. It is exploitative and usually what people get from it is "it could happen to me" rather than "I could help others".
It is a fine argument, but I mean it is youtube and it is kids we are talking about. It's really hard to show kids kindness through free content if you want to be nuanced.
The whole youtube/streaming/advertiser/influencer/product pusher ecosystem is complete shit for kids and, to a degree, adults.
We have a 10 year old son and best approach we have found is VLC on his ipad and family TV, coupled to a NAS that we drop the content on to (downloaded/ripped shows that contain no ads).
> and of course, more money then you could ever dream of making at any other company.
I didn't really find anything in the pdf outrageous except this line.
I just couldn’t with this, until the very last page. I feel like so many founders write and expect performance like this, and they miss what he said at the very, very end.
So, I’ll give him credit for that.
Common Mr Beast W
Obligatory dogpack404 link [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@DogPack404
who is dogpack404, and why is posting their links obligatory?
Dogpack404 is a former mrbeast employee currently exposing mrbeast for varying misconduct, such as faking his videos, running illegal lotteries through his videos, doing a crypto pump n dump, making fraudulent claims about his merch, inhumane treatment of contestants and harbouring multiple sex offenders at his company. The list goes on and Dogpack404 is not the only one currently exposing things like this, but is maybe the most prominent.
This is no different than the high performance culture that comes at top-notch firms or startups. The main difference between working for MrBeast and working at a startup is that at least what "high performance" means is codified in this 40-page manual. There's a lot of value in this document regardless of what you think of Youtube, MrBeast videos and the general place these videos have in our cultural zeitgeist.
He already has a huge audience so whatever he puts in that PDF is not really useful to anyone else.
Surprised that he says he studied youtube virality. It seemed that he got his ideas from 80s prank TV but over time his titles became increasingly audacious.
Also surprised that his videos are being watched to the end. The clickbait generates curiosity for watching , but his vids are so predictable it s totally boring
Everybody's riding the "MrBeast" train because he s so successful , even though they truly don't like him. 3 years down the line he will be in court defending his abuses
I think many readers would benefit from the sections on communication, ownership, and responsibility. I've seen way too many projects fail because of poor communication.
interesting to see this leaked a few weeks after the valve one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41329274), albeit unrelated.
if an actual one, to me it is another interesting perspective inside the minds of a privately-owned, internet-based party that hold a significant mind-share in its domain.
The Valve one has been floating around for years
Nice! Looks similarly written like a LLM prompt to carefully instruct people. It even includes the tipping haha
Imagine the countless millions of hours people, especially young ones, have wasted on this content.
Sure, the argument may go, its entertainment and those would have gotten the same from alternative sources, but in this particular case, viral ready addictive video content is ultimately a bane for society.
This guy has studied 20000 to 30000 of videos, done data analysis on them, and then finetuned his videos to make them popular and earn a lot of money on it. As a business, this is genius, he is talented, he is profitable, his investors are circling around banks. But society has suffered for it.
My kid watches similar pointless videos, and he is on the verge of addiction (any and all free time he has, he jumps to the videos of colorful activity videos on you tube, from chinese or russian channels. He is 10 years old)
I am weaning him off youtube altogether, and involving him in books and other activities, but it is damn hard.
It's odd as this was leaked and big on YouTube at least a week ago. I guess not much overlap of this community and YT drama.
Would anyone be kind enough to download the PDF and upload it somewhere for us, Brazilians without VPNs? :)
Here is the link to the PDF from the tweet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
There you go ! https://we.tl/t-Vn9dG1qWRU
Not really sure why it's linked to X anyway. The X post is just a link to google docs.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
Despite whatever we think of Mr Beast, these instructions have helped build something impressive. The principles are interesting, and could be applied to build other impressive things. I like that. Elements that particularly stand out to me:
1. Taking direct ownership
2. Doing things that are effective, even though they're socially uncomfortable
3. Working towards the goal, to the detriment of other things which sound good but are not the goal
4. The way they fight to keep retention to incremental checkpoints. I don't know if this has any applications for Engineering, but certainly for marketing and communication it does.
5. The claimed method of constantly evaluating his employees _really_ appeals to me
Mr best is many things. And one of them is a very good project/programme manager. This guide highlights that.
The amount of bootlicking content in here is ridiculous. Nothing in this is special or has much to do with MrBeast's success. In fact, it has a lot more to do with damaging the brand which has happened recently. Thinking you will find success even remotely like MrBeast's by following the contents of this document is hilariously naive.
See dogpack404 on YouTube for counterpoints on Mr Beast.
I’m telling you, nobody getting rich from this leak.
congrats to Simon here. This post is ranking well for a lot of terms people will be searching for.
this is interesting.
what are some resources that you can learn on how to create viral titles on existing content?
How do they get $1 million+ from a single video? AdSense or sponsors?
"How to be lucky"
So basically:
Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.
0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person.
I don't like coffee but I still might learn about the business since it's so big.
I like your perspective but I don’t think liking coffee is the right comparison. It’s closer to reading a manual for a successful casino, where a lot of it is about manipulation rather than creating value. Obviously Mr. Beast isn’t as far out ethically as casinos, but IMO more in that direction than coffee tea preferences.
Both perspectives are somewhat true. Mr. Beast is building the best YouTube videos. It is a quality product and it is entertainment. It’s garbage for education or self improvement but it’s legit for entertainment and you can’t dismiss entertainment as a net bad for the world, not completely.
You both are right and wrong in a way. Parent poster who only had negative things to say is totally out of touch.
> Mr. Beast is building the best YouTube videos. It is a quality product and it is entertainment.
Hard disagree. Is he making the most profitable, most clicked, or most viral videos? Maybe. That’s objectively quantifiable and I’ll give you that. But “best” is very subjective. I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if Mr Beast stopped making videos and deleted his account today. His videos are the audiovisual equivalent of junk food: not good for you; negatively addictive; and big shady business.
Give me Folding Ideas any day. Now those are some quality and entertaining videos. The kind I save up to savour with some wine. That’s my definition of best. Yours will differ, but that’s the point.
https://www.youtube.com/@FoldingIdeas
I don't think it's junk food. It's...just not compelling to me.
My junk food consumption is really just education/science/maker youtube recommendation engine. Yes, I am constantly learning lot of interesting things to a certain level of depth, but I would be better off with only consuming youtube in the evening to wind down and getting things done in the morning and afternoon or diving deep where youtube don't tend to go.
I’ve never watched this MrBeast person before, but the top result is “Last to to hand off Lamborghini, keeps it”. Other videos are similar. How is this not junk?
It's junk for other users. MrBeast videos are merely mildly interesting to me and then it fall flat.
he is creating video for the median YouTube user (similar how some politicians pander to a hypothetical median voter)
It's an examination of human psychology. That's why people are interested. How far are people willing to go for it? Who makes mistakes? How did the person who won beat everyone else?
I would say since it's about reality it's less junk then something like Shakespeare which is completely made up.
It's just Safe for TV Squid games (not as the Series, the games itself). And it's not examination of psychology. It's just a silly competition to get more eyeballs.
It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives on being "real" while having to do with reality as much as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
>And it's not examination of psychology.
You put humans in extreme situations and you see how they react and you see what they do. It is an examination of psychology 100%. That's why people were interested in the original show because how humans behave in extreme situations is what a lot of people are interested in.
>It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives on being "real" while having to do with reality as much as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake. The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything. You made this statement up out of thin air without presenting evidence.
What's your evidence that Mr. Beasts videos don't have any psychology and are all fake?
> You put humans in extreme situations and you see how they react and you see what they do
That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains. By that stretch of imagination, you can construe any gulag or concentration camp as an examination of psychology.
Psychology would require a double-blind experiment, some kind of control group, etc.
> Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake.
https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp...
He already faked videos before.
Most of how reality TV works is by live editing to create narratives and guiding players along what the audience wants to see. It's lies by omission and exaggeration.
> The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything.
Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
No CEO is going to tell his employees, lie, cheat and steal to get our taxes to appear as low as possible, and our revenue as high as possible. They will say: "Be a go getter. Get those KPIs in the green. Only you can make a difference! Make me proud! Etc."
That said, the leaked production document is alarming even by these standards. "NO DOES NOT MEAN NO" stands head and shoulders above the rest in its implication, even if it didn't sound like a rapist's mantra.
>That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains.
No. Examining all human behavior under all circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
Even so. You call it torture and that's way over the top and offensive because what's happening here is NOT torture. These people are there voluntarily and are experiencing NOTHING even close to torture. I have family members who were in concentration camps so I know this.
>He already faked videos before.
Should've presented this first. I find it quite likely he faked some videos and others aren't fake.
>Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
I mentioned the manual because you didn't bring ANY evidence to the table. The only other official document on the table was the original article and I said IT had no evidence. There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Your link here: https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp... is good. But again it doesn't mean his whole operation is fake. AND this link is a mild and weak accusation at best that the abandoned city is near a popular beach or can't be reached by car. I happened to watch this video and he never mentioned it was completely remote like that. Those accusations are like saying yosemite isn't the wilderness because buses and shuttles drive around inside of the park.
>rapist's mantra.
Rapist? You're over the top describing things like this. Rape is a crime. What Mr. Beast does as bad as you think it is, is nowhere even close to rape.
> No. Examining all human behavior under all circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What you describe is sadism.
> Should've presented this first.
You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
> There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
Hell, just read about Google and how engineers were told to not use the M(arket) -word in any written communication.
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
> Rapist? Whatever this guy is, he's not a rapist. Your language is way over the top.
Step 1. Please read what I said. Step 2. Don't add words to my sentences.
I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra. "No means no" is the female anti-rape slogan. What do you get when you negate an anti-rape mantra? A rapist's mantra.
-----
That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
>Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What you describe is sadism.
It's a science and observing human behavior is within the lines of that science. It's not formal application but it's observing human behavior nonetheless.
>You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
>Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
I don't care, without evidence everything is just made up circumstance. The possibility is there but your accusations are more than reading between the lines. The concentration camp thing and rapist comparison are evidence of this.
>I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra.
Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See what I did there? I only said you "sound" like that. What I said was an example but if it was a real comparison it's completely over the top and uncalled for.
Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an aggressive hustle culture.
>That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
> It's a science and observing human behavior is within the lines of that science.
That's not science. Science requires, hypothesis and testing, it also requires isolating confounding factors. Reality TVs and Mr. Beast videos aren't that.
> I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
Is it? Luckily, there is more, now go and look better.
> Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See what I did there?
Do you mean you're putting words in my mouth? I'm used to it.
> Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an aggressive hustle culture.
Seeing the culture/people he surrounded himself with, I'm not sure if that's uncalled-for. But I'm awaiting further proof to make a definite statement.
> He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
'Ends justify the means' is literally Machiavellian. That guidebook is full of it. Call it hustle, call it A-players, it's the same thing.
---
To sum up, you don't know what science is, you don't seem to be able to read between the lines, came into this uninformed and have a nasty tendency to misread and put words I didn't write/commission into my mouth. I'm done here. This is debate with someone who's arguing in bad faith.
I know what science is, I’m a scientist and I’ve studied the philosophy of science extensively as well. You’re talking about formal science. Therapy and much of the things that take place in psychology aren’t formal.
Informal science the lambo show has a question, hypothesis and actual test. It’s just not academic, but the results form legit qualitative data that can be used in a formal presentation if one should so choose.
I can read between the lines but choose not to.
I have not misread you are the one making comparisons to rape and using examples like “concentration camp” and torture. It is entirely true to say your language is over the top.
I’m glad you’re done. But I don’t agree with your accusations at all.
Interesting response.
> You’re talking about formal science. Therapy and much of the things that take place in psychology aren’t formal.
It's not formal. It's the most common definition.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scienceLook, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
According to Aristotelian Philosophy, there are only four elements and you can't disprove it. It's all the 5th element playing tricks on you.
> I can read between the lines but choose not to.
If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
> “concentration camp” and torture
That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
> comparisons to rape
I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
>It's not formal. It's the most common definition.
There's many many definitions going along the gradient of formality from informal to formal. The science you're referring to is more on the formal end where there's data gathering that's written down, a hypothesis is made and what not. Additionally we tend to use statistics to numerically quantify the information.
At the most informal end, data is simply gathered through observation, a hypothesis is made intuitively. We still did science in the sense that it's possibly still valid. Do you need formal science to prove there's ground beneath your feet before you jump off your bed?
>Look, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
science in it's most technical form can only falsify a hypothesis. When a theory is successful it means science only failed to falsify that hypothesis.
Philosophy as a whole is a bunch of BS. It's a bunch of conjecture that they try to formalize stuff that can be formalized and made up stuff that can never really be formalized. It's a mishmash of everything and is therefore nothing. You have the philosophy of science which is good by itself, but when you have something like the philosophy of morality side by side with the philosophy of science and Logic as if these things are equal... it becomes pure BS.
>If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
Freud made up his theories and verified it with his limited anecdotal data. It's much faster and is sometimes right. Formal Science is much more accurate but is slow.
>If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
Doesn't mean what you said is even remotely true. Like freud this type of prediction needs a bit more "formality" to back up what you said.
>That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Not even close. In it's most extreme form people go to jail. This is far from that and uncalled for.
>Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
No it gives you knowledge of the test and what happens in the presence of confounding factors. It also indicates the possibility that the same results could happen without the confounding factors.
>I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
Because it's extreme and unnecessary language that increases the hostility of the conversation and the accusation. I'm telling you that your response is over the top.
Most Entertainment is the equivalent of junk food.
Wine is toxic for your health. You think Mr. Beast is junk food based on an opinion while wine is scientifically proven to be garbage for your body. Yet here you are watching educational videos while downing liquid poison. You do more damage to yourself than watching a Mr. Beast video and not drinking wine.
The difference between you and people who watch Mr. Beast is raw snobbery. Sheesh. If you don’t understand why someone would watch a video purely for mindless entertainment and no educational value I don’t think you understand humans or how humans work.
You don’t need to be defensive, I wasn’t attacking you. I don’t think you have understood my comment in the slightest but I don’t wish to cause you further distress as you seem to have become quite irate. I will tell you that, like most people, I’m not above eating junk food on occasion. Also, I was upfront that I watch Folding Ideas videos for the entertainment. Savouring and entertainment aren’t mutually exclusive.
I urge you to attempt to engage with arguments as they are made, not with a version created in your head that vilifies the other person.
Finally, I wish you a calm and peaceful week, with no conflicts and all the YouTube videos you wish to gorge yourself upon, as long as the habit isn’t detrimental to you or others in any way.
Not defensive. Just telling you my point of view, albeit passionately. I wish you a peaceful week too!
your personal opinion doesn't matter at MrBest's scale and doesnt matter to this discussion at all, because you are a single person, but YouTube has few hundred million/billion other users and each of their individual opinion weights the same weight as yours.
basically what I am trying to say is you are not the median Youtube viewer
"Best" and "quality product" by a certain metric, ka-ching. I assume that the leaked PDF lays out what the metrics are that matter to them, but the article kinda skipped over how it's a choice what to consider "best". There's a lot of "quality" videos on YouTube by different metrics than MrBeast videos, that I enjoy watching quite a bit more.
A casino is the scummiest business this side of drug cartels and real estate. Edgy reality TV is more in the ballpark.
> Obviously Mr. Beast isn’t as far out ethically as casinos
That’s not obvious
Casinos are incredibly exploitative not only to staff (even relatively 'above board' companies like Evolution have awful labor records in poor Eastern European countries), but they thrive out of milking their customers in incredibly manipulative, tactical ways to bleed them as slowly and effectively as possible.
Tactics such as returning offers are specifically made to encourage people to pick up gambling addictions. Regulations are skirted by companies like Stake, allowing customers to skirt restrictions easily with a VPN and lax KYC. Their massive presence in sports as sponsors help them advertise to not just adults but children who engage with sports as well, a fact that I'm sure these operators love.
While Mr Beast might use tactics that could be construed as similar, or tries to hit KPI which are similar to those used by casinos, I'm quite sure that Mr Beast video addictions do not lead to thousands of suicides a year, and that fact alone leads me to think that it is in fact obvious that Mr Beast is not as far out ethically as casinos.
Get real.
Maybe... but I read it more as (and tend to agree with) blow it off because it's explicitly an approach that makes the world a worse place in almost every way except perhaps your bank account balance. It's possible to be successful without being mercilessly amoral and there's a big difference between not personally caring for a product vs thinking a product is toxic and holding your nose anyway for the sake of a paycheck.
You seem to be arguing there's no use in learning about immoral businesses.
I mean should we be learning about how to run a private equity firm that buys up all the heart clinics in a metropolitan area then jacks up prices? It's not really that interesting unless you're writing anti-trust legislation.
I'm not saying Mr.Beast is even that bad but spare us the patronizing attitude at least.
A person could read this document without once thinking "this is how I'm going to do things". In fact, the first I heard of it was from people describing portions specifically to decry manipulative and toxic behaviors.
In your particular example, lawmakers don't wake up one day and decide to write anti-trust legislation. They do it in response to sustained pressure from constituents who must first understand what's going wrong and propose (hopefully somewhat effective) ways to fix it. So understanding what's going on in your own community and how a business specifically is taking advantage is a good thing to do if you have the time and inclination.
If you really think that, then you should be all the more interested in what it means to execute on that allegedly-harmful effort well vs poorly
While there's merit to the "know your enemy" approach, I wouldn't expect everyone to take it.
exactly
I read this post because I was curious about how these operations work. What I found is:
- Making good YOUTUBE videos is paramount, not quality videos
- Be quirky and crazy in videos using a blank check
- If something goes awry or you need it faster, also use a blank check
- Some advice related to thumbnails and titles (relying on YouTube's current algorithm which could change the next second)
The only thing I found semi useful is how he classifies employees using the A, B and C system (e.g. A is top tier, B can be trained to be top tier, and C is dead weight)
Pretty sure he regards c players as ones that only “carry their weight” but nothing more
I don't like how much people tie success to the amount of money someone earns. (or how many views someone gets on YouTube, for that matter)
There are many people who I consider successful that have never earned 700 mil, and there are people who made billions I don't give a fuck about.
I agree on money != success in a broader sense, but we live in a capitalistic society where wealth creation is possibly the top indicator of "success", so in that sense wealth captured and created is _the_ metric.
I don’t even think he’s gaming an algorithm. He doesn’t have to.
He’s just making videos people will click on and then watch.
It’s almost like he’s trying to make something people want. I’ve heard that before somewhere…
If you read the full PDF it’s clear he is very carefully gaming the algorithm: he includes charts showing exactly when people drop off from watching videos, and explains how he has an exact set of rules for how the thumbnail, first minute, 2-3 minutes, 3-6 minutes and 6-end minutes of any video should work.
I find the lengths he has gone to in order to design his videos specifically for how YouTube works to be extremely impressive.
Statistics about when people drop off, or what thumbnail or content is appealing, is studying human viewer behavior. There's no algorithm telling the users to find it interesting and keep watching.
Talking about “the algorithm” always feels a bit foolhardy to me because it’s undocumented and constantly changing.
Given that, it’s pretty clear to me from the full PDF that MrBeast is “gaming” it to the best effect possible given no perfect information.
The thing he cares about is if YouTube is going to recommend his video for people to watch, even beyond his own subscribers.
He believes that the key to this recommendation mechanism is having a high AVD and AVP (defined on page 5). Given that he has the highest rated account on all of YouTube now I’m inclined to defer to his expertise.
I don’t dispute his expertise, I dispute your interpretation of what he’s doing if you think it’s gaming an algorithm. Perhaps we’re debating semantics.
These are metrics one might use even if there’s no algorithm, in fact historically they have. TV shows used to use Neilsen data for similar purposes long before there was YouTube. TV producers would measure audience dropoff and then use that to help writers write more gripping episodes.
Google’s hope with their search for decades was that their algorithm was ungameable and that the way to get your site to the top of any result was to make it the best. That’s why they made it a black box and changed it whenever SEO caught on and used it to push junk to the top.
That’s had mixed results on the web for sure but it’s probably worked much better with video because you can track these metrics in a way you can’t with text. Also with the web, the page you land on may make Google further money (with ad sense, inspiring more Googling, using a Google product directly, etc.) or it may not, they don’t always own the ad service at wherever you land when you click a search result link. They don’t have the pure financial incentive of just showing you what you want, something you want a little less might make them more money.
With YouTube they own it all. The more you watch YouTube the more they make. You’re only clicking ads to other YouTube videos.
Everybody on YouTube knows you want a compelling lead in to get the click over to your video, a hook to keep them watching, etc. He’s codifying what they all already know and do. He just is better at it.
>If you read the full PDF it’s clear he is very carefully gaming the algorithm: [...]
How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles? It's probably designed to draw people in and sell copies. Is that also "gaming the algorithm"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
“How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles?”
Because it’s extraordinarily effective?
He made it to the top of YouTube with it. If it’s the exact same thing as other existing techniques how come others haven’t been able to match his success with those classic formulas?
Presumably because journalism is centuries old, and techniques like this eventually become "industry standard" and you don't notice it. Once people figure out what the strategy is, they're going to try replicating it to capitalize on his success. Afterwards I suspect he'll still have a first-mover advantage, but he's going to be nowhere near as popular (comparatively). It's not any different than say, the reality show "format" being eventually copied by other production companies/networks.
Did you read my summary and not the full PDF?
If you’ve only read my summary then we are discussing this with completely different mental models of what he actually does.
I skimmed the summary and it describes every aspect about his production company, whereas your "summary" only described one aspect (ie. figuring out how to keep engagement up), so I only responded to that. You can't treat the entire document as "gaming the algorithm". For instance, the document also mentions only hiring A players, which could hardly be described as "he is very carefully gaming the algorithm".
Go and read pages 6 through 10 of the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
They do not describe the same process everyone else uses to make content. They are much more specific than that.
So far as I can tell his "gaming the algorithm" is having a few short clips near the start to hook people in (ie. an summary/abstract), and periodic bursts of excitement to keep people engaged. The first is so banal that it's hardly worth discussing. Articles in scientific journals have abstracts/summaries. It's not anything nefarious. The rest seems like standard narrative/storytelling advice, eg. hero's journey[1], or how broadcast TV shows have cliffhangers/plot developments to get people to watch the next episode or ad break. Do you think 24[2] is "gaming the algorithm" by presenting 24 action packed episodes where there's always some new/unresolved plot point at the end of each episode?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_(TV_series)
What he’s doing is very clever and very effective.
Correct but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with intentionally gaming an algorithm. TV never had an algorithm and some people were a lot better at making TV that others wanted to watch than others.
You seem to be of the belief that for anyone to be the most successful at this field they have to be gaming an algorithm. But perhaps there’s really no algorithm, or perhaps (my opinion) the algorithm is so good at showing people what they want that you can instead just focus on making videos people want.
The problem is our society teaches us to separate a thing from the externalities of the thing. If it really was just about learning then there wouldn’t be a problem. You can learn from anyone.
However, it’s not just about learning. People are easily influenced by the author of what they’re learning from. They’ll read a Steve Jobs autobiography and learn some interesting business insights, but also hold him in higher regard and perhaps feel like it’s ok to be a raging asshole. People look up to successful people.
It’s entirely appropriate to remind people that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows and perhaps this person has toxic effects they need to be aware of.
that's exactly the problem... why the fascination with "money" and "big"?
The world has real problems... called environmental collapse and climate change. Why not working on those
It's actually EASY to make money selling shit. It's HARD to solve a real problem to make everyone's lives better
I don’t disagree, but surely it’s even easier to bemoan that other people aren’t doing enough of the right things than it is to devote one’s own life to those kinds of problems.
it wasn't my point, my point was that we culturally celebrate "earning a lot of money" as "success" even though when you look carefully you see that they simply are ruining the planet... that's stupid and it should stop
I am as far from a fan as you can get. But calling it shit just demonstrates how little people understand, not how refined their tastes are. It reflects poorly on you guys.
"I spent 24h in Ketchup" is "refined taste" ?
Sure, there are different ways to be commercially successful and most probably require immense talent and hard work. Doesn’t really contradict any particular value judgment of the type of content he produces though.
Well said. It smells like some sour grapes in some of these comments.
Making videos that click and spread is clearly a skill or everyone would do it.
His interviews are just another part of his business, and evidence shows that much of what he says during them is not factual.
His comment has merit. The Beast business is fundamentally at the mercy of YouTube, the algorithm and their business priorities. In fact Beast's intentional focus on making the best YouTube videos highlights this. Beast is a high-touch content farm, but ultimately still a content farm and vulnerable to the exact same risks as any other one.
When the brand is strong and outgrows a platform..
The brand could start their own complementary platform too.
Not much different than the content becoming its own media network.
MrBeast is working on other platforms (tiktok twitch etc) and is working towards diversifying. It is arrogant and lowiq to dismiss what MrBest and his team ahve achieved as "learned to game the yt algorithm"
People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.
And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.
YouTube Shorts is really dark, there's stuff that makes David Foster Wallace's 1996 vision of people hyperglued to a TV look prescient instead of allegorical.
There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.
Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators and it's just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn't care what it is. Just hours consumed.
The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...
I think schools need to start teaching "How to Train Your Algorithm" classes to kids, early and often - with a focus on critical thinking and how advertising companies manipulate them.
Couple that with regulations that require the companies to give greater control to the user over video feed customisation and I think it's possible to reign in the arms race for attention.
Wow. Your feed is pretty messed up. Here is my youtube shorts feed:
- how programmers actually review code
- 3D Printed Latch Mechanism
- I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border in australia)
- You need to go to a “better” place! (rescue of an injured raptor)
I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
I'd say I get the adult baby videos 1 in 15 "swipes" and the bodycam / court stuff are for long form, and is definitely because I watch true crime - i.e. I found courtroom videos of long trials fascinating because I wanted to be a lawyer growing up
It's important to note it's not about individual feeds, but the basins that algorithmic content settles in given the data they have.
As things evolve, they optimize for brutally efficient production. "true crime" starts as "NPR award-winning podcast phenomena" and very quickly come to mean a swath of "DUI arrest" videos.
That's because the initial click, averaged across all of us, is *hyper*optimized for a thumbnail with an attractive scantily clad young female saying COPS DAUGHTER THROWS TANNTRUM AFTER BLOWING 0.24! It's not about individuals, or individuals feeds, it's about these niches get hyperdominated by nonsense because that's what best practice is. c.f. document's comments re: thumbnails vs. mine.
Note also, for instance, the curious absence of any programmer influencers making anywhere near the views of pretty much any other topic on YouTube. t3.gg is the top in software engineering videos by a mile, and they pull in 1/10th of what a bodycam video does.
I am intrigued by this Cops Daughter video. Do you have a link?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5gdXvfve8A
not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share it.
but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every 2 minutes with two sentences: 1. vague statement about what's happened so far that could apply to any video. 2. "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!" (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get a favor like its 1994 still)
EDIT: this ones a good subtle example of the adult baby video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jan_KjEZd20
These "adult baby videos" are the default content on TikTok.
My paranoid take is that it is a type of hypnotism or mind control yet to be deciphered.
In reality, it is just a cheap way of generating (remixing/stealing) content with TTS voice overs and algorithmic selections of video clips. I would bet there is software tailored for it, but I am not interested enough to find out.
> I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
Clear your cookies, cache, local storage, stay logged out, and see what happens. The baseline is junk.
This is true, but it's a constant fight with the recommendation system, requiring a fairly strict approach to flagging "not interested" and "do not show this channel again" etc - as soon as you watch one junk-food video in a lazy day, prepare for another round of moderating tangentially related garbage.
Well, at the very least Black Mirror will have plenty of ideas for next season.
I’m not sure it’s still “Black”. I think it might just be “Mirror”.
The flavor of the cotent is a bit different, but all media is like that. Look at a horror film, or romance novel. It's very clear what human urges/interests are being targetted.
Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.
Online Advertising, and childrens videos have been doing it for a lot longer.
Pretty sure TikTok’s vans were politically motivated
I think it's easy to believe that something will eventually go away just because we feel that something is not good in some way. But things only go away if people change their behaviour around those things on mass.
There's a growing sentiment that a lot of social media is more bad than good for us. But people don't just stop with a behaviour that they know is bad for them. We need a lot more to change a behaviour that has become established.
This is a good point. See alcohol and tobacco. People are smoking less though, aren't they?
Yes, press the play button on the world map here:
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
I think people are starting to drink less too. Now doctors are starting to ask patients how often they drink and advising them to drink less and less frequently.
Imagine doctors routinely asking their patients if they spend too much time on their phones. Would feel a bit intrusive but for some vulnerable populations like kids it might be a good thing to ask about.
This is absolutely the responsibility of the healthcare system tbh. It feels intrusive right now, but discouraging smoking would have felt intrusive once too.
Yes, see the sugar industry. I find it quite similar how both use brain hacks. It makes behavior extremely hard to change once people are hooked.
Why are we calling it anything other than what it is, addiction. You mentioned sugar. Others mentioned alcohol/tobacco. In the end it is just addiction. If we can't talk openly about the actual problem, then it will never be solved. Just like the war on drugs. As long as people want it, others will provide it regardless of legality or self harm
Yes, and now I will argue against myself a bit but it's also important to remember that addiction is not inevitable. It can be fought on a population level over time. Just take a look at this graph. Press the play button on the world map:
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
I think social media lands somewhere between tobacco and sugar. We don't need tobacco. We need carbohydrates but not refined sugar. Social media can be useful sometimes, but is often a disservice. The feeling of usefulness probably makes it more addictive than smoking. At least for me.
Ever see Dhar Mann brainrot videos? I don't see it going anywhere. It's a big reason why films aren't good anymore. Content producers cater to the intellectual tastes of their respective societies. Long story short, we get what we deserve. Long live Criterion Collection for the handful of us who abstain from mass produced trash.
This resonates. Movies lack depth nowadays, especially cultural depth.
They do sometimes convey interesting messages and they are well produced and captivating but they lack soul. I think about films like "Forest Gump". Personally, I really liked the film, maybe other people didn't like it as much but I found it to be unique and culturally enriching. I'm not even American but I could relate. Modern "movies" usually don't have enough character development; or if they do, it's highly generic. Any character development in modern movies is focused on making the character relatable to the most common denominator among the masses so they lack individuality.
It's even telling that we have separate words "film" and "movies". It reminds me of the book "Brave New World" which is set in the future; they have something called "Feelies" which is described as a complete visual and sensory experience but they don't teach you anything; they are all focused on very narrow physical experiences. Everything in BNW is designed in a way to reduce people's awareness and reduce diversity of thought to the point that they never think to ask certain questions.
There's plenty of good film and TV out there, and you don't even have to look hard to find it. I find this attitude to not just elitist but lazy and ignorant.
Try this fantastic movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nycksytL1A&t=1s
Sadly it doesn't get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. Just picking adult animation as another example, for every series like Scavengers Reign (cancelled after 1 season), there's what, two dozen low brow family guy knockoffs?
Wait Scavengers Reign was cancelled?
That's depressingly typical :(
It wasn't cancelled per se, rather HBO only ordered a single season and they never renewed the show. Honestly it's astounding that it got one season at all considering what HBO were doing to animated series at the time.
The show is fantastic but as far as I'm aware they didn't pull great view numbers, which can probably be attributed to some less than stellar advertising.
That's true. I only heard of it because I follow Charles Huettner on social media. If it had been a couple of months later, after I'd deleted Instagram, I'd never have known.
Btw. It's also seeped into video games. Compare Star Wars Outlaws to Star Wars Galaxies or KOTOR. Scary.
KOTOR, both of them but especially the 2nd are built on concepts (post-nihilist existentialism amongst other, to me it's the most obvious) that drive the story. I feel like nowadays, AAA games want to avoid philosophical stuff, or rather keep it way too simple, and we have shit stories (fallout 4/Skyrim. An exception though for Fallout 4 Far harbor DLC).
But we still have good non story-driven AAA games.
Scavengers Reign was excellent.
The population craves lazy and ignorant marvel nothingness. Don't get mad at me. Go talk to them.
Using elitist as an "automatically win any debate" witch word never paints you in a good light, FYI.
I do get a sense of relief downloading a movie recommendation and being greeted by the Criterion logo.
I certainly hope the irony of this exchange isn't lost on the both of you, the mass produced Criterion products being seen as the saviors against the wave of mass produced products.
mass produced for a different audience, however
Which doesn't make any difference in the context of their discussion, it's still mass produced and sold in supermarkets and thus by definition not obscure/unique/for initiated only.
I thought the implication was that audiences in the past had better taste
If that was the implication then it's an even worse take, as it's textbook survivorship bias. There are plenty of terrible older movie, they didn't make it to criterion collection.
I, like many people, lamented about the media dumbing us down with lazy, brainless content. What blew my mind was when I read someone online respond to this assertion: “you have it backwards, the media is delivering what the market demands”.
As with most things it’s likely a bit of both. But deep down I suspect it’s mostly the market demanding trash.
I think this still has it backwards. People, who are not experts in the content they consume, can't be relied upon to distinguish good from trash. Not because they don't experience the difference, but because they don't know the indicators.
I couldn't tell you whether my surgeon was any good or not leading up to an operation, but if they were bad, I'd sure be able to tell 2 weeks later.
I think it is ultimately up to professionals to have some pride in their work. I think they'll also need to have a certain amount of protection from hacks willing to undercut them.
If people can’t tell that content is trash then they have trash taste, and people with trash taste will seek out trash.
There is better content in the world and those who have the taste to seek it out generally will.
It's particularly apparent if you look at the Kindle Top 100 - https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store/zgbs/digita.... I'm most familiar with the romances, so that's what I'll be discussing. There's a lot more to the genre than these examples, but that's not what sells.
• Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are poorly written fantasy romances that blew up on TikTok.
• Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline are poorly written dark romances(https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/uu1age/what_d... they're also antisemitic QAnon fan fiction.
• Three books with bare chested men on the covers. These indicate that there's lots of sex scenes; no one reads them for plot.
• Icebreaker is a poorly written hockey romance. The author is ignorant about college, hockey, and the US to say the least.
• Credence is a contemporary romance that's best known for sex scenes and toxic relationships.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury. Both of these are mediocre fantasy romances by Sarah J. Maas; she's the Dan Brown of romance.
Can you do better?
If 100's of millions of people are watching something, then clearly it has entertainment value.
His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but it's hard to dispute it's effectiveness. Nor do you have to work there.
His success is all the more impressive given he started with nothing and how competitive the space is.
On some level he's the personification of the youtube algorithm - don't blame him, he's just giving people what they want. On some level this feels like the same outcry parents had to video games in the 90's.
Not saying Mr. beast content isn’t valuable to millions of people, but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.
It’s also the case that people can succeed in spite of their management philosophies. If you only look at the people who have made it you miss out on all the people who tried similar approaches and did not, which is needed to figure out the effectiveness of a strategy before adopting it. Classic example are people trying to be like Steve Jobs who are not successful.
And on the value side - There are a lot of exploitive ways to hook people, and you can think something is exploitive / a local minima, without being an elitist.
Mr. Beast specifically seems fine to me in a similar way that porn is fine. I don’t think it crosses over to exploitive, but I don’t think it’s crazy to make that argument and I don’t think people are primarily motivated by sour grapes or jealousy.
> but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.
The GP never said this. They didn't say it was good because it made money, they said it was good because people like it and watch it. I like it and watch it. I agree with the GP.
> The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually.
Before teenagers were looking up to YouTubers, they were looking up to TV celebs, musicians, sports players, and so on. You had entire publishing empires built around following such celebs around and reporting on their private lives.
I don't think this is hugely different. The tech has evolved and the formulas have been perfected, but it's still catering to the same obsessions and urges that we had for a good while.
Crazy ideas and sensationalism usually works in the showbiz and in the media industry. This is just applied to YouTube or in another words: Old wine in new bottle.
How does it fall under the definition of a bubble? Sure, view counts contribute to more views. But that's not the main retention mechanism of these videos.
I see it as a bubble because they don't have to pay anything to host or publish content even though there is a cost there (storage, streaming, etc..) so they're essentially hoping that YT can keep providing a free service with ads even if they're running at a loss.
It's not clear if YouTube is specifically profitable, because Alphabet only separates revenue, not profit. But, I would imagine they're not running huge margins or even at a loss given their recent crackdown on ad-blockers and Google's overall fight against them with things like manifest V3.
YouTube just generated over 8 billion in quarterly revenue. YouTube has been a bonafide business for content creators for ~15 years. Nothing about this says “bubble”.
It’s inevitable that every business changes with time. And on a long enough horizon collapse is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it a bubble.
When people realize they can spent a fraction of what they pay for advertising and get the same results.
Do you have any proof of that?
people who work in marketing/growth are already saying that influencer marketer rates have steeply declined. we can only hope!
Here's to hoping but that could be caused by a number of things. High interest rates for example might make companies unwilling to invest in some types of marketing.
>on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
But MrBeast does pay. He pays for it with every video, because YouTube keeps 45% of the ad revenue for it. If he receives ~$300,000 for a video, YouTube has kept another ~$300,000.
Social media / influencer sphere a bubble that’s going to pop? I… highly doubt that.
Google wipes inactive accounts because they’re often used for spam and malware.
These influencers' accounts are certainly not inactive.
No, but the cracks are starting to show. My point is that YT may go down the same path and get stingy with video storage.
You're really overestimating the cost of video storage and streaming compared to the kind of revenue they're able to get.
> contrived BS ... micromanage ... game a blackbox algorithm
The relatively higher production cost warrants hyper optimization (as an org) and demands high agency (of producers).
> younger audiences
Internet is so vast in that making something for the 0.1% is still an audience of millions.
there's something truly special about this era, we have so much comfort and "data" yet no one foresaw the enshittification of the web space even though it seems the exact same cycle that happen in any space.. when attention, fame and money gets involved .. most neurons are "working" at milking and abusing the mass. Same exact sleigh of hands really..
Exactly... it feels weird that someone like Simon would fall for this and not see through it for what it is... someone spending his life being very efficient at building shit to sell it to an audience who's too lazy to consume anything but shit, all that paid by a capitalist system running on oil to allow all this shit to happen and enrich the shitster...
We don't need to falsely pretend that those guys are interesting in any way... we should teach our kids to see through the bullshit, and ask to be less efficient, and more kind
What did I fall for here?
I think this is a really interesting document, despite having very few lessons I would adopt for my own work (as I said at the bottom of the post).
I would be thrilled to read documents providing a level of cultural and operational detail like this from ANY company.
Another one I find really interesting is the 37signals handbook: https://basecamp.com/handbook
Yes, MrBeast's doc definitely also had "Getting Real" vibes. https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
You seem to see him as a "success", which means you have a weird definition of "success" (eg you see efficiency as success)
I see a lone tree planter saving the Sahara from desertification and not making a lot of money or being very "efficient on Youtube" as MUCH more successful than MrBeast for my values...
So indeed it seems that you were unconsciously attracted by "efficiency" as "success", which is a common trait of people in tech
And this should be REALLY questioned, because our planet is going to the shitters (environment, climate) BECAUSE of extreme efficiency (to suck resources out and waste it)
That's why we expect from people that they take such entreprise as that of MrBeast with a grain of salt and more judgment
Basically his document is: "how to be even more efficient at inducing addiction-like behaviors in teens so that Youtube can sell them more ads for products they don't need (wasting the planet) and that I can get a slight share of this which is going to make me multi-millionaire (although I don't really need the money)"
is that REALLY the behavior which merits to be called "success"? Is that the kind of behavior we want our kids (or ourselves) to emulate?
> "contrived BS", "mircromanage", "game a blackbox algorithm"
Wow! There is a lot of bad faith in this comment. This is hacker news, not X, can you please be more thoughtful here?
> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.
You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast, he is producing real videos at an incredibly high volume and they consistently do numbers.
None of those videos is easy to make.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting
"Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast" — in a discussion on the ethics of Mr Beast.
Sure I get it, probably there are lessons in there ethically good actors could look at and use — but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself. It is totally possible to learn about the whole system with a morbid fascination while being constantly aware of the ethical implications without casting them aside.
The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I don't expect to get a reply given how popular this article and discussion was and given how late I am but ...
What are the ethical considerations here?
The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:
> You could say that about literally any shady business
But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.
Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.
I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).
Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.
Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.
If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.
I found the top level comment to highlight useful ideas.
Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things"
If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment
> but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself
Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
I have got the feeling you are creating a disagreement where there is none. As I said: it is okay to look at how evil-corp is doing things, as long as you can disentangle that from their evil bits, keeping in mind the context within which it was written. That isn't stiff over-moralistic behavior, that is common sense. What isn't usually as okay is going all: "Let's ignore the ethics of $X and don't think about the context within it was written". E.g. a simple bureaucratic rule to collect the religious belief of people might be innocent in some free society, but if the same rule was written in a Nazi-occupied country it gets a completely different meaning. Casting aside the context is like robbing a thing of its meaning. Now just because the Nazis abused that rule doesn't mean other societies elsewhere couldn't use the very same rule in a positive way -- they would just be stupid if they ignored the negative abuses of that rule provided they know of them.
That was my point.
Thanks - I think I misread your initial response.
Yes, the context matters a lot. One of the frustrations with this conversation (and this is a thing that happens sometimes and doesn't other times - I don't mean to say this is always a problem on hn) is that we aren't able to discuss the thing because we have to spend the right number of tokens acknowledging globally recognized facts.
I want there to be one comment at the top level saying: hey just in case you're not aware, here's context that you need to know when evaluating a document by Foo.
And then I want the rest of us to be able to discuss it with the understanding that we all have that context.
I agree, but I also think that sometimes looking at the data we have holistically is a good idea.
as the most extreme example; we paid too high a blood cost that shall hpefully never be repeated in civilization again with the Holocaust. But some of the findings in those experiments to have value (I know many of the experiments and findings are worthless from a medical sense). I don't blame anyone at all that takes a moral stance to burn such data in order to discourage any backroom experiments from trying to repeat this, but some of that knowledge was used to save lives.
>The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I believe it can. a lot of the advice I read here is just good business sense.
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
This sucks to hear as an enthusiast focused on research, but this is honestly just talking about scoping and focusing your goal. very common business sense. But your goal hopefully isn't to shovel out slop with clickbait thumbnails that maximizes engagement.
> This is what dictates what we do for videos... If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
This is about making an engaging hook. Again, good business sense you'll hear launching any product.
This is definitely for clickbait (and the interpretation here focusing on AVD over quality can be scrutinized), but you can balance this and make a good hook without outright lying.
>An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video.... we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
crude language, but they understand the competition, and what they can and can't do. Ideally the lesson you get here isn't to just "outspend your competition", but that you need to understand your strengths and highlight them. Mr. Beast mindhacked the algorithms early on and uses those funds to do stuff others don't have the Net Worth to even attempt.
etc. It's possible, as long as you keep a moral compass in mind while understanding the undertones of the advise.
> Ignoring the ethics [...]
I think that's very straightforwardly the point of contention here. Some people are doing that and are discussing the business aspects; others aren't.
I don't think any particular discussion is more appropriate than the other, as long as people are in agreement on which one they're having.
I don’t know if they’re necessarily two different conversations - there’s a conversation to be had whether the business practices discussed would have been effective in an ethical operation.
It’s entirely possible the success has nothing to do with the business principles and 100% the ethics. Same the other way around, or anywhere in between.
Ok, but the comment you're replying to wasn't ignoring the ethics. To me, this reads like, "ignoring the point of your comment, [other points]".
You lost me at "ignoring the ethics".
By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard them, but they're never ignored.
Ignoring the ethics is literally antithetical to good engineering. Alas it seems to be the default for operating a business.
because ethics have a cost. If you competitors don't need to obey the same ethics, they will out compete you.
If you can't compete without throwing your ethics overboard, the right answer is to put it down and do something else, not join in.
Ethics are not morals. Ethics are business practices morals are religious and political views.
1. morals drive ethics, so no point separating the two.
2. ethics is not some ettiquite decided in a business room. they are formed by society. It was probably never ethical to let kids work in coal mines, but as long as it wasn't illegal (and can take the PR hit) some businesses would just do it.
> put it down and do something else, not join in.
by not joining the rat race, you fall behind. This makes you less capable of withstanding the pressure from other rat racers in the world.
Imagine using this logic for survival in the jungle.
The law of the jungle is perhaps not the best model for human society.
Ok. I'll bite. Ethics is one aspect of humans that allowed us to survive the jungle and move beyond it.
I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people will not understand it that way. They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
>They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
are we really that far off these days, in this economy?
This is apparently an unpopular idea but you're right: human nature is based on cooperation. Even under "free market" systems people do things that are not optimal market decisions because they are naturally predisposed to helping other people, even when it is often exploited. A lot of marketing deliberately exploits this, e.g. the common tactic of "giving something for free" to make the consumer feel like they owe a favor, or giving products a cutesy persona so consumers anthropomorphize the product and their interactions with it instead of seeing it as a disposable tool.
We come into this world naked, defenseless, starving and freezing. Other animals are able to defend themselves or at least flee, often only minutes after being born or hatching. It takes literal months for us to learn to meaningfully move on our own, about a year to feed ourselves and many more years to be able to pose a meaningful threat to natural predators or forage for food on our own. Throughout this entire time we not only need to be nurtured by our parents, we need an entire society to sustain us and our caregivers.
This is a common misunderstanding of our evolution: it's not simply our brains that gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom, it's our cooperation. Large brains are a natural consequence of complex social interactions and feed back into them. It's not just the ability to make and use tools that set us apart, it's our ability to teach each other about them and learn from each other.
It didn't take a great individual inventor, it took a tribe full of people to carry on each invention and pass the knowledge to the next generation while sustaining the tribe to allow the inventors to invent new technology or improve upon old ones for the benefit of the entire tribe. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on a human pyramid of all who came before us and everyone around us helping to perpetuate humanity.
I'm surprised you've never had a hypothetical conversation
You do not understand the process of cogent thought. Ethics are a consideration even during the context of hypotheticals.
Please indulge my hypothetical situation: there is a company that produces many very expensive videos every week and make a lot of money from each one.
Every single video they make is a hit.
In this hypothetical situation, I would be impressed that this organization is able to deliver such consistent product. I would be curious about what they do or say operationally that enables that.
At the end of the podcast the filmcast, they say "at the end of the day, it is really impressive that _ made a movie." (They name the director)
This is true if the director has made dozens of movies or one. It's always impressive. Doing things in the real world is hard.
Do you find anything in this hypothetical situation agreeable? Or is it only hard when someone you like does it?
Poe's law makes it hard to talk hypothetical on public forums these days.
Ethics only exist to provide value. If you can’t point to a value that your ethics provide then it’s not needed and excessive. Most of the ethical standards do provide value or mitigate risk you just need to understand what that risk and value trades is.
There is no ethics in business, only revenue and profits.
Name any ethical company and I'm sure there will be questionable actions they did in past with "due to the market conditions" excuse.
This is the line of reasoning phone scammers used whenever kitboga (a scam baiter) revealed his identity and asked them why they did this job instead of something better. One of them asked him "oh, so you are a saint, and you never did anything wrong?"
It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical sometimes ".
Ethics is no binary. You ethics are not mine and everybody does questionable actions from time to time. A company is an entity with potentially thousands people, one of them doing questionable things will happen.
Some legal entities are acting all the time in a way we would lock them up in psych ward if they were a natural person. That might be a good way to "succeed" but that's probably something the society shouldn't promote/foster.
In the real world it's not only revenue and profits. That's for sure taking most of the space but people behind the entities are caring about other stuff and takes non-profit-optimal decisions all the time.
There absolutely are ethics in business; ignore them at your peril (ask SBF).
Ethics is not the same thing as legalities.
Sbf is just an example of people who failed. Contrary, Musk or Sackler family are good examples of people who succeeded. Do you want to talk about their questionable ethics and how it made them extremely rich?
Games Workshop, multi-billion pound publicly traded British company. Manufacture their core goods in British factories, don’t engage in tax shenanigans.
They do however change their figurine bases from square to round in an effort to deprecate people's armies in a bid to generate revenue.
Heh
It’s probably a risk reward choice not a moral choice.
... Myself... I find their 3-year lifecycle for rulebooks a little aggressive... (as well as their pricing - but hey, it's a hobby)
Having to spend ~£120 (rulebook and codex) every 3 years for a hobby is probably okay though?
I am from far enough back in time (started with 1st edition and then went to 2nd - and had almost all of the codexes, even though I only played a single faction/army) I would buy codexes (army books) for all the armies, because I liked the art and the lore.
The 2nd edition box set was about ~£35 in 1993, adjusted for inflation that would be ~£73 now - which then when converted into CAD is well...alot more than what I just paid for 10th edition (about $80 CAD+tax). So - it's a good deal - and I am sure that there is overlap amongst friends during edition changeover.
5-year cycle would be a happy medium, but "that's just like my opinion man"...
> There is no ethics in business, only revenue and profits.
Ethics affect everything we do. If you are doing something deeply unethical, you have way more difficult time finding good employees, for example. Because people don't want to work for scumbags. And the people you find, are likely also unethical and care only about money, how do you think that is going to play out in the long run?
Business and ethics are inseparable. You have to understand ethics to be able to make money - not meaning that you need to be ethical.
I guess people are taking this comment as supporting unethical business, but in fact what he's saying applies to capitalism in general, and why capitalism is unethical. Pretty much every big company did and is doing unethical things, but for most people it doesn't matter because they're "successful". If you equate amounts of money with success, as our system does, then it is pretty much guaranteed that people will do unethical things to reach "success", i.e., X amounts of dollars.
Wikimedia Foundation.
Ignoring the ethics of Mexican drug cartels, they are producing some crucial and consistently demanded products. Like high-volume of drugs and violence that rivals the state.
None of those are easy to achieve.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be impressed by the logistics of a militarized drug cartel, but from a business and systems view it's quite interesting. /sarcasm
This is literally cocaine logic, i.e. because I feel good when taking cocaine, it's good for me. Ergo, cocaine is good.
what if you study Mexican drug cartels, and you find that they have a certain method of communication that enables them to communicate more efficiently.
You copy this communication in your non-profit organization that feeds starving children and find that you are able to feed 50% more children when communicating with this more efficient method.
This is not "literally cocaine logic", it's learning from others.
To use an example you'll probably agree with more: You can hate the lyrics of a given musical artist but copy their production style and in doing so give your lyrics a better platform from which to be heard.
Methods != end goals
You can adapt effective methods currently used to accomplish questionable things to accomplish more noble things.
although, to be perfectly honest, I doubt you'd learn much from Mexican drug cartels that would apply to software, as the markets are completely different.
> Methods != end goals
Ok, but the methods (hustle, grind-culture, high pressure on marks) are here just as questionable as the end goals (Be the biggest Youtuber).
What can you learn from Mr. Beast? Nothing that a lack of conscience and some basic psychology of engagement couldn't teach you.
To reuse your analogy, what if you could communicate information by arranging the corpses of your enemies in a certain pattern, then use international news reports to get the messages across.
What could this teach us about communication? Nothing.
We learn that they operate on a culture of radical accountability. They are also a pressure cooker organization that micro manages hard and expects employees to pull all nighters
There are probably business ethics in the cartels as well. They have different core values and risk profiles than conventional businesses but there are likely business operating guidelines and operational ground rules that we can ethics.
I would be genuinely curious to hear: in your mind, could any system be interesting to you, no matter its ethical basis? Or is there a line, and if so, what is the line to you?
Why I can't separate learning about a topic and finding the knowledge interesting vs. its value judgement against my worldview?
Agree and I’ll take it a step further: shouldn’t we encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart them?
A big folly in political movements is completely disregarding their opponents rhetoric. Studying it and discussing it is not the same as validating it. You can't effectively fight what you don't understand and you can't understand something you refuse to know.
I think you’re misrepresenting my question.
Mr Beast’s “youtube success hacking”, or whatever you want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals.
I don’t think either of these activities would surprise anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to be learned here? Where is the deep understanding?
People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of practically everything else they value in their lives. None of this is new or novel.
Most people avoid employing these structures because they’re viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of course, do, but I don’t see us using that information to ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see them lauded for “thinking outside the box” on Hacker News.
What’s interesting about this conversation is the different perspectives on the material, not necessarily the material itself. Nothing I read in the document reads like “use hyperbole all the time” or “extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction”. Instead most of it reads like the sort of things you’d expect to see in any high paced, high competition industry, just written for the sort of people that grew up in and would work at a YouTube company vs folks that grew up in and would work for a major manufacturer. Every company, whether explicitly said or not distinguishes between employees who are excited to be there and excited to be working on the company goals and the ones who are just there to punch a clock. And at every company the clock punchers have always been held in lower regard than the excited employees. We can worry about how that tendency can lead to worker exploitation (see also the game development industry), but the reality is any time you get a group of people together, the folks who have a vision and a mission are going to be more drawn to and get along better with the people who share a passion for that vision and mission.
Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we don’t make it explicit that sharing something like this isn’t to celebrate it.
I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
Let me ask that question a different way: let’s say what you learn had no value or it was something that was already pretty well understood (such as the fact that people click misleading or hyperbolic links). What was the value to society in that information being created or shared?
That is a completely different question.
Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical quandary.
So you feel the person who is doing this competition doesn’t feel like they actually need the money in their lives? Or do you think there might be a power imbalance around financial stability being exploited?
I bet if you asked those people who were winning those life-changing amounts of money, they would say they felt the opposite of exploited.
Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.
A YouTuber who is worth a considerable amount of money.
Not sure how that changes anything I said.
The fact that I find the first chapter of When We Cease to Understand the World (the world war 1 bit) to be breathtaking/haunting maybe tells you everything you need to know
(The book is historical fiction)
I think the ethics are important when you're looking not just at Mr Beast's businesses themselves but also their internal culture, especially when squaring it up against the perception of himself he's created as some sort of squeaky clean philanthropic billionaire, particularly among his primarily young fans. Those big charity videos aren't done altruistically, they serve another purpose of deflecting criticism.
You have the façade presented to the public, then the operations of the businesses he runs, then the culture built within them. If you ignore the ethics then you won't see that a significant part of his success is in his PR muscle, and how (young) people then expect that follows through to working for him or going on his show.
I don't doubt that this isn't unlike the dream of going to work in the games industry as a kid, getting to make the very kind of game you loved to play, only to realise that what's on the inside is actually pretty ugly, and perhaps your fanaticism has been exploited.
I actually think this document gives an incredible look at the kind of culture that Jimmy is intentionally cultivating!!
There are lots of startups in SV looking for "cracked engineers" and frankly this sounds a bit like that!
Honestly to this day, I don't know what he did wrong, it seems like a concerted effort to take him down and/or grifters want to profit from his downfall by 'exposing' him.
The allegiations seems to have been:
- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
- Some of his friends/production staff did some bad stuff (I won't elaborate). These people are not MrBeast, but sovereign individuals. Production staff in the movie industry rotates at a weekly rate.
- His productions are a shitshow, with tons of stress overtime, last minute heroic saves etc. - If you've read/watched anything Adam Savage has written, you'll realise unfortunately the entire film industry is like this, with everything being on a tight timeline. Practical sets often can be set up once and get destroyed during filming. If somebody messes up, it's often weeks of work and millions of dollars down the drain.
>- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to >anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Anyone who watches 99% of media should not find scripting to be a surprise. And many posting here on HN, who have given technical talks and presentations definitely do some level of preparation/script in advance. You can tell which people on YouTube/TikTok/etc actually prepare and have a script - against those who just ramble on with absolutely no plan outside of "this is a cool thing I like, that I want to talk about for far too long". (I watch alot of DIY/maker style videos)
Because - even if it is "unscripted" - there are soooo many hours of footage required to cut together even a short news interview segment. Many many years ago, I was interviewed for a short (5m) segment on "wardriving". The camera crew and interviewer took more than 8 hours to get all of their footage/angles and my various sound-bites for 5 minutes of aired footage. (And who knows how long in the edit room) It was eye-opening for me.
I think, potentially more problematic than all of that, are the allegations about illegal lotteries, etc.
Plus:
- Exploiting his employees to a degree that could be considered torture (Yes, we need to keep you awake in solitary confinement for the time-lapse video)
- Hiring Delaware a known Sex Offender, and not keeping him away from children.
> I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Some people assumed the story is real, and knowing it is fake lessens the impact of his contests and story arcs in his videos (Mac's trials hit different when you realize it's scripted).
You're conflating "efficiency" with "success"
Just say he's "efficient" at what he does (descriptive) but not "successful" (value judgment)
Sorry, I'm not sure where I used either term
If you want, I will though: in the document, Jimmy says he wants to create the biggest YouTube channel. By that metric (his own!) he has succeeded.
His own... but not yours. Yet you still use that term
His shady way is clearly part of his business otherwise he would be successful without ripping of people.
This is ridiculous analysing his performance while ignoring his ethics especially when it's part of his income if not a fundamental strategy
Exactly!! we need to stop conflating "efficiency" with "success"
Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.
Being efficient at destroying the planet is to successfully destroy the planet.
I think the original point was precisely to separate the concepts that make something successful - to be successful at what you do - from a judgement on the outcomes - the thing that you are doing.
> But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.
The reason why I would conflate them is that success had a positive social implication. You get respect if you're successful. In order to separate these concept, I'd use language that doesn't have positive connotations. "Efficient" is more than accurate.
The scope of “success” under examination in this guide is tailored for an artificial economic organism that wants to survive and capitalize in a particular competitive marketplace (YouTube).
It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.
That's probably why we need some morals to come in and balance stuff. You want quick and easy money, you run drugs or sell your body. I'm sure you can be very successful in both if you optimize to be successful in those ventures.
But those are not only societally looked down upon but illegal is most US states. Your success here also lies on the ability to operate discreetly out of the eyes of the law. Would that be a success? (even if I personally believe they should be legal).
"Success" is to achieve the intended goal, without causing new problems that outweigh the benefit of reaching that goal.
Reaching the goal is not a moral measurement, it is all about efficiency. If you don't reach the goal, your efficiency is zero. The moral question is what new problems are acceptable. That's where reasonable people can disagree.
success without morals is exactly how we got into this age of enshittification. We got customers on lock, easy "success" to make a Big Mac $8 and mine data from an app, or retroactively increase our subscriptions from $10 to $20/month.
Maybe we should integrate that social value into "success" more often. Facebook was probably the most successful company, so successful laws are being made to reel their patterns in. It wasn't illegal before though, so success?
> Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
For some businesses being efficient means there is a side-effect of destroying the planet. For others it's causing customers/employees long-term health effects like cancer. Many industries that are considered highly profitable have these types of things -- think pharmaceuticals (legal or not), lending, gambling.
"Success" in a business generally means being profitable. Usually this requires being "efficient" but being efficient isn't the goal. Neither is "Net good for society/humanity at large" -- at least not the main one, taking priority over being profitable.
well maybe they should. That's why we have so much reguation. And why instead of following regulation they lobby to remove such restrictions.
Can I really say a company lobbying for worse people/worker/world conditions to be a "success"? The cigarette metaphor is apt here. if you wanna go more extreme, children in mines would be the best success; employees who can't talk back, can be paid peanuts, and are easily replacable is peak success.
I wasn't sure how MrBeast can "set viewers' expectations" so efficiently and mine so many minds with this formula until I recently witnessed a friend's children log into their YouTube Kids account and immediately be suggested a selection of choice MrBeast cuts. The six-year-old had the remote and went for several inane MrBeast videos in close succession but his older sibling was not impressed. But the bottom line is, children are involved in the equation, and in terms of interest in his customers' minds he is getting close to being the anti-Mister Rogers.
> If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with the goal, not with efficiency itself.
Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work
> Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan :
> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."
If we're going this way, the next question - and a real one, this time - is whether we should study and use the medical data they acquired doing very unethical things to prisoners.
I’m not going to pretend to have an answer to that question, it’s above my pay grade.
But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that we should structure and operate our medical clinics like theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.
It's above my paygrade too, but what I remember from occasional discussions of that case is that:
- The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done, the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not use it?
- The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and encourages similar acts in the future.
(Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree with legitimization.)
- There's often a side thread going on about how the atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.
(Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on its own.)
Something to note here is that most (if not all) of the "medical data" acquired by Axis experiments is useless: a lot of it is on the order of "if we make someone really cold they die". The methodology was, unsurprisingly, generally biased, non-reproducible, and often cruel for the sake of it, rather than unethical out of necessity.
IMO there's a nice parallel between useless evidence from bad experiments, and useless business practices from unethical companies. If you want to take the lessons but leave the bad stuff, often you'll find there's nothing left.
> Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool
Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch, the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.
> Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
I regret that we have done so. At global scale.
The problem is not the inventor but the invention itself. In your quite inept analogy, the wheel itself is somehow unethical. IE, they didn't invent the wheel they invented the slave.
Why would a wheel be ethically unacceptable? The example you’re replying to talks about tobacco companies and cancer. A wheel doesn’t cause cancer.
I made an absurd example exactly to show that there is a limit after which the argument of "tainted source" should not apply.
(Regarding tobacco, see a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552737)
Also notable: the first was accomplished under a fascist government intent on violent world domination, and the latter was completed under a (arguably less fascist, depending on exact time frame) different government, specifically because in the meantime there was a large scale critique of the people running the aforementioned initial government by (roughly) the rest of the world.
So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within this company might lead to a reorganization of control, such as might best position any further advancements to benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.
(von Braun being a clear “A-Player”, not a CEO, given the terminology at hand)
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
I'd love to see that document and I'm sure there's a lot to learn from it and a lot of knowledge to use for the good of humanity.
The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Most shady businesses can be boiled down to, “we exploit people for personal gain”.
Which is always bad.
"Exploit" (mostly) only has a negative connotation in the context of people; if you exploit a resource or an opportunity, it seldom gets seen the same way.
Because of the latter, businesses leaders can also quite often talk about the former without even noticing that normal people regard "exploiting people" as a bad thing.
Sometimes it's hard to even agree what counts as exploitation of a person: The profit margin of every successful employer I've ever had is, in some sense, them exploiting me — but I've also worked in places where that's negative, loss-making, and the investors paid for my time with the profits made from others, which feels to me like the successes I've been involved with paying for the failures, not exploitation.
Apple: exploits factory workers to fulfill the customer’s desire for status symbols.
McDonalds: exploits hunger by conditioning you to desire convenient, unhealthy, and ultimately unsatisfying food.
TikTok: exploits your dopamine to condition you to watch content, keeping you entertained with new quick doses constantly.
You can pick almost any major company and find some way they exploit someone else.
> You can pick almost any major company and find some way they exploit someone else.
Correction, you can pick any extremely large corporation.
Very large (i.e. successful) exploit people by design. Businesses not willing to exploit people are at a disadvantage and can never be as successful as those that are willing to exploit others.
You are being down voted but many years on this earth building trillion dollar companies has taught me you are right in a way no one wants to hear
The richest business in history was the Dutch East India Company. The richest below them are the Mississippi Company, rounding it out with the South Sea Company. Within the top 10 includes oil companies, who exploit our future for profit, and Big Tech, who exploit us for profit. Is it any surprise most of the richest companies in history exploited human capital for massive gains?
Pretty sure a dude called Karl wrote a book about this.
Exploitation and profit are the same concept just different framing. The distinction between shady and non is usually more about who is being exploited, to what extent they're being exploited and how transparent the business is about that exploitation.
You could also like to read some documents from Karl Bischoff (the architect of Auschwitz)
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens...
And also Vrba–Wetzler report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba–Wetzler_report
I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.
>Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
The difference is the game he's playing (youtube) is similar to the game we're playing (startups) so the success is tantamount.
The game tobacco companies play is also very different, so the tobacco companies success will teach you very little about being successful in startups.
Personally the game I’m playing (building an effective edtech company) is probably less similar to the game he is playing (running illegal lotteries targeted at children) than the game Tabacco companies play (lean heavily on branding, marketing, and trying to control the academic narrative).
What’s shady about producing entertaining videos that people want to watch?
Are Marvel films shady for being popular? Is HN shady for adding features which increase engagement?
Heck yes, Marvel films, any big Hollywood films, are shady. HN is basically a vanity project so it's less shady. If HN was "optimized for engagement" the way a MrBeast video or Marvel film is, I bet I'm not the only one who would be out of here.
HN puts the most popular submissions on top. Allows commenting and reviews, greys out low voted content.
You don’t think this is optimized for for engagement? Don’t let the beige design fool you.
hn is not optimized (thank good) and didn’t change in forever. There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription, and if it were more popular it would be more expensive to host.
Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)
> There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription...
This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/continue/jobs/smcxRnM-...
HN has ads.
not everyone likes to run a charity, some have a family to feed
HN engagement is really low compared to platforms like reddit
Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market films that a lot of people enjoy?
I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
Seems pretty low on the sketch scale to me.
Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is now.
I'm not into the Marvel universe (obviously) but it seemed to me they had been doing multiversey stuff for a long time, so I looked it up. They've done it since the 60s. They have also done endless reboots and endless retcons.
In short, they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters, I mean their properties, as long as humanly possible and then some.
I don't even have any nostalgia for these characters. They were a really fringe phenomenon in my country. But do you think that means we don't get the 20+ Marvel movies shoved down our throats? Oooh, no. We'll eat what we're served, or not go to the movies at all (that's the option I choose). If you wanted to make a parody of hamfisted, audience-contemptous cultural imperialism, you couldn't do better than Marvelwood.
> been doing multiversey stuff for a long time
Yes, everything in the movies/TV is derived from comic book. Comic books are extremely niche so movie content is new and novel to most movie viewers.
Multiverse / reboots / retcons also helped kill comic book popularity. It was a bad idea there as well! https://youtu.be/0PlwDbSYicM?si=iOlB2xYP8Cm1PwXc
> they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters
No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.
In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't even know what that means in this context. Superhero movies strike me as extremely low on the scale of evil. Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s
What's wrong with being shady? Morals are a meme
Marvel films, which (like much of big budget Hollywood at this point sadly) at this point are infamous for their exploitation of cheap unorganized effects artists, are probably a bad example for something being "not shady".
HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front page items change fairly slowly (rather than algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest" feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever and actively preventing you from commenting too much within a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for something being "shady".
Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast, that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?
They make money in ways that others would find morally reprehensible. The tobacco industry makes its money off of addictive substances that kill millions per year, and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention. In both cases they're highly efficient operations that make a lot of money, but whether or not you would call it a success story depends on your definition of success. If your definition of successful is "makes money", then the tobacco industry, Donaldson, fentanyl dealers, etc are indeed successful. If your definition is "the world is a better place for its existence", then not so much.
Regarding sources: if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative for argument's sake, you're capable of googling "MrBeast geneva convention" and following the sources from there.
>and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention
What specific acts are we talking about? "violation of the geneva convention" could mean literally anything between "putting red cross symbols on soldiers" and "summarily executing civilians", so it doesn't really narrow things down. If they're being put in uncomfortable positions, but they're not risking long term harm and it's voluntary, I don't see what the issue is.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550368.
>Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
Is anyone saying that Mr Beast is good and shouldn't be criticised? I can't see them.
Exactly this. Thank you.
We share a planet with nearly 10 billion other people. Money isn't everything.
> You could say that about literally any shady business.
Right, and where is the problem with that again?
This is not comparable
No but bro, listen bro, he does numbers.
The A,B and C teams seem to line up with the Sociopath, clueless, and losers in Gervais Principle.. or at least from this url(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...)
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't really know why this kind of content is so engaging but I guess it is. Kinda like a sports match where everyone just shouts at how bad the other team is or something.
EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.
This site has a lot of interesting people that did and do interesting "hacker" type things that keep me coming back, but a lot of commenting is people looking to build things of questionable value, legality, or social good and sell them off and gtfo before the cracks show.
Less "Hacker" More "Greed via Computer" So the idea that they aren't bothered by Mr Beast's lack of integrity is because they too find deceit acceptable so long as they profit. Because, someone else before him did, so why shouldn't he? It's toxic greed all the way down in this view.
the bizarre social Darwinism nonsense that permeates the internet has done a nice job of taking this antisocial mindset - passersby at a glance recognize it quite rightly as the ideology of the asshole - and rebranded it as 'smart' and a mere recognition of the 'real world' (much to the confusion of people succeeding and enjoying the company of others doing so without robbing one another)
Wait. You’re answering why this site is flooded with morale outrage with us vs them moral outrage?
Thank you for putting this in words; it's been rattling around in my head too.
I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human flourishing.
the insightful intelligent discourse that this site's audience brings often lets the darker side of that blessing - resentment for the successful - to surface.
whether that is convenient altruism masquerading as a disdain for greed or sheer jealousy at their own lack of agency or fortuna or virtu is for their own ego to hopefully one day confront.
I wonder if it would be possible to create a clone of HN without a pervasive reactionary tendency, and what you'd need to tweak to make that work.
Could not agree more, these days I feel like I only really read more technical posts where "sour grapes" comments are hard to insert. Basically anything about politics, tech, finance, management, news, the top few comments are so predictably negative its exhausting.
I think it mostly happened when HN became flooded by Reddit users. One of the reason I think this is because of how HN and Reddits way of dealing with new lines is different. In a lot of the comments on HN that I would consider to be fitting on GPs point you’ll see a format a long the lines of this:
This is the first line of my paragraph.
This is the second line of my paragraph.
They are separated because HN and Reddit formatting is different.
I think that's because people are commenting on mobile, where the lines are way shorter. What looks like a paragraph on my phone (e.g. this comment), turns out to just be a line or two.
This is also how 4chan differentiated users, by double space and ironically using >greentext wrong. I thought it was ironic to see this comment here, because, I've been using the old 4chan archives as datasets for interesting things. https://archive.org/details/imageboard_datasets
>doubly ironic is that 99% of HN users use both of those supported features
Slashdot got like that way back 20 years ago... every article about technology was a bunch of gumps wondering why we would ever need whatever tech the article was about.
It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel embarrassed for whoever posted it.
People think they are so high and mighty and have everything figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.
And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was fascinating. There is a lot of good management stuff in that document.
It would help if half the content on this site wasn't highly unethical lol. It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in. Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
Okay so now what effect are you having by making this ethical criticism? Are you changing the ethical outlook of the industry? Are you making a positive ethical impact?
> It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in.
I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
> Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
No I just do what everyone else does which is talk about tech elsewhere. I spent a lot of time over the last 15 years here so I'm sad that the place has changed, but at the end of the day I have several alternatives.
Moreover there's plenty of problems in the world out there. A few wars in progress, a genocide or two. My relatives spent the last few weeks in hiding because a government failed. MrBeast's engagement practices are probably the very lowest of my worries. If only HN comments could change the world...
> Are you changing the ethical outlook of the industry? Are you making a positive ethical impact?
I try pretty hard to only work on companies that have at least a neutral impact on society. Many of them have had an actively positive one.
> I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry.
It's a good thing I wasn't talking solely about hackernews then.
> I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
You either missed the point of the GP comment, or you think that it's entirely pointless to discuss important issues unless it's with people of prominence. Depressing if it's the latter, but given how you started your post, I'm leaning toward that interpretation. That's some kind of fucked up elitism right there.
Founders aren’t here, but all the workers are, and they’re overestimating HN’s prominence? Or are you overvaluing the position of founder. Like you’re on some Randian philosophy shit, or something.
Hey everyone, let's take a leaf out of this guys book and only mention ethical concerns if he deems them worthy - like wars for example. Anything lower than that isn't worth mentioning because it kills the vibes. Wonder if he'll see this as he doesn't use this site anymore and talks with the intellectual founder-boys elsewhere...
> Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is.
I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts. (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that when you see posts with that kind of social signaling, downvote and flag them.
The downvote is because these posts are always extremely uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.
The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread."
This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.
I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
Basically treats his own employees like his subscribers. "Stay tuned for the $1000 giveaway!". Have you never watched any of Mr Beast's videos?
The fact that you made it to his company is enough incentive for you to go through the onboarding document.
IME people are actually quite bad at thoroughly reading and absorbing onboarding material. Adding incentives so that they actually do it is probably pretty valuable.
Heck I’m not a subscriber to him and I read the whole document
I think there's at least some of the cliched HN behavior of "I read the title and used it as a prompt to write about my opinions on one of the nouns it contained".
I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.
If you think this is some genius business advice, find the nearest 20 year old marketing major on stimulants and your mind will be blown.
Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.
I really enjoyed the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about the Enron scandal for two reasons. The first and more obvious was that it was a deeper look into the systemic issues that led to the failures, which meant it was less "they did a fraud" and more about the way culture evolves at a company to the point that they did it.
Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
"History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here. Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my previous company had similar material (although likely far less controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on, which when read out of context or through the lens of a future scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.
We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been another way. We need to be better at actually learning from these things in a nuanced way.
> Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud. Wilfully and knowingly.
Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing genuinely bad things.
My read of the book was that at the beginning Enron was attempting to use M2M for their "Gas Bank" concept, and at that point it wasn't obvious that it was wrong, and it wasn't fraud either. We now don't accept M2M accounting for what they were using it for, but they were seemingly the first (or first to get noticed?) to use it in the way they did and if things worked out differently maybe it would have stuck. In this way I think it's a bit of a case of "history is written by the victor".
By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud, particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not working, but I don't think this was the only possible outcome.
Nuance is hard and everyone just wants a quick hit. Especially in these modern days of zero attention span.
I read the blog post and I found it interesting. It's something I will file under "interesting" and over time with many other things informs how I think about the topic of building successful businesses and teams. It's something I've been thinking and doing (more on the teams side, less on the business) for a while. It's not something that you just read a blog about and then go do what that blog post says. This is true of technical topics as well. If life was as easy as just do what this other (successful) guy/company does or thinks (in whatever discipline or on whatever topic) then we'd all be immensely successful at everything. It's true that success and failures should feed into building our intuition of what works and what doesn't but intuition is built over a lot of experiences.
That is a pretty interesting and accurate take. There is absolutely a ton of new innovative accounting going on still today. When / If these companies fail due to market conditions some of these accounting practices will most certainly be labeled as fraud. The takeaway from the Enron tale for the remaining firms wasn't we should stop finding new ways to increase revenue and decrease liabilities it was that we need to hire more teams to write white papers explaining why what we are doing isn't fraud.
> mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.
This is the point of the original comment, you have failed to engage in the actual material and have instead just concluded a binary position of "bad".
Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.
> where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
It's really not that hard. If they sincerely thought they were doing something legal they would have sat back and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-Shredder 2400™ in a panic and started feeding it what, for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to call "evidence".
That's a line, crossed pretty definitively.
Cockroaches.
Again, you're failing to engage with the comments here in exactly the way that the comments were complaining about. Your insights are factually incorrect and your comments say more about you than they do about Enron.
The Enron scandal took place over nearly a 10 year period. The company was weird but likely not illegal for probably half that, most of even senior leadership appeared to be in the dark about the actual fraud (willingly or otherwise) until probably a few years left. They only started shredding evidence with weeks left. This is a 20k person company, no matter how you slice it that many people aren't committing a large conspiracy together and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
I think this style of meta commentary is more damaging to any discourse than the behavior that you're saying you've identified. Looking over the top comments, other than yours, I see a good majority of people honestly trying to engage with the content. I'm not exactly sure where you're seeing a "ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude", but it seems to me that your own post typifies such a description more than the rest of the discussion here.
I would refute this point but my opinion is actually too based and even scares me.
I think OP is saying:
* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.
* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
Most people find it incredibly annoying when somebody they don't like makes a good point. Often they would rather reject the good point to avoid agreeing with the despicable author if it. They value long-term group identity / loyalty higher than any particular good point [1].
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...
I think using the example of Nazi research weakens greatly the point you’re trying to make.
Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...
Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
Exactly, exactly, people feel it very uncomfortable to lean on results of Nazi researchers, no matter what objective scientific truth this research may have uncovered. It's like "objective" and "scientific" wane and disappear, because "Nazi" and "truth" are utterly incompatible in the post-war Western culture. We're lucky Nazi-tainted scientists did not discover something fundamental.
Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.
I think it’s basically “HN is extremely hostile to iconoclastic ideas”
How about even more basic "HN is arrogant."
Bonus points for a self-referential comment! :-]
Reminder to look at the twitter user "shithnsays"
They're talking about Bayesian priors. Basically prior assumptions about the likelihood of a subject.
It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.
I also do not understand what you’re trying to get at with “internalized probabilities” etc. I understand the importance of this sort of jargon to the ‘ratsphere’ and all that (https://www.reddit.com/r/sgiwhistleblowers/s/nLaIGJbWAI), but that doesn’t make it any more intelligible to me. I guess that isn’t the point.
The goal is to update beliefs in all areas when they change in one spot.
As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.
Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).
Maybe it's exactly the wide support for irrational but mainstream views is what concerns the author. I mean, that's what you'd expect from a conversation in a random bar, but maybe HN used to be somehow different.
I've been here for awhile, and my take is that HN both now and in the past has an unusually high signal to noise ratio, which does not mean it has little noise. It's just that noise is the default state.
GP's post is also the top voted post, and most of it is complaining about downvotes and criticism which don't exist yet on his hypothetically valuable summary. If there's anything distressing about HN culture, it's this being an acceptable comment type period.
Agreed. This sort of posting is against the HN community guidelines:
- don’t sneer at the rest of the community
- don’t comment about the upvoting of comments
- don’t say hacker news is turning into Reddit (not explicitly the case here, but similar in spirit)
Yeah, some responses will be less thoughtful than others, but that’s what voting is for.
What, contrarianism is to conform to HNs cynical attitude, and the mainstream response is to criticize that attitude?
I've never seen a Mr. Beast video prior to reading this. I thought there was some interesting stuff in it (I have a recent professional interest in video stuff, though let me reassure everyone I don't plan to show up in any), some standard-issue "trying to keep a founding team culture going" stuff, and some stuff that read like self-gratification. I didn't write the PDF off. It's worth filing away. I'd be interested in your takeaways.
I did go watch a couple Mr. Beast videos. I can see why people knee-jerk about them here. They are just not my cup of tea, and they're not in a way that really rubs me the wrong way. That's OK! I can be convinced that's just a "me" thing! It doesn't matter; I'm not building too much of "don't like Mr. Beast" into my identity.
I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject? I get the frustration with superficial negativity crowding out discussions though.
> I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject?
I don't think it's just the fact that his videos are expensive click bait where he throws money around... it's the fact that he has some very shady, borderline illegal(maybe actually illegal?) practices. the livestream marketing the chocolate to children to win entries into giveaways that he then scrubs from the internet are probably not legal is one example. there are a few videos on how scummy he is. I think the visceral reaction to him as some kind of genius is warranted.
that said the pdf has some nuggets of wisdom even if it's from a tainted source.
I'm sure there are management lessons to be learnt from the Mafia ;) There are other tech companies the skirt things like regulatory and other borders.
I'm not a fan of Mr. Beast but it's quite a phenomena and human nature being something universal I'm sure there are some interesting nuggets from how that business is run.
I also don't get or watch reality shows from more traditional media.
I think there's plenty to learn from it, but there's two big problems when applying his approach in a more generalized way:
a) The youtube market is not like other markets, his strategy is successful because (among many things) the youtube algorithm promotes frequent posting. He knows youtube very well, but it's clear from his other business ventures that he's not good in other markets. I don't think you can translate ALL the stuff there into other markets.
b) There's a lot of unhealthy stuff mixed in with the parts that seem like they drive his success. If somebody does X, Y and Z and gets insane levels of success, they may not realize that it's X and Y driving the success, and Z is actively harmful. But I guess it depends on what you consider "harmful" - some might think "harmful" means "hurts the bottom line" and some might think "hurts those lowest on the rung". Either one of those might be true. It's like people who think being an asshole like early Steve Jobs is the way to be a successful leader, when he arguably achieved more lasting impact when he mellowed out.
With that context, I think some of the critiques you mention have substance.
"He's making low value content" -> I think this is true, because he's optimized for the market he's in. I think it's a legit critique that this strategies may not be sustainable or applicable to "high value content". He even expressly says this: "Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible."
"the culture of the company is horrible" -> I absolutely think this is worth talking about, and I find it hard to see building a long term company on his approach. The myth that you need to push people to breaking points to be successful is poison.
"he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill" -> Well anyone saying that is just wrong. He obviously is very good at what he does.
Personally, I don't think it's a good long term business strategy to depend so much on a single larger company, one who has a history of changing the algorithm without warning or explanation. But it's a good, but painful, short term strategy, and he will come out of it perfectly fine whenever he suddenly becomes irrelevant. But there are others who won't/haven't come out with much, and I think it's good to have a discussion if this is right or not.
But there are good things there, the critical components, the importance of communication. The direct feedback of "You are my bottleneck" is good, but it easily could turn into passive aggression and ways to pass the buck. I'm sure there's plenty of low quality comments here, but don't just write off all criticism as virtue signalling or whatever. There are def lessons in here, but that doesn't mean it's all above questioning.
It's true that having to push people to the breaking point is poison. However, there's the other, not poisonous side of the coin: Communication costs will kill your productivity, and communication degrades far faster than linearly as you add people.
So we don't want to break people, but adding one more person makes the company worse. So a very successful company is probably going to push people very hard, because otherwise communication costs eat it alive. I've been in way too many companies that got way worse over time, just because the headcount increases ruined productivity.
Well instead of posting what you wrote you posted this complaint, which just contributes to this vibe. You have the right to vent of course.
If you post something interesting people will read it! Sour grapes comments are kinda boring, and complaints about sour grape comments are also kinda boring.
If you don’t want certain kinds of conversations in a community, one of the best things to do is to “crowd that out” by just offering positive alternatives, with interesting posts.
I have a lot of social complaints about finance, but still love reading about it. Cuz it’s interesting in the abstract!
> He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill.
Does this guy know his business? Oh, hell, yes. He clearly knows his business cold. Success always has a significant chunk of luck, but skill is a part of luck, and he clearly demonstrates that skill.
However, just because someone really knows their business and does well at it does not mean we simply give them a complete pass. For example, payday lenders know their business very well yet we still consider them to be exploitative and parasitic.
This guy is super-specializing in explicitly targeting pretty much mostly teenaged males with purely dopamine hit content with very little benefit (if any and possibly a negative effect) to the audience. He is pushing the video equivalent of junk food to an audience with weak, underdeveloped impulse control.
This is going to get pushback, and it absolutely deserves that pushback.
> excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
Which priors should I reexamine? The fact that he is effectively targeting adolescent males? The fact that YouTube is all consumed with feeding the ad machine and should be forced out of Google? The fact that social media has turned out to be a pox upon our society?
You're not alone. Lately, I've found myself skimming towards the middle/bottom of comments due to this observation. I suppose the more normalized it becomes, the more people feel encouraged to continue writing with this attitude.
> confronting to a consensus worldview
There's a bit of missed irony here that you decrying the 'sour grapes' crowd with 'sour grapes' of your own, and yourself have been upvoted to the top. I do agree this culture of indulged victimhood is really dragging internet discourse down, but you surely can see your own complicity in it?
One thing that woud help real people deal with internet comments and content is switching from a binary "true" vs "false" dichotomy, eg "this is good", "this is false", etc. That is, everything must be stamped with some version of a binary label.
Instead, a trinary should be used, so among true and false, you can have undefined. Or, more importantly for value judgements, "it doesnt matter".
And of course, like things in javasvript, everything should probably just live as undefined, and there should be plenty of guardrails before choosing the other states.
You’re not engaging with the linked content either, you just picked this thread to pose a general complaint about conversations on HN.
Be the change you want to see! Post your thoughts on the Mr Beast doc as a reply to your first comment and see how it goes.
You are absolutely right that a large % of people, when confronted with evidence of the kind of obsessive focus required for unusual success, have mental antibodies activated which reject the message, to preserve their ego and sense of self-worth.
Don't dismiss the entire community because of the loud people and their upvoters though. There are other people here, and they don't necessarily browse HN at a high enough frequency to outvote or outcomment the majority.
(I personally think the document is very good, on-point, and great advice for ambitious young people. I'm no longer that young any more, and I'm also aware of a different side: when you push really hard, you can end up burning out. That's the other side of the intensity the document advocates. You can burn out. It's the single biggest reason I don't push so hard these days.)
I think I've been reading this same kind of critique of HN for over 10 years now. And I'm hedging here, I originally wrote over 15 years, but realized that my memory of 2009 might not be that good. But either way, a long time!
That doesn't mean the criticism is false. But it's always weird to me when I see it put forward as a new thing.
What changed your worldview? It was a fine read but it mostly boiled down to project management basics, some format optimizations, and some storytelling basics.
I thought it was an interesting behind the scenes look at how seriously they take their “art” but nothing world changing. Which part of the article did that for you?
> What changed your worldview
They’re not saying it changed their worldview. Their point is that if a person is just immediately nitpicking it and dismissing it, then there’s probably something in it that can change their worldview. That person’s project management and storytelling skills probably suck (because most people’s project management and storytelling skills suck).
The way I understand this is that now HN commentators are filled with what Nietzche would call the “last-men” who have “last-men” values while in the past it was not as widespread. Another site filled with such people is Reddit, where I stopped bothering to comment anymore as it is far more dominated by people in this category than HN.
Yes, it is exhausting to read through those comments, more exhausting to argue against them. Not sure if it is worth it anymore, this is probably not a tide that can be stopped. But HN is still one of the few sites that is not wholly dominated by last men, and you can find thoughtful comments that broaden your perspective occasionally. Enjoy it while it lasts!
What a stupid meme. "The last men" is most closely seen in that movie Wall-E, with the humans who are on that spaceship.
HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous than he ever was in their own eras.
It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all of the garbage from the french post-modern neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks. You are the thing you hate.
Most of it strikes me as toxic, largely only applicable to YT, with a few soiled gems mixed in there.
What are your takeaways?
Thoughts on Tate's Hustlers' University?
I'd personally love to hear your views and thoughts. Either about this subject or in general. You seem very thoughtful and self-aware, which is always a positive thing. Don't let the naysayers get to ya....^^
I can tell everyone here has something in mind that they're all talking about, but don't want to say specifically what it is. I definitely agree that if you make any sort of substantial post, you're going to get a million low effort replies nitpicking small details. If you try to respond to all of them, you'll either run out of posts or lose your mind. Most of the time people just pick one small detail, post something completely incorrect or unrelated, and move onto the next headline post to respond to.
> But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN
I’ve recently noticed it everywhere. Not just on HN.
Could you elaborate on the takeaways that challenge existing priors ?
The points in the OP boil down to:
* Focus on your product
* Hire well
* Be extra diligent towards bottlenecks
* State your metrics clearly
* Communicate often and immediately
________
These are standard guidelines for running businesses. HN commenters are unimpressed because there are no novel generalizable takeaways from his document.
For a few years, Adam Sandler was producing low-brow schlock that made 100s of millions in the box office. It was effective. It's not clear if there was a takeaway
________
There is 1 takeaway from Mr. Beast that appears generalizable.
Sometimes, for a short duration, you hit gold. During that time, obsessively extract all value you can. Merch, videos, exploitation, what have you. For a solid minute, you're Midas. So touch as many things as you can. Be shameless beyond recognition.
Too often, businesses see their hockey-stick moment as a sign of long term sustainable growth. That's a lie (in expectation). A moment is all it is. Wring out your business for every dollar you can extract, liquidate as much as you can, and bail before you're past the crest of the wave.
I'm confident that Mr. Beast's Youtube stardom will die in a few years. But, he will leave behind a legacy of obsessive extraction that is unlikely to be matched for quite some time.
For the "sour grapes" metaphor to work the grapes need to be desired at first.
This isn't the case here. Most people do not want to be rich at any cost. I might feel some jealousy about Microsoft or wolfram.com, but not about a YouTuber whose massive team produces bland addictive videos, especially if YouTube is full of good videos if you know where to look.
What concepts did you feel were new here that aren't beaten to death in standard entrepreneur/hustle porn?
I tried scouring this document for anything novel or insightful and couldn't find anything. Just a lot of spelling errors and run on paragraphs.
You are wrong to think public debates are here to reach an understanding between the debaters. Whining that nobody submits to you in a fight is ridiculous: fight, show us your genius, and don't come crying to mommy if we fight back.
Your goal is to convince the audience, not your opponents.
nobody's actually paying attention, so your goal is really to fight with people online because that's what it takes to get your blood pumping.
HN comment quality has been degrading for a while, I’m no longer that active here because of it (unfortunately). X is a better source in most cases now (if you choose well and only use the following tab).
> 750+ words of my takeaways <...> I briefly considered also posting to share with the community
I'm not going to beg you to share it after all, but just letting you know: if you would, I'd read it.
Same
People on HN need to think about how wrong others can be about topics they are knowledgable about, then consider that they might be that person in topics they don't know much about
> excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
Not being funny, how often is this the answer:
I didn't have one prior, I'm being told what to think by "smart people" online and I make my identity alignment with them. I'm empty and can't think of anything on my own, so when I read something, I add it to a memory bank to bring up later in life in conversation with others to come across as "knowing a little bit about everything"
I’ve noticed this a lot too. It happens across multiple topics, and if you present a well-thought-out counterpoint or idea, it often gets dismissed. As for his content, I don’t watch it and don’t have an opinion on it, but the document itself was engaging and well-written. It’s unfortunate that the focus has shifted entirely to the content he produces.
Hating on "nitpicking" is the funniest thing to me. It's a bold admission that one has abandoned attention to detail. Huge red flag.
Yes, correction of a detail is good and not a problem. But using that to mock the central point is a popular strategy in discourse.
In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.
I wonder if this is meant to be ironic because this behavior is exactly what was being criticized. You just picked one specific detail to focus on and ignored everything else.
The anti nitpicking attitude is the core point of the parent commenter's post. I agree with sensible prioritization as exemplified in the linked article, as should everyone. But the author of the comment I'm responding to is expressing discomfort with a culture that identifies holes in their reasoning. They're so uncomfortable with having details of their arguments challenged that they aren't saying what they really want to say.
I know an "anti nitpicker" who is entirely opposite to that attitude when it comes to their social appearance and perception. One hair on their tie is catastrophic. One publicly searchable webpage that shows a decades old picture of them is an extreme problem that warrants hiring a company to clean up. It's interesting how, in matters that are important to some of these people, seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant details suddenly matter to an extraordinary degree.
The anti nitpicking stance is a byproduct of the extreme overvaluation of social perception. Often these people do not like to look like they have made a mistake. And thus they avoid conflict or paint it as irrelevant in belief that it will save their appearance.
No, a lot of people on this website value very highly their completely irrelevant nitpicks. I’m starting to think it’s just the kind of mind the tech industry attracts, because I’ve noticed it in some coworkers as well.
Really? I see that problem all the time at work.
There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest improvement.
I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make a difference?".
If you write everything as if you must put your name to it, and then do put your name to it, your writing becomes stronger, and those kind of contrarian-neuroses go away.
This account name is not my real name, but I have thought about making an HN account with my real name. Mostly I just try to spend less time on HN these days.
I agree. We have to raise our personal standards to raise our community standards. The nihilism here is a self fulfilling prophecy and sad to see.
Well I spent an entire week writing a 75000 word essay refuting his document that I shared with some select heads of state. No you can't see it, because of your attitude. Your attitude is really very bad. It's bad. Not good.
You really are condescending to us over Mr.Beast's management style right now. Hackernews is beyond parody.
One of the biggest (and most imitated) channels... on the biggest video-on-demand platform to ever exist... Yeah, not worth being "condescending" over.
Maybe as a case study for the structural failures of algorithmic feeds. Should founders really be looking at what looks like a toxic micromanagment culture for pearls of wisdom? Maybe I'm just a type C employee who needs to be excised rather than a type A who will pretend they're an owner.
N-gate died FAR too soon.
In case people aren’t aware of the “fraud” accusations mentioned in this comment, here’s a video: https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
There are many more discussing all that has come out recently about that channel.
Let's not indite just HN here. It's more the world is the same and this is just an extension of the internet norms.
Think toxic game forums. They used to be nice and a good place, but now? It's a hot mess and everyone who wants proper discourse already self selected out.
I have a hypothesis, that once a thread has more than N comments, a sub-comment under the top comment is more likely to stay close to the top of the page, than the same thought expressed in its own top comment. And certainly more likely to be seen than any new thread.
Or, people are just more likely to see something closer to the top, that inspires them to comment.
Therefore, the top comment in a top page thread is itself a natural comment magnet.
I don't know of an antidote to this, except that I try not to do it myself. And wary of the possibility of a pot-kettle situation here.
> I don't know of an antidote to this
Display comments in random order. Then it becomes possible to add a top level comment and have it not disappear forever into the bottom of the page, forever unseen.
Alternatively, comment as quickly as possible. Ideally, be the first person to comment. Just comment your general thoughts and then fill in everything you wanted to say over a series of edits while simultaneously improving the comment's logic, grammar and spelling. This one goes all the way back to stackoverflow. It's a habit I have never been able to shake to this day because of how active I used to be on that site. Probably contributed to my account getting rate limited here.
> One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
In as far as this is a document that says 'do your best, give 110% 25/8, sacrifice everything for the company', most of what I'm seeing here is the same general approval that latter-day HN gives all impractical advice that a very young person might come up with. ('Just do gooderer, all the time!')
I don't think the change is that people now are now closed-minded, I think it's more that something like Mr Beast's PDF of peppy twenty-something bromides simply wouldn't have made the front page at all in 2014. This would be over on Digg with the other pop-Internet stories.
More broadly, given that the comment section appears around 60-70% positive for Mr Beast, I'm unsure what it is you're actually after. Would you prefer it be 100% positive? Wouldn't that be a huge loss for the intellectual diversity that this site has to offer? Aren't there other, better places for hive takes (e.g. Reddit)?
Respectfully, I think the takes you're taking issue with are precisely the remnants of the old, diverse HN, and the takes you're tacitly encouraging are the monoculture that's taken over the rest of the Internet.
It's the weekend on HN, different crowd, often very negative and comments that imho are more akin to reddit quality.
I try and remember to not HN at the weekend, obviously forget sometimes. I tend to find sticking to Ask HN is better at the weekend.
So true man, the best part of this site are the positive and thoughtful folks. It's pretty easy to be negative and find flaws in things, it's more difficult and constructive to find the positive and try to learn.
There's positive thoughtfulness, critical thoughtfulness, and knee-jerk reactions of both kind as well.
At least personally I appreciate both kinds of thoughtful comments, and it's what's keeping me coming back here. Equating valid criticism with "negativity" on the other hand honestly seems pretty toxic/cultish to me.
I kind of agree. “sour grapes” is usually correct. But it’s also usually the least productive when we’re here just talking, not doing.
Is this linked pdf an example of something “confronting the worldview consensus”? Or the comments here?
Not a rhetorical question; confused.
No one is going to be happy about what I'm about to point out, but reap what you sow HN. This is directly and fully as a result of 1. the current (terrible) set of rules and 2. Dang being a moderator (and this communities unending fawning over his moderation)
Fix both of these, and HN would have far fewer issues related to what you are describing.
All other explanations of this phenomenon which don't talk about the above two are not even close to on point.
Which HN discussion guidelines would you change (add, remove, modify), and what about dang's moderation gives you concern?
Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything has been turned only into profit maximization?
And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've very often tried to have patience to explain in depth where my opinions come from. My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial (as I actually did a long time ago), and then being met by responses like "he's obviously doing something right to get all those views and he's promoting altruism", responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was.
If think if we really are supposed to improve the quality of discussions, asking more questions should be common when we fundamentally disagree so much. On fundamental disagreements, either the other party is stupid/naive/uninformed or they have fundamentally different principles that we might not understand, and without which a response is just flaming.
Later edit: I actually think the document by Mr Beast is exceptionally well written, and most startups could apply the main lessons from it. I still think his output is extremely antisocial.
> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world
I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is describing are people who have very little knowledge of the topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on some narrative that appeals to their bias.
The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct comparison. Ex: Sure, [insert person or company] is successful, but it's because they prey on [insert moral failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!
So the only reason somebody might criticize somebody/something is... jealousy?
Can you really not think of any powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given the opportunity?
I'm not saying the root of all criticism is jealousy. Obviously there's legitimate utilitarian value judgements to be made on any particular human activity.
However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
That's a bit tautological: in any popular forum, there are going to be "a lot of people pretending they are making 'highly rational' value assessments" — or really, doing anything at all.
HN also has a lot of the "other" type (those who are rational but honest and objective), and the main distinction should be which of those dominate. And I'd argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their comments and upvotes/downvotes.
Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of person: someone who critically looks at most things, and is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with free and open source software or academia than from ever wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
Agreed that it’s definitely not everybody. But it feels like the “sour grapes” cohort is the fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all discussions that direction.
HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb masses!
You articulated this better than I would ever could. Yes, I absolutely agree. Many people here seem bitter or have an idealistic point of view (perhaps due to the bitterness?) that doesn't match the real world.
> Many people here seem bitter or have an idealistic point of view
It is the opposite of idealism to see the world as it is. Pragmatism is rooted in acknowledging both the good and bad.
Idealism is ignoring the bad in the name of "pragmatism". Maybe you have to ignore it for your Public Relations metrics, but not for your executive or engineering perspective(s).
> But it feels like the “sour grapes” cohort is the fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all discussions that direction.
> Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
I invite you to consider, based on your own wording, that you are doing more feeling than rationalizing. It is some work, and perhaps not completely possible, to do a comprehensive and correct meta analysis aiming to gauge the state of rational vs non-rational commentary on HN.
> bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable
The fact that the world is imperfect is not a reason to ignore that the world is imperfect. One must of course satisfy their Ego and make some peace with the world that is around them that it is in some sense "good", but the act of a rational mind, after it is done indulging the (necessary?) behaviors of the animal in which it resides, is to relentlessly nitpick, criticize, deconstruct the world around it, as far is it is possible, without feeling.
Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck about them. If one of them is the field in which you work, you may even resent the criticism. And yet, it is only by acknowledging what is wrong that we can build and do what is (more) right.
Perhaps what I will say, is that if HN is supposed to be a place of technical innovation, it is undeniably true that it is no longer possible to easily innovate, anymore. And if that is true, then there should some discussion of all the ways that what has been built now constrains/no longer makes possible the alternatives. That is not something you can change with a "happy go lucky attitude" or renouncing a cynical one. In fact, one can argue that "can do no harm" attitude is what has brought about this venture. Perhaps a slower, more considered approach, would have resulted in a better outcome.
>Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck about them.
I'm a long time reader, but only recently registered to post. I think this statement is quite illuminating to illustrate the point of the person you're responding to.
I actually didn't know HN existed until a colleague told me about it as a place to find a bit more optimism about technology than has become the norm on places like reddit. The overwhelming vibe on reddit is that capitalism bad, big tech bad, AI bad, etc. And I have definitely noticed this a lot more on HN in the last few years than when I first started reading.
I don't know why, and obviously it is just my anecdotal opinion, but it is how I feel, and I have seen many posters who feel the same.
Obviously we should all be open to different views, but sometimes I just want a little haven where I can read about technology and cool stuff alongside people who are mostly optimistic about that stuff, without having to be swamped by "end state capitalism" sentiment, like everywhere else. That's just what I want, I'm not making any moral judgement on what others want.
And some of us would still disagree: HN has, for a long time, been exactly the union between the overly optimistic technologist (tech founder) and a very critical engineer.
I mean, this is evident in posts by one of "model" founders, Paul Graham. Many of his posts are about how most are doing things wrong, only framed in a positive way (for success, do this instead of the usual things you've been doing).
So perhaps you came in attracted by one side, but stuck around for the arguments, even if unconsciously ;)
> And some of us would still disagree: HN has, for a long time, been exactly the union between the overly optimistic technologist (tech founder) and a very critical engineer.
Other's would know more than me, I'm just an anecdote.
All I can say is that I find many responses to be Pavlovian, not well thought out, overly negative or cynical, and in my humble opinion just part of a low effort zeitgeist against capitalism.
I think that when people are jealous of others, they cloak this motivation.
To give an example with interpersonal relationships- never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all the time.
I never went through a phase of admiring Steve Jobs, and to me the word "hacker" still has connotations of alleviating oppression. This post amounts to "you're just jealous!" - a total cop-out given the myriad ways this website and the people on it are /making the world worse/.
>The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is well known for being very anti-HN). <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826280>
I never intended to be the next Steve Jobs, I just expected that my dedication to learning and building useful skills would be rewarded in some sense. Things aren't that simple, of course.
Why did you expect that? Why would someone reward your personal choice in dedication?
Many people expect ""rewards"" in the form of making a living, having a stable salary, maybe supporting a family. Why would someone reward a personal choice in dedication? Usually because it's useful to them, economically.
I had a much more utopian and somewhat deluded outlook growing up. It was based on the things adults told me, e.g. at school, in the boy scouts, and elsewhere, or absorbed from fiction with a utopian outlook like Star Trek TNG. I think there's an impulse to shelter kids and instill hope in them which can foster a blindness to the dog-eat-dog ugliness of the world.
Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out!
I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.
A reward does not need to come from “someone”, and usually doesn’t.
You should expect reward from dedication because you’ll get it. Not from some god on high or some random person called Tyler Smith. It’s from yourself or the fruits of your labor.
The HN community is way more diverse than that, though you're probably spot on for a slice of the community. At least in my experience they are nowhere near the majority.
This has to be one of the most thoughtless comments I've read on the thread. You don't know about the lives of other commentors but are happy to make huge generalizations about them and in the process commit the same thinking error that you're accusing them of making. Do you not see the irony in that?
I love it when the community psychoanalyzes itself
I think that this may apply to some people but as a blanket statement it feels incorrect because there are tons of counterexamples.
Plenty of very successful people that I know personally think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news.
Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals that I do respect.
I've seen what you describe often, people that are simply bitter and spew hate. But does jealousy and bitterness invalidate their point of view?
I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still generating revenue and still alive but practically failures for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of business model and distribution, all the classics. The second one I think should have been much more successful were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach this conclusion.
I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and unfair?
Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most success stories in the startup world have no more merit than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings to exist?
It's on you to figure out how the world actually works instead of taking the words of people who fell into riches for gospel truth. It's a hard lesson to learn, especially if you have to pay the price of watching your startups fail despite your best efforts. Sour grapes and bitterness is how people react when they discover, years too late, that they badly misplayed their cards. The anger is then directed at the injustice of the system when in reality what held people back was not that the game is somewhat rigged but a failure to understand the actual rules.
Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos creation, specifically designed to draw attention away from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR narrative and hilariously distorted.
Sure, put the blame on the individual instead of acknowledging that the lies we were fed in our youth held us back.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
-Theo
>I would argue the opposite…
Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being Steve Jobs.
We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from extensive exposure.
Right, a challenge with an artifact like this is that the writing is good. And it's a lengthy read. The early commenters almost by definition haven't read it and can only comment about their opinions on the creative output of Mr Beast
As someone who has assiduously avoided watching his videos (because of this opinion), I was impressed by the document because it is incredibly practical. The advice about communication, managing critical components and bottlenecks - very very good.
Of course he is singlemindedly focused on building a massive YouTube channel. In the employee handbook it does not say: we treat you well and do the most ethical thing
It says: come here and work hard, we will make a big YouTube channel. (Not: a YouTube channel that is good for society!! Just big!!)
> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything has been turned only into profit maximization?
I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the word "understanding"), but an opinion.
There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that "everything has been turned only into profit maximization". It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview, an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree, very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with little empirical basis.
As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing them at every turn is boring, and against the purpose of HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate for HN:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm of generic tangents and internet tropes.
There's a place for activism, but it's not here.
> And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
I agree with you on this but I don't think it's a failure. I think people just get tired after a while. They get tired, and then they start displaying their disapproval in ways that require less work.
It's just easier than typing out all those words and being ignored.
> My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial and then being met by responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was
It's really tiresome.
At some point you start to realize that you have fundamentally different values than the people you're trying to discuss things with, that these values are irreconcilable and that further argument will just make people hate you instead of convincing them.
This isn't really about "sour grapes", we have moral objections to what others are doing, and there's no point in trying to have those arguments with people who do those things for a paycheck.
No chance it comes from understanding the world, it is an unfortunate social effect where attacking is much easier than defending. It is particularly apparent in politics where it has to be at least an order of magnitude easier to attack an opposing candidate for their weaknesses rather than defend a friendly candidate for some minor flaw.
And there isn't anything wrong with profit maximisation; we use profits to make decisions about resource allocation. That matters a lot, small inefficiencies leading to waste magnified over the entire economy represent huge damage to the people scraping by on the margins.
What did you think was well written about it? Did it provide any useful or unique insights? The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
> What did you think was well written about it?
I think it was well written because you could clearly hear his voice through the writing and empathize with his internal struggle with being in a position of authority while also feeling unqualified for the job.
> Did it provide any useful or unique insights?
As someone who has been very frustrated in the past by my perception of the inefficiency of communicating "up and over" instead of talking laterally to an engineer on another team, I thought he succinctly communicated why it's often necessary and helped me understand the value of that practice.
> The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
Orthography is only one aspect what makes writing good or bad. And a relatively less relevant one IMO.
>you could clearly hear his voice through the writing
That's certainly true. I'm surprised there wasn't an embedded provocative thumbnail for the document at the very top.
The phrase "other party is stupid" really stood out to me, and it perfectly illustrates the problem I see. Instead of recognizing that people might have fundamentally different principles, upbringing, culture, or simply not be fully informed on a topic, the first conclusion you jump to is that they are stupid.
Have you read the entire sentence that was from? It listed pretty much what you said as an option until more information is gathered. Sometimes even people's culture/principles keeps them from seeing the truth.
I honestly don't know what you mean here, I hope you can clarify.
Please share what you wrote, lots of people might value it despite all the naysayers.
What I find even more tedious is the viewpoint that imagines itself "confronting to a consensus worldview" while echoing mainline meritocratic commercialism.
Shades of "What You Can't Say"[0].
0. https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Is it just me or is the way you construct sentences jarring and hard to read? Not sure if it's my dyslexia but I had trouble deciphering the first couple of paragraphs/word jumbles.
+1 I read the whole comment and still have no idea what point they’re making or even what side they’re on.
To the grandparent: if you put in the effort to make yourself more clear, you might get the quality responses you wish for.
No you're not alone but I didn't realize it until you said it. And I am not dyslexic.
Is this meta-meta commentary? I genuinely don’t know but if so I salute you.
Haha yeah. I just found those no-period, scattered paragraphs personally hard to read and take in.
You're spot on; every paragraph is one sentence, except for one paragraph that is two sentences.
Read the second paragraph as if it's paraphrasing the people he's pointing at in the first paragraph.
I found it quite clear. But then I agreed with it.
It's not you. The entire comment is a disorganized mess of poorly thought out and non-cohesive grammar.
In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by writing about critiques, in which he appears to have immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview", which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for it to make sense as he likely intended.
Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression of erudition, compared to the people he believes he communicating down to.
"The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that."
Personalized to doesn't mean focused on; it means subjective and relative to the critic.
The "social purpose of the critiques is universal" is saying that, in opposition to the disparate and varied, personalized, nature of the specific critiques, their social purpose is all the same.
This universal purpose is saying "I felt uncomfortable ... might have to re-evaluate world view ... I'll upvote all the detractors".
> elevated personal impression of erudition
This is ironic, I have to say.
Anyhow, I found it easy to read the comment. It does flow a bit like stream of consciousness, but it's comprehensible, probably in part because I agree with a good amount of it. You shouldn't expect polished prose in comment forums on the interwebs.
If you felt that it talked down to you (personalized), then perhaps evaluate the social purpose of your own comment (did you feel uncomfortable? I got the impression you did).
Why "personalized to" doesn't work is because that line is referencing the text, not the author. If he would have preferred to have used "personalized to" he could have done so, as long as the subject in that line was changed to the author. Your interpretation of the universal social purpose line is creative and more intelligible than the referenced comment, but whatever the intended meaning may have been, it was not immediately clear.
As to your second to last comment, I wouldn't have even mentioned it had the other commenter not mentioned how they found the prose jarring. To your question in your final line, I didn't say that I felt I was being talked down to, I said that the author seemed like he thought he was talking down to an audience below him, such as with his line where he mentions his startup friends whom he shared his text with, but wouldn't share the same with HN.
No, this person/LLM model indeed writes way too long sentences.
Stop reading crp on the internet and get back to work, "founder"
I credit HN for being the unofficial hangout for nerd snipers
Nietzsche called it 'Ressentiment'
Absolutely, some days I could be convinced that people would fight back with me saying "water is wet".
When you see those really great things here it does restore some faith in the place but they are getting further apart all the time. A real shame.
It’s just system justification bias
Please do share your thoughts. It seems a shame to let nitpickers ruin the community for others.
I’m fairly certain most of the “sour grapes” comments are AI generated
"and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings"
Meh, just write it well and share, then ignore the feedback. You should really only listen to feedback from smart people that you trust anyway. But I understand your position.
Strongly agree.
He constantly runs illegal lotteries and lies to kids. What is so complex and insightful about your understanding of this situation that you have to hide it in the group chat? Companies like uber and lyft constantly ride the line of illegality and that's how they're able to turn profits.
tldr it's not that deep bro, business people are shady and draw ire mostly thanks to decades of business people being shady and drawing ire.
Um well, Mr. Beast IS a fraud (do a casual search), the content is crass, exploitative, and it's perfectly reasonable to critique a person when they have a personalized brand.
This is no different than what's done in ANY entertainment media contract negotiation that takes place with "on-air talent".
I realize this is semantics but he’s not a fraud, because he delivers on the things he says. If he didn’t spend 48 hours (or however long) underground that would make him a fraud, but he did. The content might be of dubious quality, but it’s not fraudulent
I see you haven't done even a casual search.
Here's a video titled "$1 vs $10,000,000 Job!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdjh81uH6FU). He then proceeds to look at a number of jobs, with a job that make basically no money ranging to an NFL player. It's clickbaity, there are a lot of easy jokes in the episode, but there's nothing fraudulent. He's not lying about anyone's salary, he pays people out in shows where they make money, and nobody is being scammed. All of his videos are like this. I'm not saying you have to like him, but fraud describes something very specific which he is not doing.
I'm sure there's some disgruntled employee complaining somewhere, but I have not seen any legitimate complaints about him. All those "Mr Beast is a fraud!?!" videos have no substance, and are just people using his name for views.
Search harder--maybe even do a few string literals. I know you can do it.
See https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
It alleges that many of the “contests” are staged and artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws around such games. I think to many that might feel like fraud.
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"my summary"
The poor grammar drives me crazy. I get that I am not the target employee, but if I walked in to a job and was handed that on my first day I'd walk right out based on presentation alone.
It is at least self-aware on that front: the first page says “Sorry in advance for all the run on sentences and grammar issues, I’m a youtuber not an author haha.”
He’s also rich and could easily afford a one-time editor. Heck, I’m sure one of the devoted employees would offer to improve it for free.
I imagine writing like this is a deliberate part of both his personal brand and the company culture he is trying to create.
MrBeast videos do not get better if everyone uses perfect spelling and grammar. They get better if people figure out and then execute kind of crass but extravagant “wow” moments.
If it’s deliberate there’s no reason to apologise and follow up with an excuse. Unless you’re trying to shield yourself from criticism you know you deserve and could avoid. That would be dishonest so I’m not going to speculate.
Of course there is a reason. It is part of the act and the meta-culture.
I'm not saying I like Mr Beast or this document, but it seems extremely obvious to me that this document is the way it is very intentionally.
The specific sentence offers relatability and a (perceived) degree of honesty. Stating the obvious isn't always bad — it often builds empathy and connections.
In my opinion, he is not at all trying to shield himself from criticism, he is building a connection with the reader.
We are not machines.
He'd still have to work with the editor and review the results; that's at least a couple hours of work. This has a substantially lower EV than managing, networking, producing videos, etc. I'd make the same call.
That shows a total lack of self respect in my opinion. You don't have to be an author to put even the tiniest effort into your writing in a professional letter like that.
Modern culture is very big on self deprecation and not having respect for the tiny details. If you don't hold yourself to standards, you can avoid people dragging you when you fail to live up to them. Better to say "I'm not an author ha ha" and have writing full of flaws, knowing the only people that are going to give you grief about it are people that "take it too seriously", then to try and present a well edited and highly professional piece of text and have a mistake missed in editing become the focal point of a bunch of pedants who want to tear you down for being high and mighty. It's a balancing act to be sure, but that's the current side of the spectrum the culture trends are on.
Know your audience. This seems an intentional affectation.
Like a dude who puts in an hour of work to nail the "just rolled out of bed" look. Whether its a good or bad idea is debatable, but either way its not due to lack of effort.
> professional letter
Define "professional letter". "Chicago manual of style" professional letter or some other, less professional styleguide? Because if it isn't written using the proper styleguide... I'm walking out that door before the first hour on the clock.
And you're exactly who they are looking to move elsewhere. They are looking for people who want to make youtube videos. No faff about over font and comma placement.
what additional useful information about running a youtube production company would you have learned from the document if it had better grammar?
The purpose of the company is to produce youtube videos not professionally written internal memos. In fact one might say that this is the core message of the document.
I see a lot of hating on mr beast for being so mechanical in driving views but blame the game, not the player
Doesn't excuse knowingly encouraging kids to gamble and covering for SA, or selling unhealthy chocolate bars to kids under the guise of health food.
This reminds me of how every corporation I've ever seen operates. Why is this strange or interesting?
Other corporations seriously have employee handbooks with sentences like this in?
“… instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.”
They identified something their customers (viewers) like and the competition can't provide, and play to that unique strength. That's pretty standard, they just give an example instead of obfuscating the principle in management speak.
With some rewording this would be perfect for the USP slide of an investor deck
They do, but usually you'll find it worded something like "Deliver high value, seamless and synerginized entertainment that frontalizes our strengths and inspires diverse modalities of consumer satisfaction"
This guy "corporates"... today you win at "buzzword bingo"!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo
The valve handbook is an interesting read as well, it's very different, but in a way very similar.
Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmplo...
The bulk of content on Youtube today is some stock video footage, an AI-generated script read by a computer voice. Maybe a human spends a few minutes cutting together the video footage? But almost entirely automated spam designed to feed Youtube some pink slime and rake in the $.
Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.