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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
> 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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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"
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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 :)
> 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.
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
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).
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”
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.
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.
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.
Sorry I missed this - but here's the belated but simple answer: I posted both manually, but took care to make them say the exact same thing to make it clear that I wasn't taking one person's side over the other.
I only do that in cases where it's appropriate (e.g. where both people were breaking the site guidelines to approximately the same degree), but in such cases it's convenient because it cuts out the "why me? what about the other person?" complaints which otherwise tend to be common.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.)
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 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.
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.
> 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).
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
(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)
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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. 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.
> 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”
Your example about 911 highlights how mismanaged this whole operation is and how bad any advice there is.
In an emergency situation you single out random person precisely because there are no set processes who should be doing that, so you create responsibility impromptu.
In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers. Having to constantly prod counterparty in another team signals totally broken and/or inexistent project management. It fits a lean startup where everyone is responsible for everything and everything is a fire you distinguish right there and move on. It does not fit organization where exponential growth of communication channels means communication becomes the bottleneck.
> In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers.
That's what the document was about though. The audience of the document is quite clearly people who will be given the responsibility to deliver a video or product. It's quite literally communicating to them the exact concept you're pointing out here, that you need to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And what's being conveyed is that there isn't a single "one size fits all" responsibility chain. You can't just throw a request over the wall and assume and hope someone on the other side of that wall will come through for you. Most of this document is quite clearly "project management 101". If you're hiring people for a business that is largely centered around having multiple one shot projects in flight at any given time, "project management 101" is exactly the sort of document you want to be handing to new hires. It might be obvious to you, but spend time in any large organization and you quickly come across people for whom taking ownership and responsibility for something and what that entails isn't obvious. Heck I see this on software development teams all the time, where PR requests get thrown "over the wall" at the whole team and the turn around time is delayed as people assume someone else will get to it before they will and forget about it. Most teams I've worked on eventually land on some sort of interrupt or direct assignment system for PRs for exactly this reason, because you need to assign clear responsibility in order to get results turned around faster.
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.
While I understand the concept of A, B and C employees to the employer from the PoV of the employee there is also management attrition and lack of incentives.
This concept of A, B and C employees is just ordinary dose of propaganda. A is a salaried employee who is expected to put in extra time and effort as if their livelihood depends on the success of the company, whereas type C employees poison the mindset by doing what they were hired to do. Bs are Cs with inherent sense of pride in delivering excellence who can be coached to become A.
I totally agree. This "excellence" ideology preaches unvirtuous self-sacrifice. Putting extra time and effort means that the employee is sacrificing himself to improve a result which will not benefit him but only a select few.
I argue that in many cases owners and managers, those who are posed to benefit from this ideology, are the ones which poison the mindset by punishing proactivity and being arrogant. There's also D employees, those that are unable to create value by the conditions set forth, they recognize the pointleness of their job and actively do the minimum and create excuses just to not get fired.
> 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.
> 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)
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 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 :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
I think his personal involvement in any given project is already quite limited. He’s created a huge, soulless machine that churns out videos for the sole purpose of achieving some YouTube high score, and he just pokes his nose in here and there to be the face of the operation and ensure it remains well-oiled.
Edit: that ”just” is obviously doing a ton of lifting because it’s likely still a huge amount of work on his part, but my point is that it’s not like he lovingly crafts all these clips by himself.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
>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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] thread> 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
https://archive.is/lDVoz
"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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
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.
But we still have good non story-driven AAA games.
That's depressingly typical :(
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.
As with most things it’s likely a bit of both. But deep down I suspect it’s mostly the market demanding trash.
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.
There is better content in the world and those who have the taste to seek it out generally will.
• 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.
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.
Wow! There is a lot of bad faith in this comment. This is hacker news, not X, can you please be more thoughtful here?
I don't like coffee but I still might learn about the business since it's so big.
I'm not saying Mr.Beast is even that bad but spare us the patronizing attitude at least.
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.
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
You both are right and wrong in a way. Parent poster who only had negative things to say is totally out of touch.
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
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.
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.
basically what I am trying to say is you are not the median Youtube viewer
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 would say since it's about reality it's less junk then something like Shakespeare which is completely made up.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That’s not obvious
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
The brand could start their own complementary platform too.
Not much different than the content becoming its own media network.
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…
I find the lengths he has gone to in order to design his videos specifically for how YouTube works to be extremely impressive.
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.
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.
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)
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?
If you’ve only read my summary then we are discussing this with completely different mental models of what he actually does.
They do not describe the same process everyone else uses to make content. They are much more specific than that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_(TV_series)
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.
Making videos that click and spread is clearly a skill or everyone would do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
- 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.
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)
EDIT: this ones a good subtle example of the adult baby video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jan_KjEZd20
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.
Clear your cookies, cache, local storage, stay logged out, and see what happens. The baseline is junk.
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.
Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.
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
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
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?
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Diffusion at the edge is going to change a lot of things. Especially since it won't have to encode to linear formats.
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.
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.
> 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?
The younger generation always has been, and always will be, totally so much worse than the older generation.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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”
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?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nxls1KnKCA4
Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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
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.
I only do that in cases where it's appropriate (e.g. where both people were breaking the site guidelines to approximately the same degree), but in such cases it's convenient because it cuts out the "why me? what about the other person?" complaints which otherwise tend to be common.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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
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").
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Do you think you are happier in life when you at the top? I tell you a secret, no.
Its for sure better to not stress about stuff like money but your definition of success is not universal.
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.
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.)
Sports = watching grown men play with balls, Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve, TV/Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information
yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value
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).
> 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 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it’s bad?
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.
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
Excellent.
Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...
In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Underpaid, overworked, expectations of “total dedication”, for the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Ratings
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@DogPack404
“… 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.”
With some rewording this would be perfect for the USP slide of an investor deck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo
Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmplo...
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
- 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
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).
The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.
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?
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.
Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They give the example of picking a filming location you aren’t likely to get permission to film in but would produce outstanding content.
More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?
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.
The dichotomy sometimes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
In an emergency situation you single out random person precisely because there are no set processes who should be doing that, so you create responsibility impromptu.
In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers. Having to constantly prod counterparty in another team signals totally broken and/or inexistent project management. It fits a lean startup where everyone is responsible for everything and everything is a fire you distinguish right there and move on. It does not fit organization where exponential growth of communication channels means communication becomes the bottleneck.
That's what the document was about though. The audience of the document is quite clearly people who will be given the responsibility to deliver a video or product. It's quite literally communicating to them the exact concept you're pointing out here, that you need to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And what's being conveyed is that there isn't a single "one size fits all" responsibility chain. You can't just throw a request over the wall and assume and hope someone on the other side of that wall will come through for you. Most of this document is quite clearly "project management 101". If you're hiring people for a business that is largely centered around having multiple one shot projects in flight at any given time, "project management 101" is exactly the sort of document you want to be handing to new hires. It might be obvious to you, but spend time in any large organization and you quickly come across people for whom taking ownership and responsibility for something and what that entails isn't obvious. Heck I see this on software development teams all the time, where PR requests get thrown "over the wall" at the whole team and the turn around time is delayed as people assume someone else will get to it before they will and forget about it. Most teams I've worked on eventually land on some sort of interrupt or direct assignment system for PRs for exactly this reason, because you need to assign clear responsibility in order to get results turned around faster.
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.
I argue that in many cases owners and managers, those who are posed to benefit from this ideology, are the ones which poison the mindset by punishing proactivity and being arrogant. There's also D employees, those that are unable to create value by the conditions set forth, they recognize the pointleness of their job and actively do the minimum and create excuses just to not get fired.
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.
content for dumb kids
That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)
How do you know they are unqualified?
"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"
...seriously?
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?
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.
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.
Oh, yeah I get what you’re saying now. Give in to peer pressure!
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.
No argument here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.
You don't have to imagine very hard.
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"
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".
I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all
And this is BY CHOICE.
I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.
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!)
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.
I think his personal involvement in any given project is already quite limited. He’s created a huge, soulless machine that churns out videos for the sole purpose of achieving some YouTube high score, and he just pokes his nose in here and there to be the face of the operation and ensure it remains well-oiled.
Edit: that ”just” is obviously doing a ton of lifting because it’s likely still a huge amount of work on his part, but my point is that it’s not like he lovingly crafts all these clips by himself.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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"
You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.
>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 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
Most handbooks are boring and legalese because they can be evidence in court.
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.
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?
Nah, you didn't. You're the parent, if you don't like the content, don't let your kids watch it.
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.
And nothing wrong with some entertainment videos, some leisure is good. It doesn't need to be all educational.
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.
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.
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.
YouTube content, thanks to its short-lived nature, has become essentially useless as a shared 'cultural context' unless one is plugged in 24/7.
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.
Kurzgesagt doesn't have daily videos, but it fits that bill.
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).
[1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
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.
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.
No you didn't. You chose to do so.
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
https://m.youtube.com/@FaceFullofEyes